Popular art, on the other hand, and in the interest of steering this theoretical discussion slowly toward the review nominally before us I will use Everclear's song "Heartspark Dollarsign" as an example of it, presents a very different problem. Appreciating it, in the sense of vibrating in vague sync with its rhythm and having some basic idea of the text Art is singing, is pretty easy, particularly for anybody who has existed in the context of rock music for the last thirty years or so. For the purposes of this CD single, the task has been made even easier by a remix that makes the song brighter and punchier than on album, and cover art that depicts a white boy and a black girl, just in case you couldn't follow the rather straightforward romance-vs.-racism scenario in the lyrics. What's harder, though, is connecting the song's simple surface message with all the far more complicated facets of its context and character. What does it mean that we know so clearly what's going on in the song from just the line "Because I walk with pride with a black girlfriend"? There is an essay there about how we instantly know, or assume, that the narrator of this line is himself white, an essay that reaches deeply into the links between ethnic culture and music, into assumptions about racial homogeneity, and into narrative convention. There is another essay there about the fact that it is Everclear singing this song, a band that has sold T-shirts at its concerts that say "White Trash and Proud of It", that discusses how they can simultaneously criticize and endorse their ethnicity in the space of a single tour, and the contradictions inherent in the very act of adopting the term "White Trash" (and how this relates to the co-opting of the word "nigger" by black culture and musicians), and the implications (both for the band and their audience) of selecting this song as a US single. I would contend that writing these essays well, whether just in outline form in your mind, or actually on paper, depends on the exact same mental skills and attitudes that writing papers about Nietzsche does. The problem here is not that people don't listen to Everclear songs, it's that they don't think to treat them seriously. Even some people who could do so, like Postman himself, do not, because they regard popular music as outside of the domain of art to which their critical thinking ought to be applied (and they thus miss, among other things, the experience of discovering the sublime concealed in the apparently mundane, which can be more exciting than finding it where it's labeled). The result of this is that popular culture is effectively, in large part, abandoned as a setting for meaning, and the creation of "serious" art becomes an exercise in elaborate preaching to the dwindling membership of an already thoroughly converted choir, heedless of the increasingly insensate condition of the hordes outside the walls of the temple. I am entering blithely into a long-standing educational debate here, but it seems to me that teaching critical thinking via popular-art examples holds the potential for making people both capable of critical thought and inclined towards it, whereas teaching it through The Scarlet Letter just makes people associate the practice with unpleasantness.

And so somewhere in there is why I feel compelled to write about the music I listen to. I write to document what I think I've learned, I write to settle arguments with myself, I write to take what otherwise would be an endless and featureless stream of debris, like a sort of cultural Asteroids game, and turn it into a supply of raw material for constructing hammers, beacons, boats, non-stick skillets, rear-window wipers, and other things of some tenuous use to us in our efforts to put a few more hard-won feet between us and the caves we all too recently crawled out of. I care about music too much to let it be treated as noise. I live my life as much in books as in records, but the books tend to assert their own contexts and significances much better than rock songs do, and so I'm trying to do my part to redress the imbalance.

Part of this process, too, and here is where I slip out of cultural criticism and into life-style advocacy, to the extent that there is a difference between the two, is making connections between art and life that are not implicit in the art itself. My happiest intersections with music are ones where both of us bring rich associations to the encounter. Art is to be engaged, not enshrined (and therein we find another advantage to using popular art as our subject, rather than something historically more precious). And so a large part of my subjective experience of Everclear's music has to do with my friend S- (not enough Victorian narrative conventions in contemporary music criticism, if you ask me), who originally insisted I buy World of Noise, and with whom I drove from Dallas to San Antonio the day after our ten-year high-school reunion in order to see Everclear for the second time in three days (having skipped our high-school's football game in order to see them in Dallas the first time). Hearing their cover of AC/DC's "Sin City", on this single, reminds me of S- and I seeing them use it as their set finale in San Antonio, in a club located in a strip mall whose parking lot was so filled with oversized pickup trucks that I had to drive through it in a zig-zag pattern to avoid clipping protruding bumpers festooned with confederate-flag decals, with some friend of theirs who was either their roadie, or from the Toadies (mmm, rock-club acoustics), singing the vocals. I remember us standing around after their set, hoping they'd hurry up and come out into the club so we could talk to them before Filter started playing and rendered conversation impossible. I remember the delirious glow on S-'s face when the band actually did appear and we got to introduce ourselves, and how afterward her smile seemed to light the highway all the way back to our friend D-'s apartment in Austin. And forever intertwined in my experience of both of these singles will be the memory of finding them, rushing home, calling her, and playing them into her answering machine, breathless with the news that there was something new in our canon of Everclear experience. And I tell you this not because I expect to somehow transfer these memories to you by relating them, but because I hope you have associations like this of your own, if not about Everclear, then about something.

It's a small addition to the Everclear canon, this single, but it's a significant one even on the comparatively mundane level of the music it contains. The remix of "Heartspark Dollarsign" doesn't change anything major, but it's thrilling to hear in the same way that it's exciting to find a print in a new art book of a painting you'd seen a hundred times in an old one, and see how subtly different color separation in the two reproductions changes the character of the work. The acoustic version of "Heroin Girl" is necessarily more radical, especially in the bluesy re-entrance after "just another overdose". And the furious "Sin City" cover will be a revelation to anybody who wondered whether the band could play in any style other than their own.

The most important track on this single, though, has to be the demo of "Happy Hour", just because it's the first new Everclear song we've heard since the release of Sparkle and Fade. It's rough, and Art says "Hey" in several places where I hope he'll think of something more interesting for the final version, but the tension between the chorus, which sounds like much of the material on Sparkle and Fade, and the verses, where a jangly and deliberate guitar-cycle spins around Art's quiet resolution, bodes well for the future.

This first part adds the songs "Talk Show Host" and "Bishop's Robes". "Talk Show Host" is a bleak, minimal piece, with whirring atmospheric sonic washes and a distorted clatter of drums drifting behind a distracted minor-key guitar riff and Thom Yorke's desolate moans. "Bishop's Robes" is only marginally more energetic, but its orchestral synth fills and baleful slide guitar give it a grander presence, even if Yorke does little to leverage this.

I'm a lot more intrigued by the song in the middle, though, a very Wonder Stuffian acoustic version of a song called "Confessions of a Thug", with a gorgeous melody, airy harmony, sparkling guitar, shuffling drums and a healthy dose of sneering cynicism. If I were advising this bunch, I'd encourage them to stick to acoustic versions of everything, and think about getting another violinist, too. I didn't think the Wonder Stuff exhausted the potential of their "Caught in My Shadow" folk-acoustic stage, and I'm still hoping somebody will go back and finish exploring it.