But The Answer Is Simple. Love Is

Being A Pop Fan Is A Lot Like Catholic Devotion - Lots Of Ritual, Lots Of Ceremony... We Touch The Icon To Enter The Sacred Space, Genuflecting To Reliquaries And Ostentatoria That Make Something Splendid Of Our Most Secret Desires And Agonies.

You Can Hear The Celtic Heartbeat All Over Europe And America, From Bing Crosby To Jack White, From The Smiths To My Bloody Valentine, From House Of Pain To Marky Mark And The Funky Bunch.

Like Many Other Touchstones Of Twenty-first-century Pop Culture, 'the Sopranos' Was Hatched In The Late Nineties, Predicting A Future That Never Arrived. It Was Designed For A Decade That Would Be Just Like The Nineties, Except More So, In An America That Enjoyed Seeing Itself As Smarter And Braver And Freer Than Ever Before.

One Of The Billions Of Things I Love About Beyonce: The Harder She Tries To Come On Crazy, The Less Crazy She Sounds.

A Song Nobody Likes Is A Sad Thing. But A Love Song Nobody Likes Is Hardly A Thing At All.