Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 1:53 AM by Gene

I MUST cut-and-paste this at length:

If you listen to some of those digitally remastered jazz records from the 1920s, they sound fantastic: there was never anything wrong with the recordings, just the limitations of the delivery system - those scratchy 78s. [Phil] Spector, by contrast, designed his recordings specifically for the limitations of the day - tinny little 1960s transistor radios, on which they sounded spectacular. On CD, on 21st-century players, they sound thin and fake and hollow - and dated. I can recall only one critic ever pointing out the limitations of Phil Spector's "genius" - Donald Clarke, in The Rise and Fall of Popular Music.

But the less Spector did the more the aura of his "genius" grew. For the last 30 years, the "troubled genius" has been more trouble than he's worth: he recently flounced out of a project with Celine Dion after Quebec's steely songbird had the temerity to question him. "You don't tell Shakespeare how to write plays," he huffed. The peculiar burdens of pop genius are written on his face, which is almost as strange as Jacko's. That's another rock exception to the general rule: celebrities are supposed to age well, but the Phil Spector staring out from The Telegraph masthead last weekend is a shriveled little prune under a Status Quo fright-wig, like someone auditioning for a Bournemouth Leisure Centre production of This Is Spinal Tap.

Strangest of all, Phil was said at the time of his arrest to be dating Nancy Sinatra. The three Sinatra kids are perhaps the most normal celebrity offspring in history. Their dad was the sanest superstar I've ever met. But he didn't have to live with the tortured contradictions of commercial rock's poseur transgressivism. It's only a wonder more of them don't go nuts.

Only Mark Steyn could cut through the slime like this.