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

Essentially the soul of the planet is being controlled by corporations.

The corporations have all their marketing tools, but it's so much better to go in and find out what's going on and what people are thinking.

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.

Pop music can play a large part in the way numerous young people determine their right to desire and their need to question.

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.

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.