In retrospective I just say The Beatles are truly the best example to get across what I mean.
Let's speculate: an alien being oblivious to all human culture, lands tomorrow in any given city and is given to listen "Strawberry Fields Forever" followed by "Poker Face". Does anyone here think that we would behold the former as the vastly superior piece to the latter. What if we add Mozart's "Requiem"? (well an alien probably would not understand music the same way we do)
The thing is without all the cultural back load, and the time and place, and the dreadful influence on other bands no one would class The Beatles as the creme de la creme or the perennial "Best band of All Time". It's pop music, it "sold out before you even heard their names", so to speak. But I'm beign to cryptic.
What I say is either art is a category and quality is first and foremost a subjective judgment of value (and a personal one at that), or art is the judgment of value by itself and somethings are art and others merely entertainment. You can't do both. And I'm certainly a bigger fan of the former, witch is why the responses to the original review sparked my interest.
It's a bunch of guys pissed off that all the mainstream today is crap compared to the golden age of Pop, being pissed off that someone thinks the golden age of Pop is crap compared to the old art music (or Classical).
PS: I define Pop not as a genre but as all recorded music intended to be sold in any commercial manner.
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