perfidy

According to the AP, between three and four hundred thousand barrels of oil will begin flowing into Turkey today. This oil will come from the Iraq's northern oil fields. The article did not say when oil would begin pumping from the southern oil fields.

Jeez... Steve den Beste could take lessons from me... especially since I actually know what I'm talking about *snark*. 

Anyway, it occurs to me that there are equivalents to the Truck Driver Gear Change in other genres: 

"Electronica": basically uses two beats for everything: the sound of the Roland 808 or 909, and the "Amen break." Need to spice up a boring track? Pull out the 808! Woo! Bo-RING.

Jazz: If I read ONE MORE DAMN CHART with ii-V-I all over it, I'm gonna go on a rampage. It's the laziest resolution in all of music and it makes me crazy. Even great songs like Take the A Train suffer-- at the end of the first 16 there's a damn DOUBLE ii-V-I! What I wouldn't give for people to begin reharmonizing these old charts in the parallel minor, with a plagal cadence at the end for added flavor.

Hip Hop/Rap: the i-VI-i movement, made popular by Irv Gotti & Murder Inc, the Neptunes, and about a million wannabe R&B divas. Seriously guys, there's other chords out there. Even Biz Markie did better than this. Biz Markie!

Hip Hop/Rap II: whenever some lazy baked-off-his-ass producer needs to kick it old-skool for some added flava, he reaches for the Funky Drummer break as played by Clyde "Funky Drummer" Stubblefield in the James Brown hit of the same name. It's EVERYWHERE. It's the one that goes "BOOM boom CHICK(adick)BOOM boomboom CHICK(adicka)" and repeats ad nauseum.

Hip Hop/Rap III: The Old Skool Heist: P-Diddy's specialty: Boosting the hook from Kool & The Gang's "Hollywood Swinging" for Mase's only hit; using the Police for that farewell song to Biggie. Also used by En Vogue, who turned James Brown's "The Payback" into not one, but TWO top ten hits. Homage is one thing. Imitation is another.

Hip Hop/Rap IIIa: The Old Skool Breakdown. A subset of the above. This happens when a track cuts out and an Old-Skool hit makes a five-second guest appearance. Recently heard used well in Missy Elliott's "Work It" and Nelly's video cut of "Hot In Herre." When not used well, it just underscores how out of ideas a producer is.

Kids these days! The music is noise! Television is crap! The cars are scaring the horses! Where's my back pills!

Cloning Yields Human-Rabbit Hybrid Embryo Chinese scientists (natch) have succeeded for the first time in creating a human rabbit embryo. German cannibals will be especially happy, as they can have people and Hassenpfeffer at the same time. The Chinese

"team said it retrieved foreskin tissue from two 5-year-old boys and two men, and facial tissue from a 60-year-old woman, as a source of skin cells. They fused those cells with New Zealand rabbit eggs from which the vast majority of rabbit DNA had been removed. More than 400 of those new, fused entities grew into early embryos, and more than 100 survived to the blastocyst stage -- the point at which coveted stem cells begin to form.

Crazy, man, crazy. Of course, everyone expected the Chinese to create the dreaded Pandaman hybrid. This rabbit thing was probably intended to confuse and deceive us while they continue work on the pandaman. Or, combining the known reproductive prowess of the average chinese citizen with the rabbit will result in unstoppable hordes of rabbitman chinese armies. 

Only time will tell.

In response to my defense from yesterday of the Truck Driver Gear Change, Tom of Crooked Timber has let me know that he is unpersuaded by my counter-examples of the Gear Change's quality, writing

I suppose my rather hifallutin worry is to do with what I take to be a pretty obvious fall in the musical sophistication of pop. Clearly it's unfair to take the Beatles as representative, but it really does seem to my ears that popular music was a lot more adventurous, harmonically and melodically, in the 'sixties than it ever has been in my lifetime. Never mind going back to the era of the Great American Songbook, which was in another league entirely... And yes, you're quite right about the importance of being able to accept moderately trashy music for what it is and enjoying it none the less. But I guess I fear that one day there will be almost nothing but Truck Driver changes, and because the musical atmosphere will have become so thin, that hardly anyone will notice.

Now, there is definitely something to this. Pop music always goes through its fallow periods. Worse yet, it's often hard to see the good bits until well afterward because the crap drowns it out.

