Kevin Barnes is typically bipolar on his albums, shifting back and forth between declarations of love and lust and bitter, cruel condemnations. He’s very good at expressing both extremes, but on the whole, I prefer the songs that convey genuine sweetness and desire if just because those are more scarce in modern pop. “Sex Karma” is very much one of those. It’s flirty and light, a head rush of infatuation and fascination that feels almost as good as the real thing. It’s not overly serious either. It’s playful and goofy, the lyrics put it in the terms of child-like wonder, enthusiasm, and exploration. I love that Barnes has Solange sing “you are my only luxury item, if anyone tries to steal you, I’ll fight ‘em.” For one thing, it just comes out sounding adorable, but in terms of pop music subtext, it’s a total flip on the usual dynamics of the lyrics in her famous sister’s hit singles. Instead of putting attraction and relationships in terms of accruing power and riches, this is simple and not at all crass: You’re what matters to me, everything else is just stuff.

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Here’s a fun thing to think about: Imagine that Dan Bejar has been commissioned to record a cover version of John Williams’ score for the Star Wars movies in the style of Destroyer. Not instrumental, by the way — he is expected to sing the entire thing, and reinterpret the films’ story in his lyrics. I can conjure this music in my mind, but only up to a point. I can get the sound of it, but I’m not nearly clever enough to translate Star Wars into Bejar-ese, though I can definitely get a sense of where he’d go with it, especially in terms of Princess Leia’s sexuality and royal privilege. Daughter of the evil king! Romantically pursued by her brother and a scoundrel! That sounds like the makings of a Destroyer song to me.

There is something in Dan Bejar’s voice that makes it impossible to tell the difference between artsy seriousness and intellectual campiness. It’s all a blur, intentions are always tangled, and mixed up in base urges. Through Bejar, all of life is droll comedy, and all of civilization is just endless posturing and pageantry. “Sick Priest Learns To Last Forever” may be my favorite Destroyer song, and I think it captures the essence of the band, or at least what is most appealing to me. All of Destroyer’s Rubies sounds like it is set deeper and deeper into the night, but “Sick Priest” sounds as far into the night as you can go before tripping into the dawn. It sounds like the part of night that most feels like a secret, the bit most everyone sleeps through, but there you are stumbling through it, and somehow reaching an understanding that you’ll just forget by the time you finally pass out. Bejar is typically obscure on the verses, but as he leans into the refrain, he’s reassuring: “That’s okay, yes, it’s fine…” You just take his word for it.

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There’s a lot of guys rapping and singing on this track, but all of that is a warm up for Nicki Minaj’s performance in the second half of the song. It’s a true tour de force, one of the most impressive, exciting, and distinct rap verses in a long time. Minaj has been building her reputation as a song-stealer for the past two years, dropping inventive, wildly charismatic verses on a string of hits, but “Monster” is a clear tipping point. It’s the culmination of everything she’s done to date; the place where she totally upstages two of the biggest rappers in pop music; the song that announces her as a STAR and not just a promising rapper or a great guest.

One of the great things about Nicki Minaj is that she fully embraces camp. This is most apparent in how she presents herself visually — she’s a “Harajuku Barbie;” she’s the heir of Missy Elliott’s avant garde video style; she’s the African American answer to Lady Gaga. Her campiness is more exciting on record, though. She’s not afraid to go way over the top, and her voice bounces around between cartoonish extremes with incredible ease. She seems most comfortable playing dress-up and make believe, transforming herself into something larger than life. She creates an image, an armor, a voice, and runs loose inside it — in a lot of ways, she’s like a drag queen! It’s a natural fit, really — why wouldn’t that kind of flamboyant character and self-made ego fit naturally in the context of rap? It makes you wonder what rap could become if more MCs took cues from stuff like Ru Paul’s Drag Race and Paris Is Burning.

Minaj’s tics and funny voices may grate on some listeners, but they give her a dynamic, often totally unpredictable presence on tracks. She gives you bits to listen for, little moments that are exciting and interesting and make you want to rewind over and over. That bit in “Lil Freak” where she goes “they wetter than the RAIN THEN / Usher, buzz me in / everybody loves RAAAYMOND!” is a prime example. Typing that out barely hints at the subtle strangeness of her inflection, the tiny bits of personality that come through to make it so sticky and silly.

If you go through lots of her stuff, she doesn’t really do the same trick twice. She’s always finding a way to say something in a compelling, ear-catching way. The best rappers do this in their own way, the boring and so-so rappers, not so much. In some ways I’d compare her to Ol Dirty Bastard, in that she has that willingness to go far out to get a line across, and also this musical delivery that steps outside the boundaries of strictly rapping rhymes without actually singing. She’s not exactly inventing anything — you can trace bits of her skill set to a number of the best rappers ever — but she’s in the process of refining her persona, and mastering a lot of tricks essential to being a truly great MC. I can’t wait for her next move.

Laetitia Sadier’s previous non-Stereolab work — Monade, for the most part — sounded too much like Stereolab to fully register as something distinct. This song, from her solo debut, is a bit different. Her voice and aesthetic is too central to Stereolab to sound unlike Stereolab, but in this track, you can hear the essence of her style cut away from that of Tim Gane. “One Million Year Trip” has an intriguing shape to it, full of gentle twists and curves that contrast sharply with Gane’s taste for schematic arrangements and lateral progressions. The tonality, particularly in the guitar, has a sad, emotive quality that has been almost entirely absent from Stereolab music since the late 90s, when Gane’s music became increasingly clinical and remote to the point of negating any attempt on Sadier’s part to invest the songs with emotion, as on her numerous songs mourning the death of her bandmate Mary Hansen.

