i beg to differ

Dallas Morning News music critic Thor Christensen is my target today, even though I generally like his stuff. (Don’t know the guy personally; he arrived after I’d left the paper.)

Anyway, in today’s story about Super Bowl halftime shows, he leads with: Super Bowl halftime shows have come a long way since the days when Hello, Dolly! star Carol Channing passed for boffo entertainment.

Excuse me. Some of us still consider Carol Channing boffo entertainment. A different sort of boffo from U2, which gets a big “right on” from Thor, but boffo nonetheless.

My definition of cool includes having a wide-open mind that acknowledges the value in artforms we might choose not to consume but in which we can recognize value.

I’m not a consumer of most hip-hop and rap, but I bow to its power and acknowledge its importance to the trajectory of pop music. I even recognize what is appealing about it without actually liking it. Like punk, it comes from that "LISTEN TO ME!" place in our hearts. But it's one-off for me. (I once had to interview a DJ of a local hip-hop station about his charity work, so I decided to listen to his station for a while, hoping to hear him at work. I never did hear him but after about an hour, I cried uncle and changed the station. For me, the pounding beats and bellowing had the effect of being hit on the head continually with a hard rubber mallet.)

Just because you might not throw on a Carol Channing album to get your party groove going doesn't means she isn't boffo. Carol Channing is a larger than life, fully committed entertainer who deserves respect.

Tell me this wouldn’t be a rockin’ halftime number.

And a deep cut for them who has time and inclination, this from a 1985 TV version of Alice in Wonderland. This is a boffo performance. Carol left it all there on the set.

Thor goes on to further offend me with this sentence: Back before he sank to self-parody, Prince was one of rock's most provocative artists.

I don’t buy the “self-parody” thing either. Prince has remained consistent through his career. He’s always been odd, he continues to be odd, he continues to be compelling. To my mind, that’s an awful lot of talent to dismiss so flippantly.

Of course, Thor is a critic, criticism is opinion and we just differ. (As my friend Russell Smith used to say to angry readers, “That’s my opinion. Are you saying I should have your opinion?”) Still, it seems to speak to the love-hate, push-pull many people have with creative talent. Sometimes we seem so angry at our stars, even those who earn their fame with authentic originality.