There are two arguments at work here: first that pop music is on a maybe perpetual decline into permanent mediocrity; and that pop music is cyclical, with periods of good music punctuated by stretches of bad. While I agree with aspects of both, and share Tom's fears, his thoughts have triggered a sort of, erm, ok, rant on the subject that has been gestating for some time. In short: I say "not so!" 

The arguments advanced by Tom are more or less permanent features of the landscape of music criticism. Classical composers dismissed romanticism as crap. Baroque composers dismissed music in the rococo style as crap, with some justification. Although not exactly pop music, Stravinsky was famously booed. French critics dismissed the "pounding of the Jazz machine," presumably preferring the elevated pleasures of the Moulin Rouge. Elvis, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Madonna (three times!), Marilyn Manson, rap, bebob, jazz fusion, and techno have all been heralded as harbingers of the end of civilization, or at least of worthwhile music.

And it's never been true. What IS true is that pop music is on a decades-long journey from emphasis on tune and harmony to an emphasis on rhythm. The "Great American Song Book" so justly referred to by Tom as beyond reproach contains tunes of fantastic elegance and beauty, but with the rhythmic complexity of nursery rhymes. Conversely, Eminem's biggest hit of last year contained the chorus "na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na, na-na-na-nyaaaaaaaaaagh," and was still one of the most melodically complex rap songs to hit the charts. Yet Eminem's song contained some incredible displays of rhythmic complexity.

Of course, there are outliers. Dizzy Gillespie had an insane way with rhythm and melody. Certain modern pop singers, for example Mary J. Blige and En Vogue, marry hip-hop rhythms to relatively complex harmonic structures, at least as passing chords.

Pop music has always been mediocre-- the Great American Song Book is now almost three quarters of a century old, so that the wheat has been separated from the chaff. Of the great era of the early jazz age songwriter, this stuff is the best. You never hear the insipid ballads and hackneyed jump-blues, because they did not withstand the test of time. There's now a canon.

The same thing has also happened with early rock and roll, though it must be measured by different standards. Rock and roll, though it boasts some excellent songwriting, is generally more harmonically simple than the golden age songs that came before. This places more stress on performance, which is why we venerate Elvis Presley and not, say, Gamble & Huff. In an earlier age, the parallel would be to remember a pianist for his way with an Ellington chart, rather than to remember Ellington himself.

A side note about the Sixties: The Beatles are a special case entirely. They managed to re-introduce harmony and melody into rock song forms, and hence we remember Lennon/McCartney. Others did the same thing-- Motown, Brian Wilson, even Queen-- but the Beatles were the FIRST band to understand how to combine the songwriting conventions of the 1930s with the rhythmic conventions of rock, and still maintain a sense of adventure. It's true that the Sixties can boast some very fine songwriters, but this statistic is skewed by the dominance of the Baby Boomers in popular culture keeping alive the music of their youth. But don't forget: the Sixties were also the era of the Dave Clark Five.

The trend in pop music has always been not so much a cycle of quality, but rather a cycle of markets. This has two effects: to bring to light a previously unheralded subgenre, giving the illusion that everything has changed overnight; and to actually drive innovation by drawing attention to said subgenre. So although the quality of music itself is not so cyclical, the market cycle effect caused by the spotlight makes it appear that it is.

A good example is Nirvana in 1991. The hair-metal trend which gripped the US in 1987 had totally played itself out by 1991, and rap, apart from Run-DMC and MC Hammer, had not yet taken over the Top 40. When Nirvana came along, the market realigned itself to find more things like that, making it seem that music had emerged from The Long Dark Night Of Poodle Hair. The great music was there all along-- it just took a hit to make finding it and putting it on the radio worthwhile. Remember: Soul Asylum had their first hit in 1992, on their EIGHTH album thanks to Nirvana turning the attention to the kind of music they made. (History is filled with such examples: Bix Biederbecke became better known after his death; Robert Johnson was totally unknown in life.)

Moreover, for every bit of good, there's a legion of bad. For every Bach there were ten thousand talentless hacks knocking off a mass a week at a penny per line. For every Mozart, there is a Salieri. For every Frank Sinatra there is a Jim Nabors. For every Nirvana there is a Candlebox. For every Christina Aguilera (or, if you like, Kylie Minogue), there is a Britney Spears and an estrogen army of fifteen thousand clones.

