Pop music provides not just the soundtrack to our lives, as the cliche goes; it releases our emotions and helps us to articulate them. This is why music is so important to adolescents, who are struggling with questions of identity and self-expression.

History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

If history starts as a guest list, it has a tendency to end like the memory of a drunken party: misheard, blurred, fragmentary.

Music - not just the lyrics, but the music itself - expresses confused or illicit passions: rage, lust, envy, frustration, channeling these energies and creating an outlet for them.

Facts might be false if they challenge the conviction of a mind already made up.

There is nothing that 'Sesame Street' can't teach you, if you let it.

People who are given whatever they want soon develop a sense of entitlement and rapidly lose their sense of proportion.