Still, Ms. Nicks remains an icon to a lot of women–a low-rent, flaky icon, to be sure, but an icon nonetheless. Sheryl Crow is an acolyte, and she has arrived to do a rehab job on Ms. Nicks along the lines of Bruce Springsteen's work with Gary U.S. Bonds. It is an effective and affectionate intervention, and the album often pulses with Ms. Nicks' old energy.

Ms. Crow produced about half of the songs on the new album, Trouble in Shangri-La (Warner); they're the ones with the clean, driving, rock 'n' roll flea-market sound. "Sorcerer," on which she also sings, starts with an acoustic guitar and drum sound that is pure 1970's Neil Young. "It's Only Love," which is one of Ms. Crow's own straightforward but effective slow songs–think "Strong Enough"–puts you in mind of Joni Mitchell.

The record is a sort of a sequel to the girls' club that started to form at Ms. Crow's 1999 concert in Central Park. Ms. Nicks made a guest appearance that night to sing "Gold Dust Woman." The Dixie Chicks' Natalie Maines showed up, too, and on Ms. Nicks' new record she sings a duet on a country number called "Too Far From Texas," which also has a good, spare Crow production. Macy Gray and Sarah McLachlan also appear, though their vocals are mixed almost too low to make out.

And what does Ms. Nicks herself bring to this little slumber party of a record? Her voice is holding up fine, and her phrasing is of the old school, rough and weary and slurred.

Ms. Nicks' lyrics, though, are altogether too airy. It appears that she has traded the rock 'n' roll high wire for a rich lady's life on the road. There are a lot of references to air travel. "There's a plane, it's headed for London," she sings on one song. "Paris to Rome, London to Paris / Always goodbye, I nearly couldn't bear it," she sings on another, missing a leg of the journey for a forced rhyme.

You also get the trademark candlelight-and-gauze spooky atmosphere. And there are acres of standard-issue Lite-FM love-and-longing songs, "I Miss You" and "Love Is" among them. This latter stuff, by far the weakest, could well produce a radio hit.

The title track was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial and seems another attempt to mythologize the California experience. It's a strong song, with a desperate quality and rock kick not far from "Edge of Seventeen" or "Stand Back." At the same time, though, it's a little hard to take the "Hotel California" subject matter entirely seriously anymore.

Ms. Nicks thanks a lot of people in the liner notes, including her Pilates trainer. The seventh set of "special thanks" goes out to Tom Petty, who declined to write a song for her when Ms. Nicks was feeling lousy. (Recall that it was Mr. Petty's "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around" that propelled Ms. Nicks' first solo album, 1981's Bella Donna , off the shelves.) Mr. Petty provided Ms. Nicks, she writes, with "an inspirational lecture over dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Phoenix, April 24th, 1995." He told her to write her own damn songs.

There is so much to love about this story, not least the very notion of a rock-star summit at a Ritz-Carlton. (The Chelsea Hotel, it ain't.) Hats off, too, to the self-regard that would note and reproduce the precise date of a meal.

The dinner was a turning point for Ms. Nicks. She not only cranked out a bunch of songs for this record, but also wrote some remarkably literal lyrics about her conversation with Mr. Petty. "Can you write this for me?" she sings on "That Made Me Stronger." She continues: "He says no, you write your songs yourself." It's odd, then, given her decision to put Mr. Petty's admonition in the tune's very refrain, that the music that accompanies her lyrics was composed not by Ms. Nicks, but by a couple of hired hands. The trouble in Shangri-La, it seems, is that so much of the experience depends on whether the help is any good.

–Adam Liptak

Autechre: Cold Chaos

In the years since they struck up a working relationship with Tortoise, Autechre have become a sort of gateway drug for rock fans intrigued by electronic music's progressive promise but suspicious of its origins on the dance floor. The British duo of Sean Booth and Rob Brown basically wrote the operating manual for "intelligent dance music," or I.D.M., a genre that approaches all that's alluring about post-human techno sheen without paying much attention to its disco-indebted implications.

Autechre's clinical ways have made relative stars of Messrs. Booth and Brown, who are set to play a two-night stint at Bowery Ballroom on May 4 and 5. But it has also left them in something of a bind.

For starters, their weighty influence threatens to become a burden, with an entire cottage industry of Autechre-like deconstructionists upping electronica's already-high-stakes ante. The now-sprawling I.D.M. scene has even spawned its own reactionary wing, led by Kid 606 and a slew of laptop-crunching nihilists who have made a show of lampooning the movement's humorless, monastically hip-hop-like posturing.

But more pressing than the infighting is the fact that a lot of electronic music's best ideas now are being played out on the pop landscape. Dance-wise, it's all about two-step garage and French house these days, with style-squishing garage producers and groups like Daft Punk rubbing the bellies of both giddy teenagers and heady techno theorists. Then, of course, there's the omnipresent Radiohead, whose Kid A took Autechre's icy template and turned it into actual songs.

It may seem plodding to survey the competition in such detail, but context is everything in electronic music. In a world where sociology-obsessed followers speak earnestly about the "viral spread" of specific drum patterns, every record is a response to its surroundings.

Autechre's response to their environment on Confield (Warp) was to pull their ideological hair shirt even tighter. The album is an exercise in brash minimalism, with brittle beats fractured in all kinds of head-twisting ways. That's basically par for the course for Autechre. But the effect this time out is more menacing, more claustrophobically crunched, than ever before.

The opening (and typically weirdly titled) track, "VI Scose Poise," is morbidly ambient–all minor-key synth sighs and metallic shimmer. It's pretty great, too, for the way it summons overwrought thoughts of rusted buoys and ghost ships bobbing in the Sea of Tranquillity. From there, things get much more harsh. With newly naturalistic drum sounds and a viscerally decayed sonic palette, Mr. Booth and Mr. Brown beat the idea of conditioned rhythmic response into remission. It works well on tracks such as "Pen Expers," when Autechre show off their brilliant ability to layer seven or eight different beat lines into densely percolating overdrive. But other tracks, such as "Cfern," are almost comically anti-rhythmic, with punishing bass kicks and singed snare taps that serve only to show the ham-fisted contortions Autechre sometimes go through to fight the constraints of structure.

Confield is pretty much split between nuanced beat science and directionless, browbeating chaos. At its best, tracks such as "Eidetic Casein" and "Uviol" add up to lots more than their deliberately frayed parts. But ultimately, Autechre's seemingly self-conscious zero-sum game just doesn't bring enough to the table to feed electronic music's endless craving for new ideas.

