I spend much of my time in the classroom breaking down and analyzing that “hard English stuff” that many of us geeked out over as undergrads. Sonnets and pantoums and villanelles and odes and god knows what else. It’s fun and I see sparks as students begin flexing their own critical analytical muscles.

And yet, when it comes time to flick through the playlist or slide in a CD, invariably it’s the most standard of pop cuisine. Endless verses of rhyming couplets stacked comfortably within blankets of gooey choruses strung together by sappy chord changes; pop at its very heart. Sure, I’ve gotten my fair share of albums from Amoeba’s “unusually experimental” aisle (now sadly displaced to the back of the store alongside Jazz and Blues … hmmm there’s something that needs to be deconstructed!). However when it comes to long-drive listening and I don’t have the energy for Ira Glass & Company’s company, it’s typically the “unpopular pop” of Jon Brion and his cadre or something else of equally shiny pop veneer.

It may look brittle and flimsy compared to Ashbery, Walcott & Plath (the most awesome literary law firm since Silverblatt’s crew), but there is something eternally, inextinguishably human about the way pop can creep into your brain and whisper to yer heart.