The ongoing debate …

… Visible Republic - bookforum.com / current issue. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

And decades after the much-hyped, much-distorted advent of barbarian postmodernism at the gates of the academy, Rosen's argument is probably the more relevant one. That popular art—film and comics and hip-hop—is no less worthy of sustained intellectual engagement than literature (which is at any rate an amorphous and contested category) is fairly well established by now, despite the fulminations of Harold Bloom. It's not that pop music doesn't deserve a Nobel Prize but that pop music doesn't need it. (And, uh, guys? John Ashbery is still alive.)