In this gnostic context, Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, first published in 2007, was a counterintuitive masterstroke.1 Wilson’s gamble—that even people who hate Céline Dion would be curious to read an entire book about why they hate her, and what that hatred might mean—paid off handsomely: Let’s Talk About Love was widely and enthusiastically reviewed outside the usual music-geek circles, Wilson appeared on NPR and The Colbert Report, and last year he was hired as Slate’s chief music critic, as plum a gig as a pop critic can expect in today’s collapsing media economy.
Crowning Wilson’s achievement is a “new and expanded edition” of Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste
just published by Bloomsbury; no other book in the 33⅓ series’ 11-year history has received the deluxe reissue treatment to date.
They can make London Calling the second one, since the original is impossible to get hold of…