–Andy Battaglia

Here's to Horn

With her latest album, You're My Thrill (Verve), Shirley Horn reaps the benefits of a strict, decades-long regimen of smoking, drinking and watching TV soap operas. When the Washington, D.C., singer and pianist first broke in the early 60's with albums like Embers and Ashes and Travelin' Light , she had a knack for swinging with as little audible effort as possible. When, after 20 years of near-obscurity, Verve miraculously made her a star in the late 80's, her voice had shrunk to perfectly meet the demands of what had always been a minimalist conception.

Even the difference between the new album, a collaboration with the arranger Johnny Mandel, and 1991's Here's to Life (Verve), the fruit of her first meeting with Mr. Mandel, is instructive. In Here's to Life , Ms. Horn's voice sits halfway between breathy insouciance and mortal gravitas; her intonation and phrasing are so precisely controlled you're hardly aware how limited her vocal range really is. Mr. Mandel, who has been known to follow the grail of beauty to the edge of kitsch, throws recklessly lush strings at her, and still he can't stop her.

You're My Thrill looks to be a similar affair. Ms. Horn's bracingly hip, boppish piano is again empathetically backed up by her regulars, Charles Ables on bass and Steve Williams on drums; this core trio is fleshed out on about half the tracks by the orchestral stylings of the Maestro of Malibu, Mr. Mandel. But in the intervening years, Ms. Horn's voice has lost roundness and taken on a drier, stuffier timbre. When she sings another "Here's to Life"-style optimistic anthem, such as "The Best Is Yet to Come," the effect is quite a bit different, as if she were singing from a bar stool or a hospital bed, no longer expecting to be taken literally but only appreciated for the severe perfection of her work.

To his credit, Mr. Mandel hears all this and backs off. On "All Night Long," his cool deployment of the lower woodwinds is closer to Gil Evans than the cocktail-party classical strings he favored on the earlier album.

If, on the up-tempo tunes, the contrast between the actress and the role can be jarring (in an interesting way), Ms. Horn's voice is still wonderfully suited to the romantic ballad. Indeed, on a tune like "Solitary Moon"–"Once again you share my pillow / making love to me / tenderly"–she hits a note of wistful languor that is almost uncomfortably intimate, even though there's not a shred of cabaret emotionalism in her work. Everything is dreamy, unruffled, a little sad. On "My Heart Stood Still," she's so deeply and statically in the moment that you wonder if she'll ever get out of it. With You're My Thrill , Shirley Horn has created something like an avant-garde trance music for disillusioned, buttoned-down grown-ups.

–Joseph Hooper

Veloso X 2

On April 10, a knot of students with chunky Williamsburg-issue glasses leafed through copies of Drinking With Bukowski close to the red-draped stage at Tonic. By the bar, a blow-dried blonde responded to the advances of a dapper Italian man. "I'm such a New Yorker now, I let my driver's license expire!" she said. The kids and the adults were waiting for Moreno Veloso, Caetano's son and the new new thing in Brazilian music, but few in the audience seemed to have a handle on the artist who was about to perform. The Italian man was one of the exceptions. "His father, he's like an amazing poet, a poet of music," he could be heard explaining to the blonde. "But Moreno, he's doing his own thing. He's not just riding off his father's name."

Moreno Veloso + 2–Alexandre Kassin and Domenico Lancellotti are the two musicians on the other side of the plus sign–just released Music Typewriter (Hannibal), an album that rides through the history of modern Brazilian music and beyond, mixing the classic rhythms of samba and bossa nova with retro-mod electronic sounds, funky bass, and some innovative and insistent percussion (not to mention the occasional whale song). Such a quirky mélange results in music that is simultaneously low-key and stimulating. The more energetic tracks, like "Rio Longe" or the exuberant "Arrivederci," sound like nighttime dancing by a Brazilian beach, while the mellow melancholy of "So Vendo Que Beleza" evokes chaise longues and long, dark gazes.

When Moreno Veloso + 2 get going, Music Typewriter is engagingly infectious, though a few of the songs–particularly "O Livro & O Beijo"–indulge too long in soporific stoner jams.

In concert, the three Brazilians were full of enthusiasm and ready to experiment. Wearing soccer jerseys because "it's the time of the football," they charmed the indifferent audience. They also revealed how much their music depends on a proper sound system for coherence. When Mr. Veloso's delicately androgynous vocals and guitar are properly layered with Mr. Kassin's bass and Mr. Lancellotti's percussion (at one point during the concert, he rubbed two sheets of sandpaper together for effect), the elements blend to produce a complex but seamless sound. But whether Tonic's stage was too small or Mr. Veloso's sound person was having a bad night, it often felt that the three men where having a difficult time making their individual contributions cohere into a single song. When it did work, though, it worked –enthralling listeners and inciting even the more uptight girls in the audience, the blonde among them, to sway and bob their heads to the music.

One of the more successful numbers was "Sou Seu Sabia," a gentle bossa which Caetano Veloso plays on his new album, Noites do Norte . Moreno makes an appearance on his father's album (and vice versa), and though he may not be "riding off his father's name," Mr. Veloso's taste for fusion and experiment is doubtless inherited.

Caetano Veloso was a founder of Tropicalismo, the Bahian mixture of traditional music, rock, jazz and local pop that shot him to fame in the 60's. But 35 years after his explosive debut, he remains as innovative and as relevant as ever. His new album, Noites do Norte (Atlantic/Nonesuch), weaves references to rock ("Rock 'n' Raul"), movies ("Michelangelo Antonioni"), traditional bossas ("Tempestades Solares") and Brazil's history of slavery ("13 de Maio") into a seamless slam-dunk of an album. Mr. Veloso's soft sand voice mixes with heavily emphasized drums, rare trumpet calls and varied, unusual song structures to produce an enthralling album which is at once easily pleasant and compellingly complex. This album may be the apotheosis of Mr. Veloso's explorations in style. It is certainly encouraging for his son's fans. If Moreno and his band manage to realize their concepts as successfully as Caetano does his, they too may one day inspire a Veloso revolution.

–Alicia Brownell

Al Gore's inner Paris Hilton was exposed on Dec. 15 by the New York Daily News, which published a hypish cover story entitled "AL GORE-PARTY ANIMAL."

Just about everyone who saw the accompanying two-page photo spread of the pit-stained Presidential runner-up empathized with the fallen candidate's need to blow off some post-election steam. Mr. Gore was captured partying hearty at his home on the night of his election defeat in the company of a gaggle of well-lubricated aides, semi-celebrities and aging rockers including Mr. Popper, Jon Bon Jovi and Tom Petty.