“One Million Year Trip” is another song about loss and mourning, or more specifically, accepting that someone is gone. The grief is subtle, the emphasis is placed on the process of adjusting and rationalizing: “She went on a million year trip and left everything behind.” There’s a clarity here that I find very moving, particularly as she sings about letting the pain go, acknowledging that “there is no point in holding on.” The notion of death as a voyage into the unknown is an appealing version of the afterlife. I tend to believe that death is the end of the line, but we can’t really know. If anyone would, it’d be the dead, out there on a journey through eternal oblivion.

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If you have only encountered the Scissor Sisters’ studio output and music videos, it would make sense if you thought Ana Matronic was just a sidekick or a back-up singer. She gets one spotlight track per album, and her personality doesn’t fully translate in the studio. On stage, it’s another story. There she’s central to the group’s appeal, and just as charismatic as Jake Shears. She’s a delight to behold — gorgeous, sassy, immensely entertaining. She’s the emcee, the hype woman, the foil. She is the woman that drag queens aspire to become. Scissor Sisters shows wouldn’t be nearly as fun without her. If only every pop band had someone like her. Bless you, Ana Matronic!

Scissor Sisters “Harder You Get”

The audience for this show was fine and fun, but it seemed as though a significant chunk of the audience wasn’t super familiar with the new material from Night Work. This is to be expected whenever a band tours shortly after releasing a record — a lot of the point of touring for an album is to introduce your fans to new tunes — but it was a little disappointing. Out of all the Night Work selections, the two that clearly connected with the crowd were “Harder You Get” and “Running Out,” which happen to be my favorites, followed closely by “Invisible Light” and “Skin This Cat.” It’s not surprising that these two rocked-up songs would get people going. They’re both just slightly off-brand enough to reveal something new about the band, and allow for a lot of physicality on stage.

“Harder You Get”, with its Judas Priest-gone-disco vibe, comes alive on the stage, and Shears revels in the opportunity to slip into domineering leather daddy mode. It’s the best example of the wonderfully sleazy, aggressively sexual place they’ve gone to on Night Work, and I’d love it if they explored this S&M quasi-metal style some more in the future. Or I could just put it on repeat, which is usually how I hear it. Which, of course, explains why when they finished performing it last night, I just wanted them to start over and play it again.

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The world of Electric Six is tasteless and full of preening, anxious douchebags. It’s sad and desperate and vulgar and dumb. It’s basically the culture that we are trying to escape when we embrace things like indie rock. “After Hours,” the opening number on the band’s seventh album, sounds like the theme song to an expensive, ultra-tacky Meatpacking District bar full of all those mysterious affluent people moving into all those new luxury high-rises. It’s a bad scene. The music has a frightened urgency; Dick Valentine spits out his lines with maximum venom, his voice whipping you at the end of every line — HOURS, HOURS! FIRED, FIRED! He sounds bitter and disgusted, resigned to being trapped in this stupid, stupid hell. It’s meant to be funny in a grim sort of way, but it’s getting to the point that Valentine’s deadpan satire is starting to just come across like realism. What is even exaggerated anymore? You scrape away the humorous hyperbole and the ironic distance, and it’s a scathing indictment of idiocy and excess: “That’s how organs shut down and brain cells DIE.”

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I hadn’t been in that neighborhood since then. It’s on the far eastern edge of Manhattan in the north 60s and there isn’t much reason for me to ever be around there. I recently got it in my mind that I should go back up there, walk around. Not so much in this “I need to confront something” sort of way, but more like…on some level I missed the routine of taking long walks in that area every day. I put it off for a while, in part because I knew that, yes, I was going to have to confront something, but I finally went back there last Thursday. As it turns out, there really wasn’t much to face. It was mostly a matter of retracing lines. The incredible anger, depression, and hopelessness I felt at the time when I was in that area every day — most of it to do with my dad, but certainly not all of it — was long gone. All that was there for me was nostalgia, and passing through familiar places tied to bad memories.

I mostly thought of songs. Animal Collective was a revelation to me back then. They’re about my age, they’d been through some similar things, and expressed something about those experiences in ways that resonated with me in a comforting way. There’s this patch of 68th or 69th Street near 1st Avenue that’s tied in with Liz Phair’s “Explain It To Me.” I spent most of my time with music that echoed my anger and despair. The problem was, there really wasn’t very much of it, and none of what worked for me was at all recent. The records that really did the trick for me at this point in time were Hole’s Live Through This, Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, and Nirvana’s In Utero. I feel like at some point in the mid 90s, rage and anguish became very uncool in music, and was more or less ceded to metal, emo, post-grunge, etc, and in those genres, expressing these negative feelings was often just a hollow, and in many cases very petty and whiny, ritual. I have my theories as to why this happened, but as it stands, it’s rare to find clever, tuneful musicians expressing agony and fury these days.

