Right inside the door of the Virgin Megastore was a vast section of popular music labeled Rock/Soul, which ran the gamut from the Eagles to Al Green to Pere Ubu, with vast stretches of irony, allusiveness, camp, and boring stuff in between. This giant culture deposit was thick with association. Here were bands that were the pop cultural equivalent of the pencil marks parents put inside the closet door to show how much Junior has grown since last year. Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Neil Young, and the early '70s folk rockers, many of them on the Asylum label started by the young David Geffen, oozing that peaceful, easy feeling that was my first pop love, and that I listened to in my bedroom, a sullen and mopey twelve-year-old with the lights out. Punk rock rescued me from the Dan Fogelbergian miasma of folk rock: Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, then the Talking Heads, who made punk mainstream. Although I did not understand it at the time, the shift from California folk rock to British punk rock -- from the "fake" mainstream California sound to the "real" British underground punk sound -- was the decisive antithesis that would in one way or another determine all my subsequent pop musical experience. After Talking Heads came the bands like Duran Duran, the Cure, and the Cars, who marketed the "authentic" sound of punk into the "fake" New Wave and turned me off pop music in my early twenties. Then the big-hair bands of the '80s like Van Halen, Guns n' Roses, and the second coming of Aerosmith, which had kept me away from pop.

And then Nirvana, the band that changed everything. Before Nirvana my cultural experience had followed a more-or-less stately progress up-hierarchy from commercial culture to elite culture. But after I heard Nirvana, at the age of thirty-one, the stream of culture as it flowed through me slowed, stopped, and started moving in the other direction. After Nirvana, I began to pursue pop music with an energy I had never devoted to it as a teenager, when I was too worried about how my adult life was going to turn out to pay that much attention to pop. Pop became a way of hanging on to my teenage self, which had become a kind of touchstone for me as an adult. I got into hip-hop, and then the subgenres of hip-hop, like gangsta, and then techno, and now I was into the rich ground between techno and hip-hop -- acid, trance, jungle, big beat, ambient -- which seemed to be where the future of pop music lay. As a kid I thought that becoming an adult would mean putting away pop music and moving on to classical, or at least intelligent jazz. Cultural hierarchy was the ladder climbed toward a grown-up identity.

The day you found yourself putting on black tie and going to enjoy the opening night ofAidaas a subscriber to the Metropolitan Opera was the day you crossed an invisible threshold into adulthood. But for the last five years, pop music had provided me with peaks of lyrical and musical transcendence that I long ago stopped feeling at the opera and the symphony, those moments when the music, the meaning, and the moment all flowed together and filled you with the "oceanic feeling" that Freud said characterizes powerful aesthetic experience. A month earlier I had had an oceanic experience at a Chemical Brothers' show that my friend had taken me to hear at the Roxy. The Chemical Brothers were two young musician/programmers from the dance/Ecstasy subculture of Manchester, England, who had begun by deejaying in the clubs that flourished in the dark satanic mills left over from the nineteenth-century industrial revolution, and that were now dark satanic malls of late-twentieth-century street style. We waited in a long line outside the Roxy for an hour, freezing, while scalpers in big down parkas cruised by murmuring "whosellingticketswhosellingticketswhosellingtickets." As usual when we went gigging, we were just about the ol.