Pop music - what used to be known as rock music, a loud novelty - can be something more than a pointless, artificial diversion.

It's kind of great being a group without a lead singer, because the possibilities are sky high. Odd things become the lead singer, noises become the lead singer. It actually makes the thing much more flexible.

I know, or I dream, that pop music can search out limits, mock restrictions and divisions, exorcise cultural nightmares, contribute to revitaiisation of people's thinking, disturb and inspire if only through its unstable mobility, its readiness to pursue apparently irrelevant links and private associations.

It's going to be an interesting dilemma for certain corporations. They've worked so hard to make themselves important in the way music goes out into the world, but it's completely irrelevant when people can get their music in a different way.

I'm not denying that in the world there's been some tremendous musical happenings, like DJ Shadow or whatever, that kind of thing. But when it goes into the weird thing where you get a remix done by a certain person because they need a brand name, that's when it becomes really discouraging.

Through pop music ideas, energies and resources can emerge that can help the audience release themselves from the unrelieving confinements of environment.

If post-punk enterprise suggested that pop music could establish a fierce skittishness, an aggressive self-irony, that would enable it to transcend its manufactured state, video narcissism announces that pop has found an easy way to steal more cash from young people and damage their natural desires.