We say we love flowers, yet we pluck them. We say we love trees, yet we cut them down. And people still wonder why some are afraid when told they are loved.

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.

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 somehow survive being inhibited and mangled by its harsh and stupid commercial chains, and there is surely irreducible potential because of the 'star system' and the volatile attention pop receives for multiples of wickedness, ridicule, discontent, eccentricity, desire to thrive importantly in a genuinely popular context.

The remix culture became very much controlled by the corporate world, it's a marketing tool mostly, to create mixes for different genres. So it's very soul-less in a way.

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

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.