Hole “Violet”

It’s not like just anyone can make music like this. The pain really has to be there, and I think most of us can tell the difference between a singer who is really putting it out there vs. someone who is servicing the conventions of their chosen genre. I hate to say this, but I don’t think an artist can go to this place without a complex of mental health issues. Depression, narcissism, exhibitionism, self-destructive impulses, the works. Craft is important too — you want something with hooks, something with thoughtful dynamics, not just a bunch of formless bile. It goes deeper when it’s actually musical, when the artist really knows how to make you feel how they feel. How many people really have the combination of problems and talents necessary to produce this stuff? And the support system too! Labels simply don’t have the funds to bankroll brilliant basket cases like they did back in the boom years.

So yes, an album like Live Through This is sort of a miracle. The two songs from that record that worked for me last summer were “Softer, Softest” and “Violet.” The former tapped into my feeling of impotence and hopelessness, and I still wince every time I hear Courtney Love sing “the abyss opens up, it steals everything from me.” That image was so vivid and real to me at the time. Everything was going wrong, and I could only be passive. “Violet” expresses a painful passivity too, but it doesn’t sound like it. The chorus is all desperate surrender — “GO ON, TAKE EVERYTHING!” — but even if Courtney didn’t follow that up with a bitter “I dare you to,” it would still sound entirely defiant. The song has the dynamics of a brutal storm. You hold tight in those lulls, the chorus blasts at you like a choir of hurricanes.

Hole “Softer, Softest”

The loudness and violent dynamics in this music is the key to what makes it so therapeutic. The cathartic peaks makes it feel as though you’re fighting back. “Softer, Softest” sounds fragile for the most part, and unusually pretty for a Hole song. It’s not a song that demands for a release, but when it comes, the shift in scale is jarring. Courtney sounds small in the first two minutes, she sings about feeling powerless. When the song builds up, it’s like Bruce Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk. The tiny, wounded woman is gone, replaced by this rampaging, avenging giant: “BRING ME BACK HER HEAD!” It’s empowering. It’s not real, but that’s part of what makes it so important: It’s a clear example of art giving you something that you need that you can’t often have in reality.

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As a direct result of reading Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, I’ve been thinking a lot about methods of recording, the way things sound, and the way people respond to various technological advances and the resulting aesthetic decisions. One of the aesthetics I find most interesting at the moment is the very “dry” sound that was very popular in the 70s, most especially the stuff that was recorded in California. Steely Dan is an extreme example of this style — clean to the point of being sterile; jazz/rock fusion performed with surgical precision. I get why a lot of people hate this sound. If you want guts and grit in your music, this is the radical opposite. It’s not physical, it’s not soulful. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made ruthlessly cerebral music, and everything that made it to their records was a fully formed idea rendered as perfectly as possible. Every sound in the recordings is discrete, nothing bleeds together. It’s not meant to simulate the sound of people playing together, it’s just a pure representation of a musical arrangement.

Solos, traditionally an aspect of music that at least offers the front of being a moment of inspired expression, were auditioned. Fagen and Becker ran through seven session players before finding the ideal solo for “Peg,” a song that would become one of their most memorable and zippy productions. If you watch this video, the duo play a few of the rejected solos, and it becomes clear why they were so picky. Those solos were awful, just really tacky and lifeless. The keeper, performed by Jay Graydon, is among my favorite guitar solos ever, in part for its fantastic contrast with the rest of the composition. The center of the piece is the interplay between this exceptionally sleek keyboard part and the subtle syncopation of the drums — tightly written and performed, but it comes out sounding fluid and intuitive. When the solo comes in, this already mellow tune seems to relax and slide into this even more stylish and smooth zone. The guitar tone is astonishing — rich, but with a touch of distortion — and the notes glide along the track with an unreal grace. You could record “Peg” in other ways and the song and that solo would still be great, but think the nuances in the arrangement and performance are flattered by the understated, dry approach. Nothing is oversold, nothing is obscured.

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Steely Dan “Show Biz Kids”

The dry sound suited Steely Dan in part because the music itself was so cool and aloof. The lyrics have a bitter, deadpan wit; they lean hard on irony and unreliable narration. It’s cynical music about cynical people, so there’s no room for warmth. “Show Biz Kids,” from their second album, is a prime example of their fixation on shallowness and sleaze. As the title suggests, the singer is talking about hedonistic young LA creeps — it’s basically a Bret Easton Ellis novel before such a thing existed. It’s perhaps uncharacteristically judgmental, but I think we’re meant to think the narrator is an asshole too. The arrangement is brilliant. The guitar part is relatively loose and dirty for them, it’s the most dynamic presence in this piece that mostly sticks to this dead-eyed repetitive groove. The backing vocalists sound like they’re in a trance, the chorus runs even colder. It’s a grim sound — Los Angeles rendered as hell with palm trees and swimming pools.

The best part is a temporary shift out of the main groove at 3:48, as the beat is enhanced by a metallic jangle and Fagan delivers a sharp indictment: “Show business kids / making movies of themselves / you know they don’t give a fuck / about anybody else.” In context, it’s catharsis, but it’s an extremely fleeting moment that disrupts the listener’s desire to linger longer on that part. Super Furry Animals looped the last line into something more crowd pleasing; Elvis Costello’s cover version hits that part with a sputtering rage. Those interpretations have their appeal, but I prefer Becker and Fagan’s intentions — you only get to feel that muted indignation for a few seconds before you slip back into that creepy complacency.

