Pop music isn't designed for the ad-driven journalistic ritual of the fall preview, and good for pop music. Bitch all you want about TicketMaster extortion and four megacorps squeezing the art out of the biz they dominate. Or take the opposite tack and mock the young temps and old warhorses who make their if-you-call-that-livings faking orgasm with songs they know too well. The former are usually obscene, the latter pathetic. But don't get all indignant about music's brute capitalization or rote rationalization until you compare the book industry, where lists of highly intermittent literary merit are drawn up a year in advance, or Hollywood, where release schedules are laid down for months of Fridays, or Broadway, where the lowliest flop costs too much time and a million bucks, or classical music, where at this moment superstar draws are... More >>>