But some staffers inside the Vice President's campaign were angry about the photos, feeling their publication violated the spirit of a private evening. Now, a number are pointing the finger at an associate of a specific attendee: Mr. Petty.

A highly-placed Gore family source said that the consensus among the Vice President's staff is that the Daily News photographs were taken and provided to the paper by "a Tom Petty groupie." Mr. Petty brought a small entourage of people to the party, the source said, several of whom were unknown to the campaign staff. One of those people is suspected by Mr. Gore's staff to be the culprit, the source said. After the Daily News story came out, the staff contacted Mr. Petty's manager in order to see if they knew anything about it.

"Tom Petty's been really good to the campaign," the source said. "We weren't mad. We just wanted to make sure that whoever sold them wouldn't sell any more to the papers."

Mr. Petty's manager was on vacation and unreachable, but the rock star's publicist, Mitch Schneider, flatly denied any link between his client and the Daily News splash. "The photos sold to the NY Daily News absolutely did not come from anyone associated with Tom Petty," Mr. Schneider wrote in an e-mail to Off the Record.

For its part, the Daily News isn't saying where the photos came from. Mitchell Fink, the News columnist who wrote the article which accompanied the "Party Animal" spread, declined to give up the identity of his Deep Lens. "I have no response to that," Mr. Fink said when asked if the photos came from a colleague of Mr. Petty's. "I don't think that's true at all. I have no idea who that person [the photographer] went with."

Mr. Fink, who said his source was never asked to stop taking photographs at the party, added that he hadn't heard any complaints from the Vice President's staff. "They should be thrilled," Mr. Fink said. "I think if this story and these pictures ran six or seven weeks ago, he would have been elected."

Working for the mercurial Jann Wenner involves certain complications-keeping your desk tidy is just one of them-but serving as editor in chief of Men's Journal has long been one of the most complicated positions in Mr. Wenner's volatile media encampment.

Our latest episode: On Dec. 18, one week before Christmas Day, beaten-down Men's Journal editor Mark Bryant-frustrated by Mr. Wenner's resistance to the changes he wanted to make at the magazine-resigned after barely a year on the job. Mr. Wenner responded by tapping Sid Evans, 31, a former Men's Journal senior editor who, ironically, had fled to GQ after getting passed over in favor of Mr. Bryant the year before. Mr. Evans becomes the fourth editor in the magazine's eight-year life.

Just another day in Wennerworld.

Sources at Wenner Media said that Mr. Bryant, a once-hot property who had won a string of National Magazine Awards as the editor of Outside, had been unhappy at his post for some time. Lured to Mr. Wenner's cave in November 1999 after leaving Outside to develop his own magazine, Mr. Bryant thought his charge was to remake Men's Journal into a magazine with a broader audience than kayakers and young men who think trekking in Bhutan is a cool way to spend a vacation. He told any media scribe who would listen that he wanted to develop a more general-interest magazine that could compete against GQ and Esquire.

But that was the same imposing rock that both of Mr. Bryant's predecessors had hoped to climb-only to eventually be led down the mountain by Mr. Wenner to the less ambitious short hills of kayaks, compasses and backpacks. Men's Journal's founding editor, John Rasmus, and his successor, Terry McDonell (now running Us Weekly), both had ambitious plans of taking on the big, perfume-y competition, but wound up being prodded by the boss to stick to the tried-and-true formula of Powerbar-fueled adventure articles and gear 'n' gadgetry reviews.

At other times, however, Mr. Wenner would appear torn, unable to truly articulate what he wanted the magazine to be. Sources said he would warm to the idea of Men's Journal taking on the glitzier men's magazines with celebrity covers and top-shelf features, but he would always wind up pushing his editors to revert to his original, crunchier vision. Indeed, sources at the magazine said Mr. Wenner had been increasingly meddling in Men's Journal, pushing for a return to the "adventurous lifestyle" shtick, a maneuver that eventually led Mr. Bryant to head for the door.

Mr. Bryant did not deny the conflict. "It just became increasingly clear to me that my vision for the magazine-the vision that I thought I'd been hired to execute-was not ultimately in sync with Jann's vision," Mr. Bryant said. "Jann's the boss and life is short."

Yes, Jann's the boss, and as always, Mr. Wenner won the battle. "Jann's strategy sounds familiar to me," said Mr. Rasmus, who left the magazine unhappily in 1997 and is currently editing National Geographic Adventure. "It's no reflection on Mark. His reputation is as good as it gets."

But others worried that the fickle Mr. Wenner would continue to have two ideas of what he wants Men's Journal to be-a management schizophrenia that would drive any editor to distraction. "I have no doubt that Jann gave Mark the mandate to compete with Esquire and GQ," said one staffer. "And if we're going back to the old Men's Journal, it's with Jann's blessing, too."

Mr. Evans, the new editor, didn't return Off the Record's calls for comment. But Men's Journal publisher Rob Gregory downplayed any radical repositioning of the magazine in the wake of Mr. Bryant's departure. He did acknowledge, however, that giving the magazine a celebrity angle by putting George Clooney on the cover this past July hadn't worked. "George Clooney sure looked good on paper," Mr. Gregory said. "The star of The Perfect Storm; every guy wants to be George Clooney, every girl wants to date him; but we discovered it didn't sell that well." (Although Harrison Ford, who was on the September 1999 cover, did sell well, he said. Go figure.)

Despite all the turbulence at the top of its masthead, Mr. Gregory insisted that Men's Journal has never strayed too far from the "adventurous lifestyle" focus.

"It's like we're a really nice Porsche going down the road," he said, "and maybe we've weaved over to one side of the road a little bit and maybe we've weaved over to the other side of the road a little bit, and now we're going to bring the Porsche back to the center of the road.

"It's still Men's Journal," Mr. Gregory continued. "But to stay in the automotive metaphor, we're gonna take it up to 100 miles per hour now."

So, for God's sake, Sid Evans, fasten your seatbelt. That's Jann Wenner at the wheel.

The OTR guide to the 2000 media holiday party season. New York Post-Editor Xana Antunes stops nibbling on vegetable sticks when Supreme Court election ruling rolls in. Those left behind decide between the Sports Illustrated after-after-party at Studio 54 and table dances at Scores.

GQ-Staff gets down to Lenny Kravitz at Lotus. Editor Art Cooper opts not to dance.

