The adventure is when people don't know what they're doing at all. Like, I think that the first pop band to use synthesizers as their main instrument and take it seriously was probably Silver Apples. And they sure didn't know what they were doing, and they sure don't sound like anything else.

Serious music isn't listened to in a casual setting. You don't want to listen to that in headphones on the subway.

I gave up music criticism because of the increasingly obvious conflict of interest. I couldn't say anything bad about the records when I might be meeting that person's manager backstage an hour later.

Surf is that music which is entirely about evoking something. There's never any vocals, so it's not about the lyrics, it's about the reverb.

At first I was laboring under the impression that Chinese lyrics didn't rhyme. That turned out to be untrue - they don't rhyme in translation.

Yeah, except that when I write pop songs I have pretty strict constraints that I impose on myself. 69 Love Songs is a constraint. That the titles have to begin with "I'"s is a relatively strict constraint. Charm of the Highway Strip is all travel songs. And I am free to change the plot slightly to accommodate something that happens to rhyme conveniently.

I think there is such a valid concept as "serious music," meaning that if you don't take it seriously, you don't get it all.