Another example of good (academic) writing

Carl Wilson's entry in the 33 1/3 series doesn't need me to do publicity for it, but reading it a few weeks ago (I'm doing work on taste and cultural capital for my dissertation), I was struck by one of his song readings. Wilson takes the Celine Dion album Let's Talk About Love as his subject, trying to figure out how he, a white, Canadian rock critic can make sense of the phenomenal popularity of Dion, someone who seems to break all of the rules for how one gains respect in the popular culture world. In the chapter where he (finally!) gets to looking at the music on the album itself, he pens a brilliant description of the George Martin-produced "middle eights" (Wilson's term, though they're actually 5 and 9 bars long, but who's counting?) of the track, "The Reason."

"The first break slips into a minor key and sets up a counter-rhythm in the cello section, ushering the song behind a curtain into the bed chamber: 'In the middle of the night,' Dion pants (echoed by a hoochie-mama chorus), 'I'm going down, 'cause I adore you!' That's right, going down. Lest you not believe your ears, there's a classic (stunned?) George Martin pause and drum fill before she lets out a stretching, postcoital sigh: 'I . . . want . . . to floor you.' And isn't 'floor' a fine euphemism there? The second time it all happens again but more so, adding whooping horns and spiraling into a shit-hot guitar solo by Robbie Macintosh of the Pretenders, and the cumulative effect is to invert the self-abasement that might irk you in the lyrics, ensuring that by what must be called the climax, the lady is firmly on top. A tune that starts with a girl kneeling supplicant before a man ends up as a rhapsody to womanly erotic power as the flux at the heart of the cosmos, and as long as you stop yourself from picturing Dion's real-life husband at any point, you have to admit she nails it in more senses than one. Finally, adult entertainment."

-Carl Wilson, Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, p. 145.