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Steely Dan “Parker’s Band”

“Parker’s Band” is basically Steely Dan’s equivalent to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” a song expressing appreciation and admiration for a jazz great. (For Stevie, it’s Duke Ellington; for the Dan, it’s Charlie Parker.) This is as earnest and effervescent as Steely Dan gets. Though they made a lot of music that errs closer to jazz than rock, this is certainly a rock song about jazz music. That’s a lot of the appeal — the rock aspect of this conveys enthusiasm and echoes wonder in the lyrics, though the jazzy touches in the syncopation of the drums lends the piece an usually breezy grace. I love the way the percussion and horns have a weightless quality in the mix, and seem to casually orbit the guitar at the center of the arrangement. It’s not as extraordinarily ecstatic as Stevie’s tune, but there’s certainly a lot of joy in this track.

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Rob Sheffield: Part of the 90s was the extremely fluid boundaries between famous and non-famous. You could go from one to the other pretty easily. That had been tougher in the 80s. Remember how famous Henry Rollins was in the early 90s? He’s always been famous on that Henry Rollins level, for the past 30 years, but there was a weird window of time in the early 90s when he was like Snapple Lady famous. In retrospect that was a wondrous and awesome thing.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah! And because of that window he endures as this cultural touchstone.

Rob Sheffield: It’s funny, because in a way, pop music teaches us how to talk to each other and listen to each other. On some level, that’s what it’s for. It’s part of what I needed pop stars for, that’s for sure. So I like it when they get famous, megafamous, intergalactifamous. I want my Cyndi Laupers of the world selling 14 zillion records. I like my megastars to be megastellar. I like sharing them with 14 zillion people I don’t know. I like getting to talk about them with other people who like them. I don’t know how I would have learned to talk to other people if I didn’t have Cyndi Lauper to talk about with them.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, by that logic, this common language is just devolving into regional dialects. Harder to understand, harder to relate. I came into music culture wanting everything I like to be really big and popular. I never really understood wanting to keep things a secret. When I was 14 I was frustrated because I didn’t understand why Pavement couldn’t be as popular as Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins.

Rob Sheffield: That’s always going to be part of it–rooting for your favorites to get more famous, or feeling mad when they DO get famous. I like how “Don’t Stop Believin’” has become such a famous song. Fame can be very good for a song. It can become part of the song. Of course there are famous songs I hate, so I wish they weren’t famous, and songs I wish were famous, but I like how “Don’t Stop Believin’” has entered a zone where the fame and song are the same thing. The fame and the song are one. The singer and the listener are one. The small-town girl livin’ in a lonely world? She is one with the city boy born and raised in South Detroit. All us streetlight people, poor banished children of Eve, we are all one.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s funny how there’s this whole list of songs I decided I hated as a little kid, and almost nothing can make me like those songs. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is one of those songs, but there have been moments where I’m just in awe of its power. Grudging respect.

Rob Sheffield: On the other hand, Black Flag’s “Loose Nut”? Part of what I love about the song is how it isn’t so famous. it’s still “19-year-old me with bubbling cauldron of guitar noise rage grow” boiling inside my head. I love how “Rise Above” has gotten more famous, and I hope “Rise Above” keeps getting more famous. I mean it’s still “19-year-old me with bubbling cauldron of guitar noise rage growlness boiling inside my head.”

Matthew Perpetua: Have you seen Pavement yet on this tour? It’s exciting because Pavement is so much more famous now than back then.

Rob Sheffield: Haven’t seen the tour yet — can’t wait!

Matthew Perpetua: I’m wondering if the NYC shows will be a little less mind-exploding for me. I was just totally gleeful at the show in Chicago. I expect to be really happy at the others, but I’m curious if that was just an experience I only get once because it was the first time in so long.

Rob Sheffield: ANY show is better when you don’t see it in NYC. That’s just an immutable rule of physics. It’s always been that way, always will.

Matthew Perpetua: I don’t think that has been true for me. NYC audiences have a bad reputation, that people can be cold and indifferent and sometimes that’s true. But I think NYC audiences can also be really, really intense. It just depends on the artist and the fans and the situation.

Rob Sheffield: That’s true.

Matthew Perpetua: Like that Robyn show — I can’t imagine that reaction happening just anywhere. It certainly helps to have a large gay audience. Those guys bring it. Scissor Sisters shows are always crazy too.

Rob Sheffield: Very true — the gayer the audience, the better the NYC show.

Matthew Perpetua: Kelis opened that Robyn show, and she’s very deliberately courting a gay audience. I wonder if that’s the new trend for this decade for a lot of fading acts.

Rob Sheffield: She’d be stupid not to court the gay audience. That’s the most loyal, generous, discerning following anyone could have. That’s why whenever somebody’s career is really in the dumper, they pretend they had a gay audience all along.

Something fascinating about Lady Gaga is how little she cares about straight men. She concedes absolutely nothing to the straight-boy gaze, and that’s part of what makes her so badass. When you see Madonna live, you have this sense that being watched by straight men is somewhere in the Top 20 of things she cares about, if only because she wants that to impress the gay men watching (who might be #1 on that list), but Gaga doesn’t care whether the straight boys in the house come, stay, lay or pray. I’ve never seen an arena show where straight men were more beside the point. And I’ve seen a Debbie Gibson arena show.

Matthew Perpetua: This is true. I think the only time I’ve ever seen an image of Gaga designed to get straight men going is that recent Rolling Stone cover. That’s about it.

Rob Sheffield: I don’t think she was trying to be hot there! She’s the only pop star I can think of who brags “I’m not trying to make your dick hard the way other girls are.” That’s got to be the future of pop stardom right there.