Wenner Media-Us Weekly writer Marcus Baram goes Ronson for the evening, spinning ditties for fellow Ussies, Men's Journalistas and Rolling Stoners. Jann Wenner overheard requesting the techno group Underworld.

Time Out New York-In "Secret Snowflake" ritual-a p.c. version of Secret Santa, it turns out-editor in chief Cyndi Stivers receives a monkey finger puppet, which she wags at people all night long at Chelsea's Flute.

Esquire-Belly dancers in the office.

The New Yorker-After a spate of dancing at Le Max, the staff flees to pound at the Lower East Side dive Parkside Lounge.

New York-Unable to find like-minded kin at the monstrous pan-Primedia holiday party at the Marriott, staffers disperse to other media parties; a large contingent winds up at the Observer bash at the Century Club, where plenty of Macallan is consumed.

Glamour-Staff gathers for karaoke at Moomba; art director Henry Connell dons a blond wig for rousing rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Rescue Me."

Harper's Bazaar-Large platters of meat at The Apartment go untouched.

Allure-Gag gift Secret Santa swap at Chinoiserie: vibrators, kinky underwear. Editor Linda Wells gives a copy of The Devil in Miss Jones to publicity director Marie Jones; Sasha Charnin Morrison gets a Barbra Streisand drag queen.

Talk-Chinoiserie swept clear of Allure editorial assistants for Tina Brown's scheduled 8 p.m. arrival. No Ben, Matt or Gwynnie; salmon soba noodles suffice.

So why doesn't he get the props he deserves? I think it has something to do with the intellectual bankruptcy of so much pop-culture criticism, which is why I want to begin my column celebrating Tom Petty's underappreciated genius by celebrating the soon-to-be-appreciated genius of another Tom, Thomas Frank, whose new book One Market Under God is just about the smartest work of cultural criticism I've read in years. A brilliant, bracing slice-and-dice job on the pop culture of the New Economy, the smug gasbag rhetoric of savants like that awful, ranting shill Tom Peters (promoter of the concept of "Brand You," the ethos of nonstop self-promotion), cosmic Pollyanna George Gilder and all the other clueless Candides–and their enablers in academic culture, the "cultural studies" intellectuals.

What a profound relief to see someone as smart as Mr. Frank take them on and take them apart. I found myself dog-earing so many pages of the galley (the book's due in October from Doubleday) that I turned it into one big dog ear, rendering each individual dog ear useless.

Democracy is the worst system in the world, Churchill once famously remarked, except for all the others. But the fact that it's a better system than collectivism doesn't make the market a benevolent system.

Yet the ruling ideology of the market worshipers Mr. Frank so brilliantly anatomizes has it that the market is not under God, the market is God. Not something whose inequities and depredations should cause concern, not something we need to protect the weak and unfortunate from. No, just throw them off the sled if they can't carry their weight in the mighty mission of humanity: to raise stock prices.

The sheer intelligence of Mr. Frank's close reading of the promotional rhetoric of Internet globalization ideology is dazzling, but my favorite two chapters are the ones that expose the interpenetration of the hot new cult of advertising "intellectuals," the "account planners" and the tin-eared drones of "cultural studies" in academia. The ones who claim to be engaged in radical politics but, as Mr. Frank demonstrates, serve as inadvertent cheerleaders for "market populism." Pretending that watching TV and fetishizing the sex lives of Star Trek characters are political acts of "contestation" and "resistance."

"Studying fashion magazines or communities of fans was the real revolutionary stuff," Mr. Frank observes of the "cult-studs" with salutary contempt. "The first step in what would become an irresistible assault on the powers that be … cult-studs enthusiastically declar[ed] their firm intention to go on subverting, to continue 'fighting the power' by celebrating the counter hegemonic messages of TV sitcoms."

But "for all its generalized hostility to business and frequent discussions of 'late capital' cultural studies failed almost completely to produce close analyses of the daily life of business." Failed to notice as well how "the official narratives of the American business community of the nineties … embraced many of the same concerns of the cult-studs … their tendency to find 'elitism' lurking behind any critique of mass culture and their pious esteem for audience agency."

It's just a brilliant analysis whose sophistication and wit is worthy of Mencken or Dwight Macdonald, and it confirms my feeling that–with very few exceptions–whether they profess to love it or hate it, academics always get pop culture wrong . They no longer live it, if they ever did. But rather–despite their horror of "commodification"–they commodify it to advance their careers. A genius like Tom Petty just flies below their radar.

I recently came across an egregious example of this, a painfully earnest cult-studs tome on Elvis fans. The author strenuously attempted to demonstrate her empathy for Elvis fans, constantly patting herself on the back for her bond with the little people, unable to conceal her condescension, and then making the stunning admission that she never much liked and clearly didn't "get" Elvis' music. As if the content of the little people's obsession were irrelevant, it could have been flying saucers or Nazi memorabilia. It was just so endearing that the little people opted out of the evil capitalist hegemony with their Elvis shrines. So revolutionary!

Elvis actually can serve as a transition to Tom Petty. I'd been reading Tom Frank's book while thinking about a Tom Petty column when I happened to drop in at The Oxford American 's party, at KGB, for their annual Southern Music issue. An issue that happens to feature a terrific interview with Tom Petty by Holly George-Warren.

It is, of course, ingeniously appropriate to appropriate Tom Petty as a Southern Musician. Sure, he's best known as a southern Californian rather than a Southerner. (The video for "Free Falling" may forever be the signature image of dazed Valley anomie.) But the guy is from Gainesville, his origins are in the boiled-peanut bleakness of the Florida panhandle. And the interview reveals that he received his initiation into pop music from the ultimate (white) Southern Musician, Elvis!

Tom Petty was 11 years old when relatives took him to visit the set of an Elvis movie ( Follow that Dream , too perfect!). He recalls it as a dreamlike moment, almost a mystic initiation. He was standing behind a chain-link fence and suddenly heard his aunt say, "' That's Elvis!'" And it really was a semi religious experience. I mean he glowed to me.… He said 'hi,' and then went in his trailer.…" Young Petty sees others getting the King to sign his records. "And I was like, 'Damn, if I had an Elvis record, I could get an autograph.' So when we went home I was a changed person. I set out finding Elvis records. That was how I fell in love with rock 'n' roll records … I always liked radio, but at that point I became consumed with it. At night we could get WLS [in Chicago]. There you got to hear all that great R&B ... I became so obsessed … I had no other interests than that."

