Brian’s Songs

The truly wonderful thing about pop music is that it allows for anyone . . . absolutely anyone to be a so-called genius.

All it takes for one like ex-Beach Boy Brian Wilson to qualify is to have some self-flattering, self-proclaimed omniscient Pop Critic declare it to be so (“The Album: Really Good Vibrations,” by Paul Grein, July 10). . . and . . . ABRACADABRA! . . . it is. How naive I’ve been to think that the standard . . . the definition of a musical genius was/is to be found in the works of Beethoven and Mozart.

But seriously . . . enough of all this antediluvian pop rhetoric proclaiming the creators of musical mediocrity to be so much more important than they really are! What, after all, qualifies someone such as Prince to be dubbed “Sir Genius”? That he was a frog in a previous incarnation?

JOHN EMERSON

Glendale