Matthew Perpetua: That would be great. It’s interesting to think of a pop landscape where straight men are irrelevant. But then again, pop-as-genre already is that way, isn’t it? It’s a genre that is now mostly intended for women and gay men.

Rob Sheffield: I think you’re right. Pop stardom is going through big changes. But ultimately, people love stars, I don’t think that will or should change. As Chuck Berry said, “way back in history, 3000 years, ever since the world began, been a whole lotta good women shedding tears for that brown eyed handsome man.” The man could be Jesus or Sinatra or Jay-Z or Duran Duran. He could be Madonna or Gaga or Dylan or Beyonce. He could be Elvis or Obama or Cleopatra or Adam Ant. But that starlust will always be there.

Matthew Perpetua: I just keep hoping that mainstream pop can transition out of this phase where most hits are about being angry at your boyfriend or girlfriend. The level of hostility in pop music has been so high in the past decade. I wonder what that does to kids who grow up on it. Everyone just wants to write a Bad Romance now, maybe?

Rob Sheffield: It’s the pro-girl song I miss. I heard Grand Funk’s “Some Kind of Wonderful” the other day and thought, wow, huge hit rock song, and it’s about liking your girlfriend! Not even your NEW girlfriend! It’s about liking the girlfriend you have right now! And then he sings, “Hey, yow, is there anybody got a sweet little woman like mine? There’s got to be somebody, got a sweet little woman like mine! Can I get a witness!” Not even a particularly good song, but I’m like, wow, that used to be something you could make a hit song about.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah! I really like songs that are sweet like that. One of my favorites of recent years is Kevin Barnes from Of Montreal. His songs are this point evenly split between super appreciative loving songs, and songs about totally hating someone. Kind of a bipolar dude.

Rob Sheffield: But even his disenchanted songs are really funny and self-mocking. “I’ve got a tigress back at home, and besides, you wouldn’t know what to do with me…” I love that one.

Matthew Perpetua: “Bunny!” That is probably the sweetest song to ever use the word “faggy”

Rob Sheffield: Sweet is the word. “I need a lover with SOUL POWER.”

Matthew Perpetua: This is the of Montreal line that kills me most, maybe: “You don’t have to try to steal no nothing from my heart because for you anything you want is always free.”

Rob Sheffield: I love that, I really do. That’s part of why I wrote the Paul McCartney chapter in my book. It amazes me how pro-girl he’s always been in his songs, and apparently in his actual life.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, Paul McCartney is a guy who really believes in love and has mostly made it work. A guy who could have anything whenever, which makes it more meaningful I think.

Rob Sheffield: I love that Chris Rock joke: “A man’s about as faithful as his options.” Nobody in the history of the male gender has ever had more options than Paul McCartney, and yet both his music and his life seem to suggest he just likes girls a whole lot.

I love how he just sings about being around girls, whether he’s making out with them or not, and enjoying their presence. I love the way he sings about the nurse in “Penny Lane,” the one selling poppies from a tray, and he’s just dreamily imagining what it’s like to be her, and how she feels. He isn’t even trying to get her phone number. I find that amazing. Who the hell else has so many songs like that?

Matthew Perpetua: I think you made a point in your book about Prince being pro-girl, even in his seductive songs. Almost especially in his seductive songs.

Rob Sheffield: Prince definitely! Even his filthiest songs are often incredibly sweet–”Let’s Pretend We’re Married,” or “Sexuality,” or “Raspberry Beret.”

Matthew Perpetua: I think the key is that Prince thinks of women as people.

Rob Sheffield: “The Ballad of Dorothy Parker” is actually very McCartney-like in its lyric. He’s interested in the fantasy lives of the girls he meets. He wants to know what they think about, what they dream about, who they see in the mirror. It’s something Prince never really got his due credit for.

Matthew Perpetua: Do you listen to recent Prince stuff? What does he sing about now? It seems like he’s walled himself off from the world so much, I wonder if that spills over in how he writes about this stuff.

Rob Sheffield: His lyrics aren’t so interesting now, but he still writes some great songs. I love that “Guitar” song from a couple years ago — “I love you, baby, but not like I love my guitar.”

Matthew Perpetua: Did Prince ever do a “listing off all the different types of girls I like” songs? You know, like “California Girls” or “Girls Girls Girls” or “Love King”? I don’t think he has. Which says a lot, maybe.

Rob Sheffield: Ha! I guess the 1999 album is like that. Some girls he likes to drive around with (”Delirious”), some girls drive cars (”Lady Cab Driver”), some girls are cars (”Automatic”), some girls wear lingerie to a restaurant (”DMSR”), some girls fly planes (”International Lover”), some girls have sex with cars (”Little Red Corvette”). He’s an open-minded guy.

Matthew Perpetua: Okay, but those are single songs. I think the thing of the other type of song is that you’re just talking about girls as types rather than as individual people. It’s more about appreciation at best, and collection/ego at worst.

Rob Sheffield: Well, I tend to like songs where boys and girls talk about the kinds of girls and boys they like.

Matthew Perpetua: I don’t think it’s a bad type of song at all, but it’s just different from writing about a single person. Or even a single fantasy figure! I’m not sure if “Darling Nikki” is based on a true story.

Rob Sheffield: Do you know the Stacey Q song “Favorite Things”? One of my favoritest 80s pop songs ever, and I don’t think it was even close to any kind of radio airplay. “I can’t believe it! You like all the songs I like. You’re too good to be true. You’re not real.”

