Everything I needed to know about Nick Hornby I learned from this paragraph in "Songbook":
I once presumed that nothing good - nothing great, anyway - could come out of the mixing and matching and scratching and cutting and pasting, and this was true while the approach of the cutters and pasters remained essentially plagiaristic: the contribution that say, Eric B and Rakim made to their version of "I Know you Got Soul" is minimal - it's Bobby Byrd bassline and beat the define the track.
And any musical response that you might have to Puff Daddy's "I'll Be Missing You" is actually a response to the Police's pretty riff. To create music - to create any art - is surely to pull something out of thin air, to produce something where there previously was nothing.
This passage hit me just like Hornby's Times piece hit Keith Harris, as so severely detached that compassion was the only appropriate response. It was like that heartbreaking moment when you're talking to an elderly relative, struggling to understand how they could be so wrong-minded, and then suddenly your frustration melts into pity as you realize they are just no longer capable of lucidity, and all you can do from now on is smile and nod politely as they drift away from the world.
I would elaborate but I've got work to do (takin care of business, bloggers can't you seeeee), and this has pretty much been covered.
