CONTINUUM'S "33 1/3" BOOK SERIES has become one of the most interesting vehicles for rock writing and pop album appraisals.

Its assessments focus on the safely canonized and newly crowned classics, ranging from straightforward fact-gathering accounts to fictitious teenage memoirs. But its clearest departure (and most pleasant surprise) is Carl Wilson's evaluation of Celine Dion's 1999 mega-selling album "Let's Talk About Love."

A self-proclaimed "journey to the end of taste," Wilson takes a thorough and critical look at our musical value judgments through the lens of the punk-rock cover song, Bourdieu and Kantian critical thinking and a horrible excursion through the nether regions of Las Vegas.

One might not always agree with Wilson's analysis, but its principal points are consistently thought provoking while they simultaneously make some of contemporary pop music's gatekeepers seem like sourpusses.

As critical debates rage furiously about "Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste" on message boards and daily threads, Wilson's avoidance of knee-jerk posturing comes as a breath of fresh air.

Express spoke to Wilson about the potential legacy of Jay-Z, the philosophy of Angela Chase and the striking similarities between the rags-to-riches stories of Celine and Loretta Lynn.

» EXPRESS: A friend of mine recently came back from Morocco and told me that a white friend of hers was referred to as "Celine Dion" during her time there. You provide a number of other examples of international references in the book. Besides the obvious strategic marketing, what do you think makes Celine the cultural reference point of the West?
» WILSON: I think there are several factors: For one thing, although she's a representative of American pop culture to the rest of the world, people are also aware that she's not originally American, which I think counts as a point in her favor. She shares some of their outside-looking-in feeling, while still embracing the parts of U.S. pop culture that many people everywhere adore — the bigness, the glamour, the epic scale, the high-end production, the showbiz culture.

As well, her music is about very basic universal themes and values — love, family, the struggle to hold yourself together through hard times. English-speaking listeners might often find the songs too simplistic lyrically, but when you're listening to music in a language you don't speak, or only speak rudimentarily, that can be an advantage — with my crappy French, I know that I partly love "Ne Me Quitter Pas" by Jacques Brel because I can tell what it's about — "Please Don't Leave Me!" — and identify the emotional response as a sympathetic one, a big emotion that crosses the language barrier. Whereas other Brel songs I enjoy but have to look up translations of the lyrics to "get" the song completely.

Celine doesn't get too sexy either, which in a lot of cultures, makes her seem more dignified and acceptable. You might even say people hear their own responses to globalization — being attracted to the material riches it seems to offer but wary of its effects on family, personal relationships, intimate ties, their faith, etc.

» EXPRESS: Celine is a prime example of an artist who sells millions of albums that nobody claims to own. By simply labeling them "guilty pleasures," American audiences are able to ingest performers like Celine without feeling the pressures of external condescension. How did listening to and liking a song on the radio become so complicated?
» WILSON: Music serves as a badge of identity, first of all, from adolescence forward. And taste in general is more constantly fraught than we consciously credit. Everything we do serves as social code that signals your status economically and culturally, your allegiances, what claims you make about your inner life. So if you claim to like how "stupid" something is, to be slumming it indulgently but not being so gauche as to like mass culture sincerely, you protect yourself from being misperceived as lower status than you "really" are.

This kind of mad thinking then goes on to produce bizarre spinoffs like the lounge-music revival of the '90s for instance, or the contradictory concept of ironic pleasure. The result is what people are upset by in what they call "hipster" culture — a ridiculously reductive term — that what are supposed to be gestures of individualism turn out to be another system of conformity. Again, I could go on and on like Celine's heart here, but there are chapters full of that in the book.

» EXPRESS: You reference Celine's music as "schmaltz," a Yiddish phrase that's come to describe a piece of work dripping with sentiment. Do you think that rock has recently co-opted the genre, with the advent of mall-punk or emo? As you referenced, one of the genre's commercial forbearers, A New Found Glory, covered "My Heart Will Go On."
» WILSON: I don't think New Found Glory is playing that song in tribute. In any case, the difference with emo is that it's not openly sentimental — it coats its sentiment in a layer of angst, which provides an acceptably "alienated" disguise for rock-youth culture.