Stacey Q “Favorite Things”

Matthew Perpetua: I haven’t heard of that! I only know “Two of Hearts.”

Rob Sheffield: She did this album in 1988 called Hard Machine, it’s one of the great 80s disco-pop albums, totally top notch mall disco with great melodies, great lyrics, great beats, really spooky and poignant in all sorts of clever ways, but it never was a hit. It’s totally worth any search you have to make to find it! It’s the 80s synth-pop version of Dusty In Memphis.

Matthew Perpetua: Wow.

Rob Sheffield: Her early synth-pop stuff, which is more new wave — that’s great too. Like “Video Girl” and “Screaming in My Pillow.” It’s funny, “Two of Hearts” is just the tip of the Stacey Q iceberg! You have so much to look forward to! I’m jealous! If you like Robyn, you’ll like Hard Machine.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s pretty cheap used on Amazon! Digging for records, so much easier than the old days.

Rob Sheffield: Ha! Definitely. In terms of the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, Hard Machine is up there with Scritti Politti’s Cupid and Psyche 85. Those two albums are to the Fairlight CMI what “Green Onions” was to the Hammond B-3.

Matthew Perpetua: I was reading about the Fairlight CMI recently, the list of the first people to buy it.

Rob Sheffield: It was the machine that changed everything. Greg Milner’s book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music has all this mindblowing detail about the different synths in the 80s and how they affected the sound of music. You’ll love it — amazing detail about how they invented those big Bob Clearmountain /Power Station drums that sound so hilarious now. It’s the first book to really talk about the sonic details of music recording in a way that’s both aesthetic-minded and technical-minded, and it ends up turning into a completely compelling secret history of pop music.

Matthew Perpetua: I’m always interested when people point out all this history hidden in plain sight. From the Amazon page: “The big obnoxious ambient drum sound that defined the ’80s under the Phil Collins dictatorship.”

Rob Sheffield: The part about the Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight” drum solo is a classic!

Matthew Perpetua: Phil is a major figure. Phil Collins was one of the first pop stars I really liked as a kid.

Rob Sheffield: Poor Phil. I was just reading an interview in Mojo and he seems to think everyone hates him. He said he retired because he got “too annoying!”

Matthew Perpetua: I think he gets a bad rep and sometimes he earned it but mostly it’s just a hangover of snobbishness that is really outdated and dumb. It’s horrible when people just glom on to some other generation’s snobbishness without understanding why those cultural values came to be, or why they might not be relevant anymore.

Rob Sheffield: Well, eventually people started liking Scritti Politti. So anything’s possible. I spent years being the only person I knew who liked Scritti Politti. Then, for about a year and a half, indie kids decided they liked Scritti Politti — but only the early 80s postpunk stuff and then the mid-2000s folkie stuff — and I felt vindicated and then suddenly it was over and I was once again the only Scritti Politti fan I knew. I guess it’s the kind of dilemma that would be in a Scritti Politti song.

A couple years ago I was in London and I needed a scarf and I went to buy one and the sound system in the store was playing Scritti Politti’s “The Word Girl” and I thought, wow, a whole country where people like Scritti Politti! But of course, the next song was All Saints, so I guess not even that moment meant anything. But I’ll always bang the drum for Scritti Politti!

Matthew Perpetua: There’s a bunch of Scritti Politti songs that I like but I can never seem to go all the way with them. I appreciate what Green Gartside was going for. He pioneered the whole “making pop for grad students” thing.

Rob Sheffield: I love Cupid and Psyche 85. It’s one of my personal favorite, most-played, most-cherished albums of all time. and none of my friends or loved ones can bear the sound of it. My powers of Scritti-suasion just suck. “The Word Girl,” that’s the one. And “Boom! There She Was.” And “Hypnotize.”

Matthew Perpetua: My favorite is “The Sweetest Girl.”

Rob Sheffield: I love “Sweetest Girl,” God what a song. I once was moving out of an apartment, on Wertland St in Charlottesville, right next to the house where Georgia O’Keefe grew up, and I had an armful of records and I dropped Songs to Remember onto the patio of a basement apartment, and I spent countless minutes leaning over the railing, plotting how to crawl down and retrieve it, without getting arrested or breaking a bone. It had major sentimental value, plus I paid $2.50 for it at Mystery Train in Boston. It’s been 20 years but I still miss that copy of Songs to Remember.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s harder to imagine huge stars now, things keep fragmenting. Our biggest pop stars are people like Gaga and Beyonce, and their audiences are large but nowhere near how things were in the old days.

Rob Sheffield: I don’t know. the music audience is as large as it’s ever been, though, right?

Matthew Perpetua: I have no idea. It’s really hard to say.

Rob Sheffield: It’s just that the traditional music-delivery systems, like radio or MTV, fell apart and nothing has come along to replace them yet.

Matthew Perpetua: How do we measure anything? I think as a rule of thumb if you take any given artist’s sales and multiply it times four, that’s probably how big the audience is.

Rob Sheffield: Well, it’s hard to say how much album sales have to do with anything. Some audiences buy albums, some don’t. Sade and AC/DC fans buy albums.

Matthew Perpetua: Right. That’s just my way of guesstimating it. So, there’s probably around 2 million people who dig Phoenix a lot, their most recent album is about to go gold. That seems plausible. My perhaps hopeful guess is that one in four fans is still willing to buy a record.