So what's cyclical is not quality, but collective tastes. What's pleasing one year might be horrid ten year s later. For example, jazz-heads can quite justifiably look at the music of Poison and, hearing nothing but a 4/4 beat with the bass holding a pedal tone and the guitar soloing completely inside the simple changes, conclude that such a song is lamentably simple. Conversely, Poison fans can listen to John Scofield play through some crazy post-bop changes and conclude that jazz is incomprehensible garbage.

But I digress. I'm starting to sermonize, and that's not particularly courteous. I actually agree with Tom's worries that the Truck Driver Change and its ilk will become the norm and that nobody will notice or care. It's one reason I loathe the piping in of house music into every store in the world-- every song is EXACTLY the same. EXACTLY.

Right now, we have two armored divisions, several heavy mechanized infantry divisions, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, and the 10th Mountain division. If we added a couple more armored and heavy infantry divisions, would we be little better off than now. Certainly, we would have more troops, which would ease the pressure on the existing units. Prepositioned stocks of equipment ease somewhat the cost and delay of shipping heavy equipment to the battle zone.

But the primary problem we have faced since 9/11 is getting troops, and more importantly their equipment, close to the enemy. Adding more heavy divisions will not ease this problem, it will exacerbate it. There are two aspects to the logistical bottleneck. First, lack of transport. The Air Force has a finite capacity for airlift. The Navy has a functionally infinite capacity, but it can take months to get gear in place by sealift. Second, the size and weight of the Army and Marine gear that must be moved.

The M1 Abrams tank is far and away the most lethal main battle tank ever built. It is virtually invulnerable to most enemy tank guns, while its main gun can shoot through a Soviet tank lengthwise. It is fast, accurate and on the whole reliable. It also weighs 70 tons. Only the two largest Air Force transports can carry the M1. The C17 can carry one, and the C5 can carry two. There are 100 C5s in the Air Force, so they could transport all the tanks in an armored division anywhere in the world in ten days. Of course, they would not be able to carry anything else, like fuel, food, ammunition, humvees, guns, troops, or whatever for the army. And of course they would not be moving missiles or armaments for any of the other services either.

It has been said many times that amateur strategists study tactics, professional strategists study logistics. So, let’s pretend to be professional. A division is more than 16,000 soldiers and all the equipment, ammunition, fuel, food and water they need to fight. We have several types of divisions. The airborne and mountain divisions are the easiest to transport, because they have the least amount of vehicles. The 82nd has its own Air Force transport wing, and they train to make deployments quickly and efficiently. In theory, the entire division can deploy in under a week to anywhere in the world.

The heavy divisions are in exactly the opposite situation. During the cold war, they had complete equipment sets positioned in Germany, and all the divisions had to do was fly to Europe and match up with their gear. They would hold off the Soviets while the Navy and Merchant Marine began shipping over equipment in quantity. When these divisions are needed elsewhere, we face the monumental problem of getting all their stuff to where its needed. As mentioned above, airlift is a narrow but fast pipe, while sealift is a fat but slow one.

The military gets around this to some extent by setting up equipment depots around the world, to cut the time needed to ship stuff where we need it. Roll-on, Roll-off cargo ships have all the tanks, trucks, humvees, Bradleys, fuel and so on for an entire division. The Air Force has detailed plans to use its airlift capacity at maximum efficiency. If we are to not only increase the size, but increase the deployability of our forces, we need to increase the logistical throughput of our military.

The simplest method would be to first of all more Air Force transports. No new technology is required, the planes have already been designed and tested. We just buy more of them - small intra-theater transports like the C-130 Hercules, up to the large airlift planes like the C-17 Globemaster and the C-5 Galaxy. The Air Force has a institutional prejudice against “trash-hauling”, preferring high tech wonders like the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor fighter. However, the Air Force already has the ability to crush, decisively, every other air force in the world, and to penetrate the tightest air defenses and deliver precision munitions. Transport is the biggest priority.

The Navy is responsible, strangely enough, for sealift. The biggest limitation with sealift is the requirement for basing rights for storage, and safe harbors with docking facilities to unload all the gear. The latter means either convincing a conveniently located nation with port facilities to help us, or using one of the Airborne divisions or the Marines to take one from the enemy and convert it to our use. Even long-term allies like Turkey have denied us the right to use their ports to unload our gear.

