The Madonna Code

"In the last years of his life, Lomax had come to view music as a kind of code that carried fundamental information about the culture that produced it; it was a code he thought he'd cracked. 'Society and the arts are joined by what may prove to be general laws,' he wrote."

I've always felt that pop music is our generation's poetry, and that our society is stratified by what we listen to. In the land of John Hughes, high school kids might break down in to socio-economic cliques, but in my hogh school, the deadheads didn't associate with the metalheads, who didn't associate with the art-rock kids. Even now, as an adult, I'm always shcked when I discover that a close friend is totlaly unfamiliar with, say, Fables of the Reconstruction. "How can we possibly be friends and get along so well?" I always wonder.