I Had No Voice To Talk With

Seeing Taylor Swift Live In 2013 Is Seeing A Maestro At The Top Of Her Or Anyone's Game. No Other Pop Auteur Can Touch Her Right Now For Emotional Excess Or Musical Reach - Her Punk Is So Punk, Her Disco Is So Disco. The Red Sequins On Her Guitar Match The Ones On Her Microphone, Her Shoes And 80 Percent Of The Crowd.

You Know The Prince Song Where The Girl's Phone Rings But She Tells Him, "whoever's Calling Couldn't Be As Cute As You?" I Long To Live Out This Moment In Real Life.

Singing What's In Your Heart? Naming The Things You Love And Loathe? You Can Get Hurt That Way. Hell, You Will Get Hurt That Way. But You'll Get Hurt Trying To Hide Away In All That Silence And Leave Your Life Unsung. There's No Future Without Tears. Are You Really Setting Your Hopes On Not Getting Hurt At All? You Think That's An Option? You Clearly Aren't Listening To Enough Morrissey Songs.

Being A Pop Fan Is A Lot Like Catholic Devotion - Lots Of Ritual, Lots Of Ceremony... We Touch The Icon To Enter The Sacred Space, Genuflecting To Reliquaries And Ostentatoria That Make Something Splendid Of Our Most Secret Desires And Agonies.

'the Sopranos' Gets Praised As Novelistic, But It Follows The Most Banal Of Life Patterns, Showing The Sheer Tedium Of Being A Mobster. It Has Dead Spots, Boring Plotlines, Weak Episodes. Characters Develop Slowly, Or Don't. Like Viewers, A Gangster Might Get Bored, Fade Out Of The Action, Then Come Back To Find None Of His Debts Forgotten.