Josh has lots of interesting stuff to say about musical dialogue: he sees mainstream pop as not providing any dialogue, I obviously see it as providing lots, at least by my biased definition of dialogue, where the art in question doesn’t have to talk back much. (This is all concerning recent entries on Blue Lines, by the way). What I’m after is simply for people to think critically about music, but to continue the conversational metaphor Top 40 pop (which is often but not always ‘disposable’, cf. Abba and the early Beatles, which doggedly refuse to be disposed of several decades post-release) is appealingly blank, a space for you to fill, and it’s mostly the discourse around it that provides the critical meat. Whereas a lot of alt.rock, as Josh suggests, offers a lot less conversation than it appears to, and is also a lot shriller about demanding it.