SHUT UP AND SING. TBogg has a lot of fun with this Rockanomics site. I can't say I'm in complete agreement with his assessment. The proprietors are clearly mad, but so what? Music is for everybody, even and perhaps especially the disturbed. Neither the "house band" nor The Right Brothers (whom they closely resemble) are my style, but they don't sound any worse than a lot of other old-fashioned bands. I don't relate to "Open Season," but I don't relate to "Cop Killer," either, and they both rock pretty hard.

The bloggy parts of the site are expectedly tedious, but the parts that have music... have music. My standards are blessedly low, as are the standards of rock and roll itself. Goethe's dictum that there's nothing worse than active ignorance doesn't apply to rock. As a sprat I had my "California Uber Alles" and "Beat on the Brat." These are not works of measured analysis, but cool tunes.

The state of arts education being what it is, I have to applaud anything that motivates people to play. Long-term it may even have a civilizing influence on them. I've seen more than one anti-social type redeemed by immersion in a useful craft. Why might it not work on anti-socialist types?

But that is all to one side; the lively arts need no justification outside themselves. We shouldn't let the odd Horst Wessel Lied sour us on Euterpe. Her charms are for us all.