I didn't have room in the book but I found an essay online about emo that kept using Celine Dion over and over as an example of what emo was not — it was emotional but not "Celine Dion" emotional. Their defense of that position mainly had to do with using electric guitars and harder drumbeats, rather than any coherent definition of what separated these two ways of being emotional, and the undercurrent was mainly just macho rationalism — with a certain quotient of misogyny. "It's emotional but it's not girly!" he might as well have said.

» EXPRESS: You suggest that Celine's roots can be traced to the talent show. Do you think that the discomfort stemming from this lies in a rockist, authenticity obsessed frame of mind?
» WILSON: Sure. Why is a talent show a terrible place to come from, while a rap battle isn't? Is a rap battle not basically a talent show too? The talent show has its roots in an older entertainment culture, and thus isn't a cool backstory.

That being said Dion has a good traditional poor-hick-to-stardom backstory that is pretty close to the one that's idealized in country music history, for instance. Loretta Lynn and Dion aren't that far apart as narrative objects. You know, Robert Johnson didn't actually make a deal with the devil at the crossroads. He was a professional entertainer, as was James Brown — hell, as was Lou Reed, you know, a Brill Building songwriter.

The music-industry cliche is that there's no such thing as an overnight success, and it's worth remembering when you start buying into that "he came out of nowhere..." myth. Nobody comes out of nowhere and very few successes are by accident. It's just thought gauche in middle-class culture to be seen to be trying too hard, and talent shows look like people trying hard, exposing their dreams too nakedly. But for Celine Dion, this impoverished youngest of 14 kids from rural Quebec, it was try too hard or get nowhere.

My response to the authenticity debate increasingly is just that everybody's an act — as Angela Chase said in "My So-Called Life," if it wasn't Bob Dylan — and everybody is real.

» EXPRESS: Your statement that Celine as opposed to Pavement stands as a more "compelling artifact" of its time because it more accurately reflects the zeitgeist of the '90s is pretty provocative, especially in the face of the continued fracturing of pop music. The idea that one musical movement or singular artist provide the soundtrack for a time or mirror the feelings of an era seems almost antiquated and quaint. Do you think that such a thing is still possible? Is "Let's Talk about Love" one of the last albums in recent memory to paint such a picture?
» WILSON: Every artistic artifact represents its era, and once it's old enough to be examined with distance it's easy to see how. But pop music that has a bigger constituency in mind, a less particular niche — intended for "everyone" — is maybe a bit more sweeping in its way of sucking up the values of its time and putting them on display.

The work that's recognized as being representative in its moment is probably narrower in its points, in a way, so that it stands out — the narrowness also makes for a greater sharpness. But I can't imagine that Jay-Z won't seem incredibly representative of '90s/'00s culture 20 years from now, more so than the more self-consciously socio-political M.I.A., for example. This is no slight against M.I.A., just a balancing of the way the two get discussed. I still like Pavement.

As for whether any single album or artist "sums up" their era, I think that was always a bit of a melodramatic fiction. The fracturing effect makes us more quickly aware of what's omitted, perhaps. The Beatles were very zeitgeisty, of course, but the women in their music are mostly caricatures or romantic objects. So then you look over to Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin or Janis Joplin or Barbra Streisand to round out that picture. And the Beatles weren't representative of people over 30 in 1965 so much, either, no?

Still, you're right. It's obviously the case that radio isn't the uniting force it was through most of the 20th century. But that process was well-advanced by 1997 — while millions of people were listening to Celine's hits, millions of others pointedly weren't. Which is the book's starting point, of course. I wasn't making special claims for "Let's Talk About Love" as the quintessential 1990s album or anything. Only that one of the values it can have for us now is as a historical document, alongside its musical value — which is part of the larger thought that there's no such thing as "pure" musical value — songs are always too packed with non-musical information for that.

Written by Express contributor Matthew Siblo

Photos courtesy Carl Wilson

Posted by Express at 8:36 AM on February 12, 2008
Tagged in Books , Entertainment , Music , Top Stories