The song's too simple

In 1985, Dave Hickey published an essay titled “The Delicacy of Rock-and-Roll” in Art Issues magazine, and later included it in his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy. In the piece, Hickey, loosely and casually yet highly persuasively, takes down the so-called dichotomy between high and low art. It was a career-long game for him, to deflate pompous arguments.

In the essay, Hickey remembers a night at an underground film festival at University of Texas, in Austin, where he was a student in...