It's almost a Harry Potter moment, isn't it? A young apprentice wizard initiated by the Wizard King. Of course, you can be initiated into all sorts of stupid things–not all obsessions are equal. But Tom Petty's obsession with the pop song has produced works of pure wizardry and wonder. He's a natural at it, but he's also a true scholar, a sophisticate, a genuine cult-stud, someone who understands the difference between a song as poem, as words on a page, and the three-dimensional sonic entity , for want of a better word, the living being it's endowed with by chords and harmonies.

Those who analyze Dylan's words, for instance, rarely give more than a nod, if that, to Dylan's chords . Of course, you can go too far in that direction. Once, in an interview, Dylan stunned me by talking about the emotional significance of certain chords. D-minor, he told me, was "the chord of regret." Of course, he could have been putting me on. In the immortal mockumentary, Spinal Tap , released a few years after my Dylan interview came out, we have Nigel musing about his "art" and telling us "D-minor is the chord of sadness." To be gently mocked by Spinal Tap is true pop culture immortality.

Still, a number of actual musicians have told me they felt there was truth in Dylan's D-minor remark. In the emotional specificity of chords. This is not to say that Tom Petty's words need to take second place to anyone's. He's the master of the beautiful, understated, cryptic, gnomic pop-song utterance. But he's also the master of the harmonic alchemy of sound and sense in song. But enough of these generalities; the best way to focus on Tom Petty's greatness is to talk about the individual songs. And maybe the best way to talk about the songs is to force myself to choose my Top 10 Tom Petty Songs and defend my hierarchy. Not an academic critique, but a fan's notes.

1) "Free Falling" / "Learning to Fly." It's not a cop-out for me to choose these two together. In fact, if I had to narrow it down to one it might be "American Girl" or "Louisiana Rain." But there's just an amazing, fortuitous harmonic convergence on the Greatest Hits compilation that has "Free Falling" followed directly by "Learning to Fly," a clear indication (from Tom Petty himself?) that the two songs ought to be considered as two sides of the same coin. They are, metaphorically, the Old and the New Testament of Tom Petty visionary anthems. One about a Fall, the second one about a Rise–although "Learning to Fly" promises one further, final fall:

Learning to fly

But I ain't got wings

Coming down is the hardest thing. …

He ain't got wings. He ain't no angel but he writes like one. Sometimes he writes about them: His choiring riffs are always inquiring, you might say, into the realm of angelic ecstasy, realms evoked in dreamy images of floating, flying, free falling, driving, cruising. Sustained suspended gliding across the landscape. The kind of flying you do in dreams. What's impressive about "Free Falling" is the way it's true blue to its local color: some Valley dude floating away from his Valley girl. ("I wanna glide down over Mulholland.") And the cryptic incantation of "Free falling, yeah I'm free falling" evokes a sense of the human condition caught between the two realms of heaven and earth. He is the poet of suspension, of suspended animation, of suspended examination. He's free falling like the original fallen angel, the morning star, Lucifer, who–cast out in the opening of Paradise Lost –fell "nine times the space that measures night and day." "Free Falling" is Tom Petty's Paradise Lost in the Valley, "Learning to Fly" his Divine Comedy .

2) "Louisiana Rain." Again it could have been "American Girl," but the edge goes to "Louisiana Rain" because, for some unaccountable reason, it was left off the Greatest Hits album. In a way, it's another ecstatic falling song. Only here it's the rain that's "falling like tears." This is one of the all-time great sad-but-hopeful breakup songs. It's about soaking in the past, soaking in it to the skin, but a soaking that turns to a cleansing. The purgative rinse cycle of emotion. Going on the lam, as the singer does, from San Diego to South Carolina and finally to Baton Rouge, being on the lam gets you redeemed, washed in the blood of the lam, you might say.

3) "American Girl." One of the great rock 'n' roll songs of all time and it's only his fourth best! It cries out to be played up against an equally great classic, David Bowie's "Young Americans." I can't better the way Holly George-Warren describes its effect on her, in The Oxford American , as her youthful initiating experience of Tom Petty: "I guess you can say it was my theme song: its jangling metallic guitar riff perfect for pogoing, and the urgent vocals laced with a kind of southern English accent insisting that 'there was a little more to life somewhere else.'"

Urgent is the perfect word for "American Girl." Urgency is there in the best of Tom Petty's songs: a lovely desperation. What's beautiful about "American Girl" is its empathy. Unlike Bowie, who stands apart, affectionately mocking his "Young Americans," you feel that in some way Tom Petty knows that we are–all Americans are–American girls, "raised on promises." A desperate, hopeful innocence. "She was an American girl," he sings. But he's an American girl, too.

4) "Walls." A lesser-known masterpiece, not on the Greatest Hits compilation. It appears on the all-Petty soundtrack of the likable Ed Burns film She's the One . It's haunting, lovely and cryptic. It's not clear who's inside, who's outside or whose walls will come falling down: the singer or the girl with "a heart so big / It could crush this town"–or maybe it's the same wall, the one within. Again there's that urgency: "I can't hold out forever / Even walls fall down." This song just kills me; it's the pure perfection of the jangling Beatles-Byrds guitar riff; it's the heart-and-soul keyboards recapitulating rock laments all the way back to doo wop.

5) "Straight into Darkness." Again an unaccountable omission from Greatest Hits , this is perhaps Tom Petty's darkest, most chilling vision. It's about a woman, a relationship that went "straight into darkness," but it's about the way we all eventually go "straight into darkness, straight into night." Straight into death.

6) "Here Comes My Girl." The angelic chiming says it all. A rare song that captures the feeling of ecstatic anticipation . That speaks to the teenager in love within us all that never (alas) dies.

7) "The Waiting." Again anticipation, but this time more agonized, more informed by the experience of loss. Waiting for the return of something that is probably gone forever.

8) "Refugee." It's not at all designed to be a political song, it's more about emotional exile. The way we all are, in some way, if not physical, then emotional refugees. Exiled from a lost homeland, a lost paradise. But the song can't help, in the inescapable other context of "refugee," become political in the best, most powerful way: from the inside out.

9) "Southern Accents." It's his anthem but it's not on Greatest Hits . (Why?) In the Oxford American interview, Petty says that Johnny Cash once told him it was such a perfect song it ought to replace "Dixie," that idiot, racist Confederate anthem. Amen.

