Is music like wine or malt whisky? Leave it out of sight for a decade or two and something intolerable becomes great. I wasn't in the room for the Spice Girls' appearance last night but from upstairs I could hear my daughter's squeals of delight. They may have caught her eye at age three but they're not consistent with her teenage taste: Radiohead, Beirut, P J Harvey (some overlap with my own tastes, actually).
The point of the Spice Girls was never musical, no more than the point of the Bay City Rollers was, or the Osmonds (with the notable exception of Crazy Horses), or Rick Astley. But people my age now talk enthusiastically about all of these.
Does music improve with the passing of years, in a near-magical process akin to the effects of sherry casks on new whisky spirit? Or do most people view crap music through the leavening haze of nostalgia? It's still crap - musically banal, even inept; peddling easy and valueless sentiment - but they come to love it anyway.
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