Your unconscious mind, it turns out, does not care what label a piece of music comes out on. It doesn’t care much about the artistic ethics behind it, either. Which means that the artists having the most fun in this new playground, at least creatively speaking, are the ones like Charli and Vernon—the ones who make the most of collaborative possibilities and don’t ask anyone listening to make distinctions about where any of their influences came from. That may sound jarringly utopian for a mostly dystopic moment, but if there is one thing we still want from pop music, even if the lyrics are downcast, it is a sense of possibility, of endless horizons.

Those attacking “Bound 2” as crass kitsch employ preestablished taste hierarchies that often exclude people like West. They assume he doesn't know where his work is coming from or what he's doing with his sources.

The blurred messages Thicke, Cyrus and others are now sending fit a time when people think of themselves as products, more than ever before.

“And if you want to talk about pop music between 1980 and now, that issue—the question of who’s singing and who’s being sung to—is an important one. The study assumes that hit singles in the eighties and hit singles in the new millennium play the same role in our culture. But over the past 30 years, the weekly charts have seen changes a lot more significant than any surge of ego. It’s not just that pop’s audience has changed; it’s that its whole purpose has.”

"But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around."

"An artist is Advanced when they do something that is neither expected of them nor the opposite of what is expected of them." Tongue-in-cheek, but the article lives on. Note the notes on Val Kilmer and C-Murder.

On Advancement Theory: it's not bad; you just don't get it. "The most Advanced figure of all time is Lou Reed [who in] 1986 released the song 'The Original Wrapper,' in which he raps about AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, and waffles."

"Your guide to understanding Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, and other highly Advanced musicians." If a genius does something you don't understand, it's probably even more genius.