10) "I Won't Back Down" / "Billy the Kid." Two separate songs (I'll admit I'm squeezing them together to include more than 10 in the Top 10). "I Won't Back Down": a gritty, fight-back, underdog- against-all-odds anthem. And you have to include "Billy the Kid" (from Echo, his latest) as a kind of sequel to "I Won't Back Down" for that knock-down, drag-out chorus riff: "I went down hard / Like Billy the Kid / I went down hard / But I'll get up again." Fall and rise, then rise and fall. Free falling, heart rising.

11) Special bonus selection: "Even the Losers." Once again the keynote of Tom Petty anthems, dreamy defiance: "Even the losers / Get lucky some time / Even the losers / [Insanely angelic chiming chord run] Show a little bit of pride.…" Once again he's at one with the emotional refugees, who've been "kicked around some," been down hard.

Thinking about "Even the Losers," I recalled something the great Murray Kempton once said to me about "losing-side consciousness." He was talking about his own background, as a descendant of defeated Confederates, how it somehow prompted him to become a civil rights activist in the dangerous 30's. When there were no victories in sight. How it explained the Miranda decision: "Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black came from the only county in Alabama that stood by the Union. Earl Warren's father was a railroad striker in the Debs strike who was blacklisted and spent two years in [jail]."

How the historian Kempton loved best was Clarendon, the 17th-century writer who was always on the losing side in the shifting politics of the English Civil War. How being on the losing side, in the loser's locker room of history, can inculcate a tragic sense of life, an identification with the unfortunate.

I think a kind of losing-side consciousness is responsible for the passion in Tom Frank's analysis of New Economy rhetoric: his passionate disgust at the triumphalism of the smug winners, his passionate identification with the losers and the left-out–all those left out of the party by the exigencies of market-worshipping globalization.

Even the losers get lucky some time, and in Tom Petty and Tom Frank, the beautiful losers in life have found two brilliant champions.

Ron Rosenbaum's new collection of non-fiction, The Secret Parts of Fortune (including two dozen Observer columns), has just been published by Random House.

And I hope I'll have enough room left to get around to that, after my special appeal to Mr. Murray, who is himself, it occurs to me, like Mr. Petty, an underappreciated savant. That's the point of my appeal to Mr. Murray: recognition, the right kind of recognition, the kind he deserves, the kind two wonderfully imaginative, enthusiastic, charming and devoted women are trying to give him. The kind he has so far inexplicably chosen not to acknowledge.

Dear Mr. Bill Murray:

Please don't stiff my friends Chris and Nancy. I'm speaking of Christine Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, the two founders and directors of the Newport International Film Festival who have been courting you, counting on you to show up at the Bill Murray Retrospective they're staging in your honor at the Newport Film Festival, which runs from June 1 to June 6 at that beautiful resort. Actually, they're not calling it a Bill Murray Retrospective , they're calling it a Bill Murray Introspective , as I am sure you know from the catalogue they sent you (along with the highly prized Emil Verban baseball card which Chris Schomer went to the trouble of snagging from an E-Bay auction on the Internet and sending along to you because she knows the sentimental affection and iconic significance with which you have endowed the famously plodding but consistent Chicago Cubs second baseman from the 40's. Talk about devotion!).

Not Retrospective but Introspective, because "His work deserves more than a Retrospective," as they write in their catalogue, "it deserves a look inward. The Bill Murray Introspective offers a contemplation of Murray's singular capacity for conjuring rich convincing inner lives for his characters. Watch Caddyshack again with an eye to just how much Carl [the groundskeeper] communicates with a blank stare. Read the backstory etched into [Ernie McCracken–Mr. Murray's ecstatically vain bowling champ character] in Kingpin . Understand, somehow, without any explanation, the root of the emotion in so many of his lines in Rushmore ."

And these two women, Chris and Nancy, are not pushovers for fame and name, for mere star power. They're both smart and discriminating and the festival they put on is a highly impressive, hugely enjoyable and professionally run event. I served as a juror on their feature film panel last year and they had the city of Newport, a place I once dismissed as a snotty, standoffish burg, throwing open its fabulous mansions to lavish hospitality on the filmmakers and attendees. Their carefully crafted catalogue descriptions of your work are brilliant, compressed appreciations; the clip reel of your career which their program director Maude Chilton put together is a smash.

They've even scheduled a Bill Murray golf tournament and book signing (if you show up to sign, of course–hey, why not call Chris and Nancy right now and give them the confirmation they've been wishing for so devoutly as the clock ticks down toward the festival opening?). A book-signing for your new opus from Doubleday called Cinderella Story: My Life in Golf , a book which I've come to love despite the fact I've never before been able to stand golf or anything connected with it. Because it's not so much about golf as about life: Bill Murray riffing on Life, on his life (I loved the riff on trying to get cast as Joseph in his grade school nativity pageant). "The daddy of all roles: Joseph … the complexity, the layers … How secure was this guy? Unfazed by Nazarene gossip …") Bill Murray riffing on his goofily eccentric fusion of Westernized Eastern philosophy and show-biz shtick. Bill Murray making a startling revelation about the origin of his crazy Zen-slacker take on things: Towering over the golf course in Wilmette, Ill. where he first caddied was a Bahai temple, the very center of the Bahai faith in the West, set down in Bill Murray's hometown. Why? Because, Bill Murray tells us, his hometown is the obverse navel of the earth in the Bahai faith, a point directly opposite the founding temple of the Bahai sect in Persia. How wild is that?

Now Bahai is a unique religion in that it professes to be a fusion of all religions Eastern and Western, an inclusive spiritual communion that prompts some genuinely heartfelt remarks from the usually mock-everything Mr. Murray: "The faith believes in the unity of all religions, the nine major ones celebrated in the nine sides of the temple. Bahais are the victim of genocide in Persia. Where's the logic? Choose no favorites; believe all faiths are equal in God's eyes. O.K., prepare to die for that belief."

All of which tends to confirm the kind of speculation I indulged in a couple years ago in these pages in a column titled "Bill Murray: Secret Zen Master" [Aug. 12, 1996]. An essay in which I tried to make a case that Bill Murray has been seriously underappreciated, that beneath the goofy deadpan mock sincerity of his usual comic persona there is an intriguing and persistent subtext of cosmic/comic spirituality. It's an essay (reprinted in the Bill Murray Introspective Catalogue of the Newport Film Festival) which argues that, "beneath the spectacularly smarmy, self-subvertingly parodistic insincerity of Bill Murray's signature characters … there's something More going on … beneath the mugging, beneath the deadpan insincerity–the numinous shadow of something Unspoken, which the insincerity is mutely gesturing at–the obverse of it [just as the Bahai temple is the obverse of Wilmette, Ill.], a kind of sublime godlike composure, an almost Buddhalike serenity."

