No Rock And Roll Fun

A LOAD OF OLD POLLARDS: Well, actually, it's some new Pollards - in a piece published in the soon to be tabloided Independent, Stephen Pollard considered if there is a scale of excellence in music. The trouble is, of course, that a person who can dismiss the entire body of rap - all the way from Grandmaster Flash to Morris Minor and the Majors - with two words "worthless noise" is never going to be able to consider the question and come up with any answer other than "Yes, and classical music is at the apex." We'd wonder if Mr. P would consider, therefore, that whatever Mylenne Klass does with her million-quid classical hands has to be better than, say, Abba's Dancing Queen or When We Were Young by the Whipping Boy simply because it's got the classical label stuck to it. And would, therefore, Bohemian Rhapsody be the best Queen song for it's classical allusion? Presumably, the sampling of Trois Gallopides (almost certainly spelt wrong) by Mark Stewart would make that a rock song with some merit, while the other Mafia stuff has to be pointless? Clearly, it's possible to stack up every tune ever in to come to a pyramid of best to worst, and clearly every time it's going to be a totally personal viewpoint. But to dismiss a work not on its own demerits, but because it comes from a genre that you're not keen on is actually as narrow-minded as you can imagine. Not listening to rock music because it's rock music is on a par with not dating someone because they come from Slough.