However, the Navy came up with a solution: the JMOB, or Joint Mobile Offshore Base. The concept is simple – using technology developed for mobile drilling platforms, create several thousand foot long cargo ship modules designed to connect to each other. Each module can sail independently to a hot spot, where it would link up with four other modules to create the JMOB. On the top of each module would be a runway, and when all five modules are connected, the JMOB becomes an airport capable of handling C-17 and C-5 transports, and all but the largest civilian cargo jets. Inside each module is storage, and lots of it. Space for fuel, food, vehicles and everything else the well equipped soldier needs. And each module has port facilities, so that material stored on the JMOB, or arriving by plane or cargo ship can be rapidly and efficiently loaded onto landing craft to be dispatched to the beach.

The beauty of this concept is that it totally eliminates the need to get basing rights from other nations. Carriers allow us to project air power almost anywhere in the world. Mid-flight refueling gives our Air Force the ability to strike anywhere in the world. JMOB would give this same power projection to even heavy armor divisions. It would give us entirely new capabilities, while vastly increasing the usefulness of things we already have, like roll-on, roll-off cargo ships, landing craft and armored divisions. No JMOB has yet been authorized for construction, and at a billion dollars a pop, the JMOB is not cheap; and we’d need several of them, at least. However, the freedom of operation that they would give us would be well worth the price.

Other smaller, but still needed improvements could also be made that would improve our ability to transport soldiers to the battlefield, but if these two steps were taken, half the logistics battle would be won.

The recent reports of troops being rotated home for two week leave highlight some of the problems that we have faced in maintaining military preparedness when the military is being asked to handle so very many jobs. I commented earlier on the extent to which our forces were committed, and the need to expand the military to meet even current requirements.

But how should we expand the military, and how much? In this post and its sequels, I will concentrate on the Army, and on Army logistical issues that affect the other services. I have more ideas for what to do with the other services, but that will have to wait for later.

In general, but especially for the last twenty years or so, the United States has emphasized quality over quantity. During most of the cold war, it was assumed that highly trained, lavishly equipped American soldiers would be able to stem the red tide should the Soviets ever decide to kick off WWIII. During the 80s, ever-greater sums were devoted to developing advanced weaponry to equip our forces for confrontation with their Soviet counterparts.

By the 90s, advances in American civilian technology began to greatly affect the types of weapons that the military could develop. Space and computer technology made possible the revolution in smart, brilliant, and jesus-that’s-smart weapons that we now see in the hands of our military. These wizard weapons allow soldiers to fight in the dark, our tanks to shoot completely through enemy tanks, Air Force pilots to target individual rooms in buildings, and so on. But the core of our amazing military effectiveness lies not in the panoply of wizard weapons our soldiers carry, but in the communications and logistics technologies that surround them.

Our military is wired for communications to a level unimaginable fifteen years ago. Military networks allow information and intelligence to be transmitted to troops in the field with remarkable rapidity. These networks allow units to coordinate their activities to the point where they can act almost like a single intelligence. This is what gives us our flexibility, adaptability and speed. This is the heart of our lethality.

When we think about what kinds of units we would like to add to the army, these are things that need to be kept in mind. But before we even think about adding more troops, we need to think about how to move them.

Via Crooked Timber and Doktor Frank comes this website dedicated to the celebration and eradication of the Truck Drivers Gear Change, otherwise known as a final half- or whole- step modulation. The Gear Change is so called as it allegedly gives a tired song one last kick into a higher gear before the fadeout, like a weary trucker kicking it up to high so he doesn't pass out before the next Travel America plaza.

For you music theorists, there are four common Truck Driver changes, I-II, I-bII, i-ii, and i-bii. The good folks at gearchange.org have been collecting egregious examples of this musical offense, complete with a musicological essay explaining the mechanics of the thing and why the Beatles get a free pass for using it. Very nice site indeed!

But their animus is misplaced.

As the owners of the site point out, the the truck driver's change is frequently deployed by the fantastically lazy and obvious (say, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), But I believe the good it does outweighs a ton of bad. The entire point of the Truck Drivers change is to inject energy into a song without transforming the song's structure or melody. This can either be a hallmark of laziness or an admission that there's a good thing going here that oughtn't be screwed with.

