A friend and I have had an ongoing discussion for the last year or so. He says I think there�s nothing going on in new music � I say he thinks there�s more going on in new music than there really is. I�m thinking back particularly to when we were comparing notes on our respective Best Of lists from 2002; while I ended up submitting only 10 records for my Stylus Top 20, he was struggling with what to leave off his list.

It set up what often became a pissing match. We�re entering a new age of music, he would say, with so many different artists recording so many different kinds of music on so many different labels. Spoon, Max Tundra, The Walkmen, Blackalicious � it was exciting! �I guess,� I told him. I wasn�t sold � I thought, well, there�s a lot of good music for sure (Max Tundra Mastered By Guy At the Exchange, in particular, scored five giggles on the ol� Fun-O-Meter). But were there any stone-cold works of drooling, sloppy genius that we�d even remember, much less be blathering on about in ten years? I wasn�t so sure.

My argument centered around Wilco�s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot � a record I resented so much that I tried to keep it from topping Stylus�s list by giving nearly all my points to other, well-loved Stylus favorites (I failed). We didn�t really disagree on the face of it, more or less agreeing that YHF was a perfectly fine record under most circumstances. But as the most critically lauded record of the year, I fucking loathed it. YHF represented everything I believed independent pop music had become: melodically serviceable though far from outstanding, moderately experimental though fairly tame in execution, �emotional� yet far from heartbreaking, and heavily reliant on a big dollop of critical buzz and one or two big influences. In other words, fine in a boring and familiar kind of way. Or maybe terrible in a very, very intriguing way. I�m still not sure.

Okay, so now it�s 2003 and even though we haven�t talked about it in awhile, I�m still feeling like this dispute with my friend hasn�t been resolved. Four Tet�s powerfully average Rounds is on track to be The Most Euphorically Overhyped Record of this year (and I really, really want to believe all that crap about the �breathtaking melodies� hidden somewhere in those 2-second loops � I just�don�t). Dizzee Rascal�s doing a New Wave Tricky rap and King Geedorah�s got endless Ernie Isley loops.

Then it started to hit me recently: my friend and I are both music critics. Unlike your regular consumer or pop music enthusiast, there�s a rather questionable incentive on both sides to unearth a �real� reaction � to fashion an outlook that takes us out of the doldrums of having to come up with a fresh opinion of some sort. That�s not a criticism of his writing or my own � I�m saying that given the sheer volume of what�s out today, you need a reason to keep going. To keep thinking. In one sense, you build a series of boxes in which to file them way. But in another, you create your own world. He might disagree, but in the most basic sense, my friend is looking at the pop music scene almost like a cook or a chemist would, investigating how various ingredients�genres, artists and influences�interact when mixed � though he seems most excited when outcomes are unexpected, quite unscientific.

By comparison, I�m finding myself less interested in process, becoming one of those bearded, paunchy historian-types on Ken Burns documentaries who pride themselves on knowing everything about something � often something random. And nothing new measures up. It�s as if I�m almost trying to find The Next Great Masterpiece by reverse engineering the last one. And thus far, it doesn�t seem to work.

In any event, in the case of New V. Old, Good V. Great, no one seems to have emerged victorious. I�m expecting it�ll take a bit. There�s no Supreme Court for this sort of thing.