Of course, the reason all those beverages and treats are such a hit (in terms of popularity) is that they are really are a hit (in terms of physiology). So the veins and the various systems of the body open their mouths wide to suck it in, the charge is lit, the buzz is immediate… and like any such rush, the fall is equally precipitous, the crash as hard as the flight was high, the ugly feeling and the desire not to live with it trigger a search for a quick fix, and back we are again with the promised, instant high.

I’m talking chocolate and drugs, but I thinking music. Everything – you’ve already grown tired of me saying it, but I will say it again – is in everything else. So the inherent dissatisfaction of pulp music is no different than the white shot of adrenaline you ingest. It offfers a quick high, a simplistic jiggle of chords and hips, a lyric which does its best not to intrude, and there you have it: the B-grade “hit”.

There is no depth to white-sugar culture, and therefore no staying power. There is no meat on the bone, just bone to gnaw. There is nothing beyond you to draw you on, just a bland present. There is nothing to take you into, or out of, or below or above yourself. There is nothing to push you left or right. Just a quick and meaningless hit, healthless drug, that quickly falls before its dissatisfying replacement.

Have you heard Jane Siberry’s Oh, My My? How about Michael Schultz’s Jim’s Brain Glue? Gillian Welch’s My Morphine? The common factor shared by those musicians who have stepped out of the mainlining popular culture mill is the commitment to a full diet, to telling a truth and bringing people up into a new insight, or down into their humanity; who found a vision and stuck to it. Because it is individual, it is complex; and because it is complex, it takes some time to digest, maybe years. It takes chances, this non-addictive music, and often fails to communicate, but when it does it cannot easily be forgotten.

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