Exhibit A: Cheap Trick, "Surrender." Right before the third verse, the song shifts without passing chords from B to C, and ends there [see update below]. The verses and chorus are all sung the same way in the new key, as required by the Truck Driver Gear Change Code of Conduct. But far from being a cop-out ploy designed to prop up a boring song, the boys in Cheap Trick looked at their creation, saw it was good, and improved it the ONLY POSSIBLE way they could have. When you have a perfect song, you can't do more than this without ruining it.

Exhibit B: Bon Jovi, "Living on a Prayer." The final chorus is a whole step above the rest of the song, elevating what's already a timeless, sugary hair-anthem into celestial territory. Who knew any man not named Dio could sing that high?? Again, it's a perfect song. Perfect production, perfect playing, perfect lyrics and mise-en-scene. But it needs a kick on the final chorus. What better way, what less intrusive way, to close the song on a bang than to do the simple and obvious? Finally, can you honestly expect anything more than the simple and obvious of Bon Jovi?

Exhibit C: Ramones, "The KKK Took My Baby Away." A TDGC from C# to D, right before the last verse. The Ramones can do no wrong. None. Not even Brain Drain was wrong, just unfortunate. This song is perfect.

Mind you, I'm not arguing that every use of the TDGC is warranted. No, I suspect rather that songwriters too often get stuck in Cheap Trick's trap and believe their song is perfect, and choose to resort to the TDGC instead of try more creative measures that could ostensibly undermine the song's effectiveness. Unfortunately, since every song can't be "Surrender," and songwriters can be unbelieveably biased toward their own material, they usually end up with dreck festooned with poo.

My question to the gentlemen who run www.gearchange.org is this: what else would you want? Say a song is kicking along nicely in a standard I-IV-V progression with a bridge in vi. The outro chorus is a little boring, and you need something to punch it up a little. The obvious thing would be to kick it up a half step. But since that is now illegal, what do you do? Maybe try a little double coda with a false ending that cycles through the circle of V's via flat-ii's, all the while trying to keep things nice and singable? Please. Maybe if you're Yngwie Malmsteen.

If you're gonna attack a musical trend, at least go after one that's totally inexcusable in every case, like the propensity for hip-hop and R&B to use i-VI-V in every damn track (Irv Gotti, you've got a lot to answer for), or the use of the tritone in nu-metal, or the use of I-bII movement in every cheap house, techno, and flavor of the month dance track.

Leave the Truck Drivers and their modulation alone. Evil does not live here.

[update] It occurs to me: "Surrender" modulates twice-- once from B-flat to B after the 8-bar intro, and then again to C before the third verse. That's a DOUBLE Gear Change!

It also occurs to me that there are successful ways to kick a song up without the Truck Driver Gear Change: 

Exhibit A: Alice in Chains, "Would." The entire song is built on two chords, with different melodies on verse and chorus, but at the end of the last chorus the song switches into an entirely different change, with different rhythms. This is great songwriting-- it took me probably hundreds of listens through the song for me even to notice the unconventionality of the structure. As long as you have a good enough closer, this is a fine way to go.

Exhibit B: The Knack, "My Sharona." When I play the song, I fade it after the amazing, kickass, totally non sequitur guitar solo rather than sit through the rest of it, making the solo the outro. It's a terrible song, but the solo is so awesome that it transcends the fact of the song's suckage and achieves the same propulsion that the Truck Driver Gear Change tries for.

Exhibit C: The False Outro Fade. Recipe: Start hot ending jam. Fade out slowly. Song fades to nothing. But wait! Here it comes again. More hot jam. Soulful, ohhhh so soulful! Fade out again. Goodnight, Cleveland! Most often heard (by me) in the single mix of Parliament's "Flash Light," but with a long and storied history otherwise. Alternative method: the differently mixed ending, as in Pink Floyd's "Have A Cigar." The solo plays but....WOOSH...now it's coming through an AM radio. Even more than the TDGC, this is truly a solution of last resort.

[further update] More on this controversy here, here, here, and my commentary here, here, and here. Ohhhhh yeah.

Music good. Silence boring. Ugh. Buckethead not know much about music. Can't even bang antellope thigh bone in time with music.