I argued that your "signature characters like the schlockmeister lounge singer you created on Saturday Night Live sketches offer a profound critique of self-serving vanity. That your affectation of show-biz phoniness is your way of making apparent, transparent, the phony Bad Actors our egos are–dramatizing the distance between our acting and our Being. It's a far more devastating critique of the self-aggrandizing performative self–of Self itself–than any of the self-absorbed lit-crit theorists have contrived. And an awful lot funnier, too; an all-too-knowing subversion of Selfishness in the service of a higher Selfless wisdom."

And I meant it. Bill Murray is, as I said back then, the closest thing I'll ever have to a guru. And one of the greatest things about talking with Ms. Schomer and Ms. Donahoe about their Bill Murray Introspective was the discovery that they're on the same wavelength about your work. In fact, Chris Schomer unearthed from Caddyshack a monologue from Carl the Groundskeeper about playing golf with the Dalai Lama that may be the Ur-moment of the subtextual spirituality in the rest of your work, your most explicit disclosure of what's going on beneath the surface. It's a passage I shamefully failed to recall in my "Secret Zen Master" essay, a passage that would have clinched the case. A passage that Chris Schomer, with the loving devotion of a true initiate, has gone to take the trouble of getting printed up, on an engraved card, that serves as the invitation to the golf tournament they've scheduled in your honor. To signal that this is not a mere golf tournament, that a deeper game is being played on the greens. Here's Carl the Groundskeeper's deadpan account:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course in the Himalayas. A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I'm a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald … striking. So I'm on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one–a big hitter, the Lama–long, into a 10,000-foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga Galunga … gunga, gunga galunga. So we finish the 18th and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, "Hey, Lama, hey how about a little something , you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me. Which is nice.

I don't know, you have to rent the tape to fully appreciate it, but there's something both hilariousandbeautifulinCarlthe Groundskeeper's delivery of the last line. "You will receive Total Consciousness. [Pause] So I got that goin' for me. [Pause] Which is nice." Funny on the surface–the Dalai Lama tips his caddy with total consciousness–but there's more to it. It seems to mock the notion of Total Consciousness, but slyly insinuates the idea that in every game we play, the real prize is total consciousness.

But in some weird way–and I'd say this about no one else in public life–Bill Murray may really have the closest thing to Total Consciousness you can find, at least in Hollywood films. And he just keeps getting better as Rushmore demonstrates.

But the most exciting aspect of the Bill Murray Introspective (aside from the prospect of Bill Murray himself showing up and saying a few words–Hey Bill, why don't you call Chris and Nancy now , if you haven't already) is the prospect of seeing a clip from your forthcoming performance as Polonius in the Miramax Hamlet . It's an inspired piece of casting (although, frankly, someday I'd love to see what Bill Murray would do as the Prince of Denmark himself, say on the "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" soliloquy). What's most inspired about Bill Murray as Polonius is that the role thematizes, as the lit-crit types say, the two-leveled tension in all Bill Murray's work. A tension I'll attempt to explain by reference to one of his most inspired signature lines, perhaps my favorite Bill Murray riff. It's the one from Tootsie , where, you recall, he plays Dustin Hoffman's roommate Jeff, an Off Off Broadwayplaywright-waiterwho's penned a determinedly grim and depressing opus called Return to Love Canal . He's discoursing at a party to other theater types about the effect he wants his plays to have. In a brilliant Polonian fusion of pomposity and theatrical mock profundity, he tells his hearers:

"I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden. I want 90 people who just came in out of the worst rainstorm in the city's history. These are people who are alone on the planet. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rains … But after a performance I don't like it when people come up to me and say 'I really dig your message , man' or 'I really dig your play, man. I cried .' I like it when people come up to me the next day or a week later and say 'I saw your play. [Long pause] What happened ?'"

It's a knowing and hilarious sendup of theatrical pretentiousness and sententiousness, yes (in the manner of Polonius describing the traveling players in Hamlet as "the best" actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical pastoral …")

But again, as in all Bill Murray's best work, there's something more there, it's comical, but it's comical-spiritual. When he says he wants to hear people say "What happened ?" a week after they see his play, it's a gesture at the notion of transformation by art–of theatrical rapture that verges on loss of a destabilizing identity. The unstated but implicit corollary to "What happened ?" is "Who am I now?" A transformative experience that suggests what happens to Bottom after his night of sudden transformation, in A Midsummer Night's Dream –a dream beyond imagining, of ecstatic sexual union (an extremely hot version of total consciousness) with a higher being, with Titania, queen of fairies.

By the way, I think the new Michael Hoffman A Midsummer Night's Dream has been unappreciated for its ambition, for its distinctive vision of the Dream : that it is, at bottom, Bottom's Dream . It's Bottom, after all, who is the only one in the play whose transformation has been an ascent to a higher realm, rather than a lateral transposition to a different lover in the same realm. Bottom is the visionary who has to deal with the melancholy return to daily life after his momentary glimpse of total consciousness.

This is classic Bill Murray, this "What happened ?" line in Tootsie : to gesture at transcendence, but only through a scrim of mockery, which nonetheless gives an intimation of a genuinely transcendent realm beyond the scrim.

This is what Bill Murray does best, this is why he's, if not unappreciated, then not fully appreciated for what he's done. He doesn't call attention to it, he doesn't explicate it tendentiously the way I do. He only winks and nods–and maybe gives you a little nudge with an elbow–to gesture at it. Carl the Groundskeeper is Bill Murray's Bottom, our Bottom. "Methought I was … Methought I was …" Bottom stammers as he awakens from his rapturous dream of union with a goddess. What happened ? But nothing, no words can recapture his rapture, and "A man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had." To speak of it is to betray it, that evanescent moment granted to a few only on their deathbed: total consciousness, ecstatic union with divinity. "So I got that goin' for me … which is nice."

Which is why I can't wait to see his work as Polonius, and I say this as someone who's spent the past few months communing with Hamlet scholars on two continents. There are those for whom Polonius remains more of an enigma, more complex than he's played on stage. While much of what Polonius says is subverted by his relentless sententiousness, there are flashes, glimpses of truths not utterly ironized by his all-too-evident hypocrisy. What should we make of "To thine own self be true"? Self-subverting in Polonius' mouth, but is it utterly dismissible because of its source?

