Thanks to Bessie for submitting this article from Slate on the new celebrity mix CDs currently being sold in Starbucks. I've seen these mixes on coffee shop shelves, and I'll confess to being rather pleased by the concept, in which artists like Sheryl Crow, Lucinda Williams, and the Rolling Stones put together a CD of songs that, well, matter to them. I have mixed feelings about this particular article, however. As a former critic of sorts, I'm very sensitive to accusations of critical "elitism"; after all, a critic's job is to become as competent as possible within his or her field of choice, which usually means caring passionately about movies, music, and books that most people might not recognize. But the Slate article crosses the line, I think, from an expert's knowledge of pop music into the sort of willful obscuritanism, even contempt for the mainstream, this is often mistakenly associated with High Fidelity. This paragraph strikes me as being especially cruel:

The most recent disc features songs picked by Sheryl Crow. A profoundly mainstream songwriter, she has profoundly mainstream taste. Carol King's "So Far Away," James Taylor, Elton John, the Crowded House ballad "Don't Dream It's Over," Rod Stewart's stalwart "Maggie May." It's the sort of stuff you might hear playing in the background at Walgreens—or maybe these are themes from several generations of eighth-grade dances. Scan the list of titles and artists, and you feel as if you'd heard it without even putting the disc on. Sort of like Crow's music.

Now, I've been guilty of far more sweeping critical judgments. (You're talking to a critic who once described Pokemon: The First Movie as "Fight Club for preschoolers.") But the difference, I think, is that I was attacking movies that cost millions of dollars to produce, and don't have much of a grassroots equivalent. Mix CDs or mix tapes, on the other hand, are a much more widespread phenomenon, and I think that by dismissing Crow's CD (which I haven't heard, by the way), Rob (yes, Rob) Walker is implicitly endorsing the mix tape mentality that says: the more obscure, the better. Believe me, I've been there. The result, usually, is a piss-poor mix tape. Frankly, you can't ask much more from a mix CD, even if it's been assembled by Sheryl Crow, than that it contain good songs, thoughtfully chosen, that really mean something to the person who compiled them...even if they're comfortably embedded in the mainstream. It took me a long time to figure this out, and I made some pretty bad mix tapes along the way, but I think I've learned my lesson. I just made a mix for a friend of mine that begins with "Thunder Road," of all things, and follows it up with "Dear Prudence." And you know what? The damn thing is still pretty good.