In eighth grade there was an after-school program called MathCounts in which all the future engineers and programmers got together to learn number theory concepts that went beyond algebra and geometry. Not only did it prepare young students for the kind of mathematical thinking that college would require, but it also served as a preventative measure for adolescent dangers like having fun or kissing a girl. One day, Mrs. Schultz taught us how to find the number of diagonals—lines that connect non-adjacent vertices—in any polygon, and she did so by showing us what she believed to be an efficient counting method. Ever the intellectual malcontent, I thought her process cumbersome, and a better set of instructions just came to me, as if it had been revealed in a daydream: subtract three, multiply, divide by two, done.* After ten minutes or so of verifying that my way was in fact a sound and stronger and boy geniuser alternative, she conceded and then started to gush. “How did you see that? How did you know it would work for all cases?” As much as I wanted and still want to be adored by everyone, I remember thinking, “Slow your roll, baby. It ain’t that big a deal.”

And it wasn’t that big a deal, because inspired moments like that have little to do with the people who receive them. Those flashes of inspiration come from and belong to God, or, as I like to call it, the G-word. I use “It” because the idea of a personal God like that in the narrative of the Hebrew Bible is, to say the least, outmoded. While I’ve always been a credulous person with regards to objective goodness, I can’t claim any knowledge of the divine in the epistemological sense. Maybe I’m being romantic, and maybe It is nothing more than a psychologically codified institution, nurtured by tax breaks and regalia, reinforced by guilt trips; but then, it would have been extremely implausible for me to have encountered that diagonals formula elsewhere prior to that moment in eighth grade.

Horace is good hero material. He carved a career out of a sturdy block of charisma, befriending powerful people while rich Romans snuffed out the Republic and politely enslaved the world. Except for loving the ladies, he led a virtuous life free from major controversy, his counsel was often sought by Emperor Augustus, and he had a loving relationship with his humble father. Through nothing but the merit of his own genius, Horace went from nobody to being the most respected poet of his time. And he was a scathing little shit, too. His “Ars Poetica” is a five-hundred-line epistle written at the request of two aspiring-poet sons of the powerful Piso family. When your career as an artist is at the mercy and patronage of the aristocracy, what do you do with a commission like this? In the following parody, I’ve tried to update Horace for the pop music paradigm.

The Art of Pop Music

If your little sister bought a pair of neon Jordans,
Started writing rhymes about the trials of getting by in Pensacola,
Slinging coffee to the bean-fiends down at the Maximilian
Cuz the game’s about stackin’ that paper and puffin’ on e-cigs,
You would find a hole to hide in, hope to die of terminal
Humiliation, rue the day your dear old mother spawned
Rosemary’s Baby Boo because artistic license can’t excuse
Absurdities like breaching basic harmony of form and continuity.^[i]

So you should not abash your family name with shitty
Platitudes on loneliness or some dumb books you read.

Who writes a better song, The Basher or The Bard? Each septuagenarian has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame, each has built his respective iconic body of work consistently for over fifty years, and each has acted badly in a bad, bad movie. So, would you take “Like a Rolling Stone” to the desert island before “I’m a Believer?” Diamond’s is a perfect song, and Dylan’s is a pompous mess. If we polled the Trop readership, I’d bet money that Dylan wins by a margin of sixty percent—at least—and the third century scholar Longinus would agree with us (yes, us). I’d like to present one of the great questions of neoclassical criticism in his own words: “…Which is to be preferred in [pop music], great writing with occasional flaws or moderate talent which is entirely sound and faultless?”

The classicists didn’t see eye to eye on pop music. Aristotle was a rap guy—or, a fan of genre art—and Plato pretended to hate everything in order to keep his interlocutors focused on his beloved philosophy. The neoclassicists, whom we’ll place roughly between Horace and Alexander Pope, sweep Plato’s trickery under the rug and start with the assumptions that beauty exists, that some things are more beautiful than others, and that beauty can be analyzed and judged. From there, they seek to delineate the rules to which all great artistic creations adhere. While we could build a series of analogies between the virtues of writing poetry or prose and the virtues of writing music with lyrics, I’d like to focus for now on why we and the neoclassicists tend to value genius over competence, or why we tend to value the work of Dylan over the work of Diamond.

“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.”

—Dolly Parton

I don’t enjoy playing the CMAs. The last time I did it was the one before last, and my three minutes of so-called work were preceded by hours of wandering the dreary, concrete bowels of the Bridgestone Arena, steering clear of the very important people, keeping low so not to breathe the airs of ego and insecurity. But there was one moment worth recalling. As fate had it, I found myself caught in a pop history vortex between two approaching entourages: the one on the left led by Lionel Richie; the right by John Oates. Backed against a wall, I watched them meet with a handshake, exchange courtesies, and then move on, all right before my eyes. And what was the price of their admission to this modern genre? They had both shaved their iconic mustaches and replaced them with soul patches. I thought, “This is what pop country does to the great ones. This is where the heroic yapstacks come to die.”

