A few days ago, I came to the illuminating realization that most of the music I listen to is...well, kind of lame. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I was just listening to Moby's 18, an album that I like an awful lot, when I suddenly thought: "You know, if this album weren't so good, it would suck." Which is to say: a song like the single "We Are All Made of Stars," which sounds like it could have been recorded in someone's rumpus room, seems terminally unhip and obvious at first, yet is so dogged and gracefully done that it passes through lameness and emerges on the other side into something like perfection. If anything, this is a testament to Moby's talents; it's hard to begin with the lame and transmute it into the sublime, which is precisely what Moby does in just about every track on this album.

He's not alone in this. Pauline Kael once mentioned a critic who quoted a few lines from Walt Whitman and stated, "There are problems with these lines--and they do not matter." I'm never happier than when I can say the same thing about a song; it's amazing how often a pop song can violate most of my aesthetic standards and still light up my life, which in a way is more impressive than when the song is rooted in established notions of coolness. (I'd be prepared to argue, for example, that Shelley Duvall's "He Needs Me" is a greater miracle of music than Bruce Springsteen's "The River," since the latter has every reason to be amazing, and is, while the former, a featherweight vocal from the movie Popeye resurrected for the Punch-Drunk Love soundtrack, has no reason to be amazing, and is anyway.)

This also applies to song lyrics that are so awful that they're somehow wonderful, ranging from many of Elton John and Bernie Taupin's lyrics (notably the one in "Your Song," about the man who makes potions in the medicine show) to Eminem's "I put lives at risk when I drive like this / I put wives at risk with a knife like this"...an awful line, but a weirdly compelling one. It's all in the delivery, maybe; or maybe certain artists, at certain moments, are able to get away with aesthetic transgressions that would doom the more tasteful. You can't pin down why these things work, and you can't reduce them to craft, which is probably why I love them so much. (Needless to say, you'll always find people who insist that all of the above examples, not to mention the complete works of the Pet Shop Boys, actually do suck...but they just haven't listened for long enough.)