Your accusation that I'm a snob who hates popular culture because I'm a snob coincides with one of my periodic, maybe every couple or three years of pulling out The Band's Brown Album and being reminded of what a great achievement in music matched with words it was.
It's still, after all these decades, something I can go back to and be knocked out with its artistic imagining of lives and relationships and worlds and, in my hearing, religion.
I'd say that it stands up there with other such great achievements such as those theme albums of Carla Bley but its grittier relationship with lives that live on the edge and become the least among us adds a lot to its depth. I find it profoundly religious in all its ambiguities and recounting of weakness and failing, waiting for redemption. It didn't surprise me, at all, that when they chose musicians to perform with them at their last concert, the great, transcendently great Staple Singers were invited.
I'm such an elitist that I won't be satisfied till everyone is elite. I'm a universalist egalitarian.
Update: And now the guy who calls me a snob is offended because I didn't mention the greatest, world-classiest, offical, critic ordained greatest of the great, instead of The Band and The Staple Singers. My choices weren't officially elite enough, those accredited as the greatest of the greatest by those in the know, apparently.
There may be snobs as big as the pop music critics but there are none bigger and more cluelessly ridiculous. What a con job pop critics are, only to be topped by the academics who gas on about such stuff.
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