Rob Sheffield: In the 80s and 90s, radio and MTV were a seriously lethal music-delivery system. Whether it was the Breeders in 1993 or Prince in 1983, you had a sense that you could turn on a switch and have audio access to the most exciting music that was being made anywhere in the world at that moment. I don’t know if anybody feels that way about any music-delivery systems now. Another transitional period, I hope.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, people act like Pitchfork has that power now, but only in a small way. There isn’t really any mass broadcaster of taste now. I don’t know if anything could replace the MTV of the late 80s through mid 90s. That was some serious power.

Rob Sheffield: Artists really used radio/MTV to be taste makers then. In the 80s, if you liked Prince, you liked all the stuff Prince liked. If you like Poison, you also like Britny Fox and Cinderella and Faster Pussycat. if you like Duran Duran, you also like New Order, and if you like New Order, you also like Arthur Baker and Jellybean Benitez and Shep Pettibone. You could just flip a switch and hear this stuff, all jammed together on the same station.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, I’d love to know more about the process and tastes of the people who programmed MTV in that era. Who were these people? Someone please write that book for me to read.

Rob Sheffield: In a way, the music programmed MTV, rather than the other way around. They had 24 hours to fill and nowhere near enough mainstream content, so they couldn’t have played the Top 40 if they wanted to. They had to scrounge around and play all this stuff because they needed 24 hours of video a day. Then in the late 80s and 90s, it’s more formatted, but they’re still the most eclectic nationwide Top 40 station in American history. Also, the only one. They were an amazingly rich database, if access to music was what you wanted.

Matthew Perpetua: I definitely got the impression in that era that MTV really cared about music.

Rob Sheffield: Yes. and Top 40 radio kind of followed that, so it became incredibly eclectic all through the 80s.

Matthew Perpetua: It seems like the 90s is where things start breaking down more around genre lines. You like alternative/indie, you like rap/R&B, you like pop, you like metal, you like country.

Rob Sheffield: Yeah, totally. By then there wasn’t a Top 40 station in the country playing the entire top 10! But there was still so much action muscling into the Top 40, often totally out of nowhere. Regional hits like “Tootsee Roll” and “C’Mon N Ride It (The Train)” and “Cannonball,” they became huge nationwide hits.

Matthew Perpetua: I think regionalism still exists but it’s so warped by how we experience music now.

Rob Sheffield: Do you feel like music is missing stars right now, real stars? And if so, is that necessarily bad for music?

Matthew Perpetua: For the most part, yeah. I think my experience of music in pretty much all genres is improved by having iconic characters at the center of music.

Rob Sheffield: I would agree. I could be convinced I’m wrong… but I’ve always felt that. If you were a Replacements, Minutemen or Husker Du fan in 1984, no way did it have nothing to do with the personality in the music–you heard these guys and you felt like they were your surrogate big brothers or something. and these weren’t pop stars, obviously–but that charismatic quality was a huge part of the musical intensity.

Matthew Perpetua: I like having this pantheon of amazing pop characters. Why do you think we have fewer legit icons now? I think the 90s overflowed with them too, but you kinda get fewer in the 00s. Beyonce and Jay-Z, definitely huge icons.

Rob Sheffield: I agree. It’s amazing when you compare 1999 to 2000 in terms of music. in 1999, music was bursting with personality and energy, but within a couple of years it was very different. In 1999 pop music was funny, almost by definition.

Matthew Perpetua: When I think of the 90s, it just overflows — Kurt and Eddie and Beck and Malkmus and Bjork and Polly and Tori and Biggie and Tupac and Mariah and Liam and Damon and Jarvis and Guy and Ian and Corin and Carrie and the entire goddamn Wu-Tang Clan!

Rob Sheffield: Music was personality-rich in the 80s and 90s, that’s for sure. You had to scrounge harder for that in the 00’s, to say the least.

Matthew Perpetua: You know how a lot of the previous decade was about “fans want to have a connection with artists”? I think that’s the opposite of where things were.

Rob Sheffield: How do you mean?

Matthew Perpetua: It’s totally pointed that people like Beyonce and Lady Gaga reject social media. They are icons, they are private. Madonna and Prince wouldn’t have ever used Twitter. Kanye West is totally an icon and he does, but I think he’s more of this era. He’s maybe figured something out. I think if you’re going to be a big personality, you have to limit the public’s access to you. You have to exist in their imagination.

Rob Sheffield: True. But also, a pop singer’s Twitter is read by, what, a few hundred thousand people max? That’s not Madonna or Prince style stardom. Every time Prince sneezed, millions of people trembled in their nowhere-near-purple boots!

Matthew Perpetua: Do you think it’s even possible in the future for people to have that level of stardom? I feel like more people can be famous now but few people can be THAT famous.

Rob Sheffield: That’s probably true. At best, a pop star’s Twitter is like Missy Elliott’s liner notes on her albums.

Matthew Perpetua: Changing topic a bit, but you have a chapter in you book in which you include some information that blew my mind. I had no idea people were buying cassingles so late into the 90s.

Rob Sheffield: It’s weird, they kept making them for a long time. I’m not sure when people stopped really buying them!

Matthew Perpetua: I think tapes really stopped appearing in shops around 1997/1998, which is around the cut-off for your list of favorite cassingles.