This is the Polonian paradox, a paradox which Bill Murray was born to play. This is the realm Bill Murray has inhabited with his comic genius and gives voice to: "windy suspirations of breath" that sound merely mock- serious but which might actually be a kind of test : Can you see past the smarmy, even sleazy delivery to the glimpse of a realm of truth beyond the pompous rhetoric?

And speaking of tests, Mr. Murray, I really don't want to think of your decision whether or not to make an appearance at the Newport Film Festival Bill Murray Introspective as a test for you . I'm sure your inability to commit to an appearance with one week left to go, an inability that is torturing the festival organizers, your biggest fans, is probably more a matter of your schedule and your family obligations and all that. But I feel somehow on one of those six days, June 1 to June 6, you could find a way to show up and gladden the hearts of the two women, Chris Schomer and Nancy Donahoe, who have put their hearts and souls into giving you a fitting Introspective. I don't want to bring up Carl the Groundskeeper's riff on the Dalai Lama stiffing him on that round in Tibet. You haven't stiffed them yet. But I think Chris and Nancy and I would trade Total Consciousness for a Newport Introspective appearance by our Lama, Bill Murray.

After that, the song gets ridiculously gaudy. Mr. Petty goes on and on about this room at the top of the world while a bass starts thumping loud (bum-bum-bum ), and an electric guitar blares single chords like some old Queen song. Then Mike Campbell, one of Mr. Petty's longstanding sidemen in the Heartbreakers, plays a quick, sloppy guitar solo imitating (or mocking) a Richard Thompson Celtic Strat solo.

The music is both dumb and jubilant because of the wholehearted pathos in Mr. Petty's lyrics. Once you realize how many regrets you're carrying around, Mr. Petty's insistence that he "ain't comin' down" is touching. Most of us are smart enough to know that no one, save maybe Donald Trump, stays in the room at the top of the world for even the duration of a single night. Bless Mr. Petty for being dumb enough to think that he'll be up there forever.

Most of the songs on Echo (Warner Brothers), his latest album, concern the triumphs of losers. But listening, you feel neither equal nor superior to his characters, like the chick in trouble with the law who calls her mother-in-law for dough ("Swingin'"). Or even Mr. Petty himself, who goes "down hard like Billy the Kid" but gets up again. What you do feel is pleased that at least a handful of good-natured dumb clucks realize "you need rhino skin to pretend you're not hurt by this world" ("Rhino Skin"). Mr. Petty rips through 14 songs about losers without betraying bitterness, and only slips on the 15th song, "One More Day, One More Night." In that one he whines, "No one taught me how to be on my own." It's the only moment when Mr. Petty is a crybaby. On the rest of Echo , he is a man humbled by bad luck, bad decisions and bad karma, and still dumb, or brave, enough to stay in the ring.

It's not necessarily an insult to call Tom Petty a dumb blond. He was born in Gainesville, Fla., in 1952 and considers himself a Southerner, once singing, "There's a Southern accent where I come from … the Yankees call it dumb." He followed his inspiration to become a rock star after seeing Elvis Presley filming Follow That Dream in 1961, and since 1976 has recorded pretty good shopping-mall rock with his pretty good band the Heartbreakers, writing pretty good songs like "American Girl" and "Don't Do Me Like That." But Mr. Petty has reached a plateau with his new, very good album. He has the dumb courage to realize what sophisticated singers would never be caught admitting: "The mistakes I've made will follow me into the grave" ("This One's for Me").

To now compare Tom Petty to Doris Day will seem a stretch. What do they have in common other then blond hair? Dumbness.

Doris Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1924. Her music was dumb in the 40's and 50's, and sounds even dumber in 1999. But to call Ms. Day a dumb blonde is problematic; the phrase implies she was sexually available and naïve, and Ms. Day was (and is) anything but. Columbia is about to release a 48-track celebration of her music, Golden Girl (The Columbia Recordings 1944-1966) , and even a cursory listen will reveal Ms. Day as the most virginal female singer ever recorded. Well, not "virginal"–innocent. Basically, Ms. Day served the national duty of being the Pied Piper, leading post-World War II maidens into marriage while revealing not a clue about what to expect on or in or under the marriage bed.

When Ms. Day goes to bed, she sleeps alone, telling her pillow how much she wants to get married ("Pillow Talk"). In "A Guy Is a Guy," Ms. Day tells how a guy is following her up the stairs, which has a sinister 90's slasher-flick vibe. Don't worry, all he wants is a good-night kiss. But if the guy is a guy , he wants more, right? Of course not! After they peck, Ms. Day goes to her ma, who goes to her pa, and the next thing we know the guy is following the singer down the aisle as if a good-night kiss is grounds for a shotgun wedding.

All these songs are dumb–but dumb in a good way, like Mr. Petty's Echo . Before I tell you why, hear Ms. Day's first big hit–"Sentimental Journey," released in January 1945–in historical terms. This lovely song is not about marriage; it's about taking a sentimental journey back home. Now what does a 19-year-old girl (Ms. Day's age when she sang it) know about sentimentality? The song is just a pretty piece of blankness unless you consider the month it came out. The Allies were winning in Europe and had Tojo on the run in the Pacific. Hope was in the air. American boys would soon be taking a "sentimental journey" home.

There's no way for us "postmoderns" to imagine how sincere the now-dopey-sounding naïveté of those days was. Certainly when the grunts returned from Vietnam no one sang about a "sentimental journey." And in the 30-odd years since the end of Oliver Stone's war, naïveté and innocence have ceased to exist in America's cosmology. Only dumbness remains. Not even children are innocent–i.e., school shootings, Internet porn, "homosexual" brainwashing by Teletubbies (or so says Jerry Falwell). Listening to dumb Doris Day becomes a necessary postmodern delight. On Golden Girl , Ms. Day sings "Ain't We Got Fun?," a great dumb song with a corny choir in the background. The answer back in 1953 is Yes! The answer in 1999 is a resounding No.

The one Day song that everyone knows is "Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)." You know how it goes. The narrator remembers asking Mom, "What will I be when I grow up?" Rich? Poor? A Jedi knight? And Mom answers, "The future's not ours to see. Que sera, sera …"

Now, a mom can give that kind of la- di-da spin to her kid, but it's just a cop-out, because as another dumb guy once sang, the future's uncertain and the end is always near. Not that you can bear Doris Day any ill will for one false song. She was pre-Tet offensive, pre-Watergate, pre-AIDS, pre-trench coat mafia. Her music gives us the archeological experience of innocence, while Tom Petty sits in his room at the top of the world and forgives us for all the dumb things that went wrong in our lives. It's dumb, but it feels good.