I’m glad Elanor has discovered the power of crappy music, and I wish her well with her new and exciting journey. You see, for so long now I’ve quietly resented all these TC (“too cool”) people who would sit around talking about the power of this lyric, or the brilliance of this ironic pose, or the daring of that reference to something intellectual (when I say people I mean Elanor and Leah). When I would suggest, meekly, that perhaps there was another musical path one could travel – a brighter, happier path – I would receive concerned looks, or worse, a little chuckle and an implied pat on the head: “little Guy is so endearingly funny with his taste in crappy music”. But I kept believing. I knew that what I felt couldn’t be wrong: the power of a key-change, a pop comeback, a really cool dance-move. I stayed strong and held onto the memories: cruising the streets to the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack, being busted pyjama dancing in my room, the joys of scoring a song on Video Hits that wasn’t totally lame. And now… and now I feel somewhat validated that Elanor has begun to see what I see: that beauty lives in 90s sounding keyboards and session-musician percussion.

Now, Elanor did claim that my taste was insidious, dangerous even. This is absolutely true. Like any great passion in life, it’s deadly. It can own you, consume you, drag you under. Only this morning, I had a dream that ties neatly into Elanor’s recent paean to Christina Aguilera and her masterful “Stripped” project, and shows how totally messed up I am. For this reason I'll describe it below. THIS is what happens when pop music leaches into your subconscious:

“The dream began in this huge totally American bling bling mansion. Good-looking and cool people were milling about aimlessly, making small talk and comparing coolness. This went on for a bit, until suddenly there was silence. I looked up and Christina Aguilera was at the top of the staircase. The next thing I knew we were in a field, with Aguilera and the posse of cool people. Everyone was now in costume, with Aguilera in this totally avant-garde full-body black plastic suit that covered her face and hair. She looked like a blob of tar. Everyone else was in similar garb, standing around Aguilera in your typical dance formation.

At this point Aguilera thrust her fist into the air and made some high-pitched, animalistic noise that I assume meant something like ‘let’s dance!’ At this point Not Gonna Hold Us Down came on and the dancing started. With the black-clad Aguilera leading, the whole phalanx of dances moved down towards a wire-fence that was next to a freeway (!). From this prime locale, Aguilera and dances then began to heckle drivers, saying stuff like ‘we’re hos: get use to it’, ‘skanks around the world unite’, ‘WE’RE HERE!’, ‘we’ll never give up’ and so forth. Lil’Kim then appeared and started dancing onto the freeway, weaving through traffic in her Versace bikini and cloak, threatening drivers and the like. But suddenly the music stopped. The dancers vanished. And then I knew that it was over… because (I kid you not)… and evil Bond-style genius was taking over the world. And then I woke up, thinking: ‘what totally cool dance-moves’”

Tread carefully Elanor, tread carefully.