I’ll bet the New York Times would agree with the Hesiod of a year and a half ago. In a recent article, Jon Caramanica criticized the newest releases by Gary Allan and Randy Houser (my current employer) for showing “how smooth exteriors can put complex interiors at risk,” an indictment of the primping and marketing that compromises otherwise visionary artists. He argues that Allan and Houser’s new albums stoop to shill the pablum of their lesser contemporaries, presumably folks like Luke Bryan who dare sing songs about having fun*. This opinion implies a common assessment of what country music has become, namely a bastardization of an expired songwriting medium, polished and mass-produced for an undiscerning audience. This is an arguable claim, and I’d like to argue against it.

Aristotle is the first important thinker to defend hardcore rap music. Along with Plato, he established an aesthetic criticism that held as its central point of discussion art as imitation (mimesis). To the Classicists, all works of visual art, poetry, and music seek to imitate reality, both sensible and imaginable. According to Plato, to imitate beauty is to adulterate beauty, and thus can only misguide or corrupt all who witness the imitation. Considering how little he cared for the Beatles, he would’ve hated the Wu-Tang Clan. Aristotle, on the other hand, considered mimesis to be cathartic. If at the Theater of Dionysus any clan of thespians ever declared they “ain’t nothin to fuck with,” he might have applauded their braggadocio. Moreover, he might consider hardcore rap to be the most dramatic kind of modern music, so it follows to examine his treatise on Poetics through the tragedians and comedians of rap.

Aristotle, ever systematic, would insist on defining what is meant by hardcore rap music. Hip hop as a term has little use for this inquiry because it is as much about visual art, dance, and politics as it is about music. Writing about cultural anthropology is like masturbating a horse: it’s something I just don’t do. Rap music is spoken or chanted lyrics accompanied by music, which explains another reason why hip hop is avoided: with regards to music, that term at its most authentic refers only to rapping and/or turntablism. Instrumental music is not a part of this discussion, nor will musical accompaniment by anything other than a DJ be excluded.

Pop music criticism begins with Plato; he criticized everything that was popular. To him, all art—music, poetry, sculpture—should idealize human conduct, and in his dialogues he uses the historical Socrates as a mouthpiece to take a hostile but ironic stance against poetry. To understand this ironic hostility, it’s helpful to consider an analogy: the works attributed to Homer are to the classical era of ancient Greece as the Judeo-Christian biblical texts are to Western civilization of the last 1000 years. That is, each literary entity was/is considered a guide for, misappropriated in the name of, and revered or denigrated depending on an individual’s opinion of, what is good and right. For example, when a modern politician cites the Bible in defending or attacking some point, she polarizes her constituency into groups who either accept or reject the Bible as relevant. While there are infinite shades of gray in such biblical controversies, those shades are indeed defined by how people align with the source. And such was the way with Homer in the time of Socrates.

So when Socrates banishes the poets from his proposed utopian kingdom in the Republic, and when he intellectually decimates the great Homeric rhapsode of his day in the Ion, I suspect he does so in order to illuminate the power of poetry, something often taken for granted as a cultural luxury. Surely we can’t take him at face value when he says that “the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates.” Can we? This disturbing question is why I decided to cut out the middleman (Plato), and talk to Socrates myself.

HESIOD JAMES: How’s the coffee?

SOCRATES: Black and strong.

I am not a music-lover. A music-lover likes to sing along to the latest radio jamz; she’s moved to tears when the local college choir performs Faure’s Requiem; he likes every kind of music except country, or every kind of music except rap; she hates anything that sounds too weird, or too safe; he’s really impressed with his friend’s kid who plays piano and sings at the same time; and she’s totally stoked about that new Kings of Leon record… A music-lover is, in other words, someone who is not repulsed by sound in time as it relates to his or her own existence. This type of person has a real use for music: it captures his mood like a soundtrack to his daily experiences, encapsulates and triggers her memories, and gives both him and her something to talk about with other music-lovers. This is the only way to enjoy music, and if you’re one of these people, I urge you to read no further.

Because this is an essay for my people, the arbiters of music. We, the arbiters, have no real use for music—or any other art form—because it does not win us any friends, make us any money, or bring us any fulfillment. It steals the wind out of our lungs only to blow it up our spines. It empties our wallets and draws lines in the sand before our enemies. And when we try to confront it, all it does is ask us questions we can’t answer. Music for the arbiters is an invitation to philosophy, an arena in which history’s greatest minds have fought for their lives and lost their souls. And because there’s so much at stake down in the blood-soaked dirt, most of us spend our time up in the cheap seats eating hot dogs, drinking domestics, gazing upon and mocking that beautiful, terrible monster—that sweet, dreadful sound—impaling with her horn all the fools who attempt to mount her. I say it’s cowardly to sit up here throwing peanuts when we should be down there asking that purple unicorn to dance. And that’s what I hope to do with this column.