In response to my comments of yesterday about how David Bowie kind of sucks, NDR writes:

"I cannot argue with the fact that most Bowie albums were filler. However, Rock was still producing LPs that were not completely distinct from 45s. Certainly the days had passed when bands created throw-aways, but singles still represented a strong market, and bands could still records two albums in one year (how many ABBA albums were there?). Only a few bands created complete albums that ignore singles, but their production was more limited.

To counter my point I would note that at the same time Bowie produced Low and Heroes, two great albums, and the disappointing Lodger, Costello produced My aim is true, This year's model, and Armed forces."

That's true enough. Despite the also overrated Sgt. Pepper's, it's true that rock as a whole had not come around to the idea of album as complete piece by the time Bowie became famous. There are some outstanding earlier examples-- I'm thinking of Marvin Gaye's and Stevie Wonder's early-70's work, and also the work of high-profile auteurs like Neil Young and the Beach Boys-- but for the most part NDR is correct. Bowie is definitely a singles artist with higher aspirations, as was Elvis Presley. "Release three singles and slap them on an album with some hastily chosen covers and random filler" was the rule. Hell, despite pretensions to the contrary, the single has ALWAYS been king for most artists, even if that's not been recognized.

It's interesting, too, that the era of the album as art form is currently waning. It will never die -- musical forms never die*. But downloading and the structure of the current radio and retail market tends to promote the single over the album, and albums are trending back toward the three-single-plus-filler or singles compilation format.

The album as we know it was made possible by LP technology and the limitations of that format. People over a certain age grew up with two-sided releases totaling no more than about 45 minutes to an hour at most. The aforementioned auteurs became adept at using the two-side, time-limited format to their advantage, setting up albums as two mini-dramas complete with tension and release cycles. Since the CD is the absolute now, this classic album format is no longer relevant. CDs have no sides, reducing the emphasis on programming order, and the 80-minute playing time has expanded the amount of music you can cram onto one release. This is a bad thing, as a rule. The major exception to this rule is the lavish re-issue such as Rykodisc pioneered in the early 90's. In that case, the classic album remains intact but is supplemented with extras that exist conceptually separate from the album as a whole.

But those days are over now. The single is back on top, thanks to downloading, tight budgets at the labels, and the grinding wheel of commercial radio. Ironically, the major labels stopped producing commercial singles in 1999, citing an unfavorable cost-benefit ratio, just before downloading re-aligned music listening young people to seek out singles. More ironically, had the majors not eliminated the single they may have been able to move more readily to a pay-for-download format for those marquee songs since the infrastructure and mindset for such a thing would already have been in place. It's amazing how hard it is to change the minds of music executives, especially when it's a good idea.

------------

* This is true. That stupid "two-step garage" fad that swept England and the hip clubs of the USA three years ago was nothing more than classical dance rhythms of the eighteenth century warmed over for a new era. Disco mined cha-cha-cha, salsa, samba, and mambo rhythms for most of its big hits (listen to the cymbals and percussion on the upbeats!!). For all that rock and roll and modern hip hop try to destroy classical harmonic rules, the hookiest songs still play by those very rules. Modal composition, which is almost the standard in today's R&B and hip hop, dates back to the golden age of liturgical chant. Old music never dies, it just changes its name.

David Bowie is incredibly, and inexplicably, overrated. I find most of his music turgid, boring, pretentious, fumbling, and less than half as exciting as an intimate massage from Janet Reno.

Notable exceptions: Low, Station To Station, many very excellent singles including "Heroes," "China Girl," "Young American," and "A Space Oddity." But song for song, pound for pound, and column inch for column inch, David Bowie is the best-loved nonstarter since Dwight Eisenhower.

[postscript] What brings this on? Today I have been listening to "Young Americans" and "The Man Who Sold The World." Hardly a half dozen great songs between them, and a load of incoherent dreck.

Obviously, others might make the same case about Elvis Costello, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Aerosmith, and a host of other ostensibly immortal talents. Yes-- EC had Goodbye Cruel World, the Beatles had most of Magical Mystery Tour, Aerosmith seem hellbent on self-parody, and Elvis had Hawaii and little red pills. But to those who may quibble with my assessment of the Thin White Duke, pointing to other more egregious examples of reputation outstripping actual worth, I say this: taste is subjective, quality is eternal, and you're wrong.