What Level Of Lash Are We At In The Poptimism Debate?

“This marks somewhere around 2,500 years, at least since Plato’s Laws, that someone or other has been fretting over the glory of music being diluted or corrupted by its own popularity with the rabble. And at least two centuries of people demanding that good music should be hard work, not just to make but also to listen to.”
 — “How About a Little Poptimism for Tchaikovsky?” from last week in the Los Angeles Review of Books, is the kind of thing that you will either utterly devour or only click on by mistake, but if you are someone who is in the former category you will for sure have thoughts about it. (Just don’t share them with me! I don’t like fighting on the Internet! Especially about music!) Speaking of the Los Angeles Review of Books, certain people in L.A. seem to love it, since it is the first time any of them have come into contact with culture since they moved there from New York.