Rob Sheffield: They were the perfect pop format in a way, and they suited what an eclectic time it was for music. You wouldn’t want to hear a whole album by Natural Selection, but that “Do Anything” cassingle…

Matthew Perpetua: I never had many cassingles. My sister had a bunch.

Rob Sheffield: I loved how they had “flip sides” too. So the Kris Kross “Jump” cassingle also had “Lil Boyz in the Hood,” one of the “serious” Kris Kross songs.

Matthew Perpetua: The funny thing about cassingles and cd singles is that the format is the exact same size as a full-length album. With vinyl, there’s this intuitive size difference.

Rob Sheffield: It’s funny. they could easily fit more music into a cassingle-size tape, but it just made it more cassingular to have one song.

Here’s a store-bought tape my little sister gave me for Xmas 1988, a K-Tel-style compilation called “Hot Moves.” Check out these songs:

Side One: Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” Sweet Sensation’s “Never Let You Go,” Kon Kan’s “I Beg Your Pardon,” L’Trimm’s “Cars with the Boom,” Salt N Pepa’s “Push It”

Side Two: Pebbles’ “Mercedes Boy,” Information Society’s “What’s On Your Mind,” Ten City’s “That’s The Way Love Is,” Taylor Dayne’s “Tell It To My Heart,” Erasure’s “Victim of Love”

That’s some quality pop trash, my friend. And it was all, to some degree, “dance music.” “Hot Radio” is what they called the format and it was perfect for cassingle-sized eccentrics. Some of them big stars, some of them basically totally unknown.

Matthew Perpetua: That is a great mix of songs I know by heart and a few I’ve never heard of! That’s my favorite Erasure song.

Rob Sheffield: My favorite Erasure song too. I love that acoustic country version you posted on Fluxblog once! It really does have a country sort of poignance to it! Goes well with a banjo.

Matthew Perpetua: I always love that he sings exactly like Cher.

Rob Sheffield: Vince Clarke is always the man. He’s never had an off season. Yet “Victim of Love” might be his finest moment.

Matthew Perpetua: That and “A Little Respect” and “Stop,” the holy trinity of Erasure.

Rob Sheffield: Kon Kan’s “I Beg Your Pardon,” do you know that song?

Matthew Perpetua: Never heard it!

Rob Sheffield: I guarantee you would love it. Made for you. A total New Order rip off, sampling the disco group GQ and the country singer Lynn Anderson, by a new wave synth duo that didn’t even exist, which is so new wave in itself.

Matthew Perpetua: I had never ever heard of Haysi Fantayzee until I read your book. I think the only other place I’d ever read about them was your previous book.

Rob Sheffield: I love Haysi Fantayzee!

Matthew Perpetua: That’s the 80s that didn’t survive.

Rob Sheffield: They definitely summed up a moment. Probably a moment nobody would ever live through on purpose, but a moment that just kind of happened to us! They never had their retro-chic comeback moment. It was such a rich time for one-off novelty shots like that, putting an entire career’s worth of dodgy ideas into 3 and a half minutes.

Matthew Perpetua: It’s funny to see the 90s slowly transform into the new 80s in terms of nostalgia. But you see the same thing of — well, that inexplicably stuck around, and that did not. There’s some people who were a big deal back that who have seemingly blinked out of existence. Remember when Ani DiFranco was a thing? My friend Chris who works in comics says she was “written out of continuity.”

Rob Sheffield: That puts it perfectly! Some stars, like Ani DiFranco, do get written out of the storyline. It is like the “Pam Ewing had a bad dream” season of Dallas. You can’t predict. Not at all. Like, imagine going back to 1996 and telling people Gwen Stefani and Paula Abdul and Rivers Cuomo would be famous in 2010, but Alanis Morrissette and Ani DiFranco and Paula Cole would not be remembered at all.

Matthew Perpetua: I think that’s unfair to Alanis — she’s still part of the cultural fabric. You’re absolutely right about Gwen and Rivers. No one at ALL took them serious when they came out. Which is why it is so hilarious and sad to me that people now are angry at Rivers Cuomo, as if that guy was a serious artiste. He was always a pop guy! Maybe he’s not as good as he was but he’s been doing the same trick for 15 years.

Rob Sheffield: Okay, I take back Alanis, but there are so many other examples. Hootie, I guess being the most obvious. Go back to 1995 and take bets on who’s going to be mega-famous in 2010, Hootie or the Flaming Lips?

Matthew Perpetua: Hootie and the Blowfish, it might blow some people’s minds now to know how huge that was back then. I bought a new copy of that Spin Alternative Record Guide you worked on in the mid-90s, and that’s full of artists from the 80s who got written out of continuity. Of course, in 2010 that book is most useful for highlighting those artists.

Rob Sheffield: The Afghan Whigs got their own entry!

Matthew Perpetua: The Afghan Whigs definitely have an enduring cult. Dulli stuck around!

Rob Sheffield: You are kidding, right?

Matthew Perpetua: No, that guy totally has a cult. I know some pretty hardcore Dulli fans. And 33 1/3 went ahead and did a Gentlemen book.

Rob Sheffield: Wow. Even at the time I thought it was hilarious they got their own entry. But then, I wrote the entry for the Bats, so what do I know. That Spin book really does sum up that moment though. You look at it now and it’s amazing how much excitement and enthusiasm is in that book.

Matthew Perpetua: Yeah, I love that about it. That book was a big deal to me when I was 15.