Deaf Spot

I've been trying for well over a decade to like the music of American Music Club and its mastermind Mark Eitzel. But I can still barely listen to it. Were I less self-conscious about the force in declarations of taste, I might label them "overrated." I guess this is proof that, despite the excessive influence that music critics have exerted on me since I was a teenager, there are limits to my capacity for self-refashioning. I mean, I must have read a hundred tributes to the wonders of Eitzel's songwriting over the years, written by people whose writing I respect, yet still, like the grown-ups in Polar Express, I just can't hear it. Then again, I still hear Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" without the distortion of irony, so I suppose my intransigence, however limited in scope, must have two sides. Anybody want to enjoy me in a marathon bout of listening to Asia albums for the pure joy they bring?