Casey Kasem’s death has coaxed all kinds of sweet memories from Americans who remember the DJ’s countdown show; pop music, and a paternal-sounding voice, exert a strong nostalgic pull regardless of one’s generation or political tilt.

Nearly everybody seems to have a strong association with “American Top 40,” and I’m no exception: Decades ago, I was a kid crammed into a tiny Datsun, hurtling in the dark across Maryland suburbia, as my dad took my siblings and me from our mom’s house to his apartment. Kasem’s upbeat tone, as he described a hot new song climbing the charts, or offered a long-distance dedication to a listener missing someone special, took the gloom out of those divorce-inspired drives. Kasem’s enthusiasm was infectious. I can’t remember exactly what years these were, but most of my memories of Kasem’s show involve Kim Carnes singing “Bette Davis Eyes.” It’s not a song I’m likely to play now, but I still have some warm feelings for it.

What’s striking about Kasem’s death – he passed, appropriately, on Father’s Day — isn’t that he’s being remembered fondly. He deserves to be. It’s that he’s been drafted posthumously into a war he never fought, and become a symbol in a debate in which he never took a side. Several prominent Kasem appreciations have framed him as a cheery cultural gatekeeper, a guy who loved all kinds of music, a tender of record charts that served as pure meritocracy. If you’re to believe these critics, America voted with its pocketbooks and wallets, they picked the very best, and Casey Kasem served it up – whatever the musical style, free from hype or influence — in a friendly and appealing package. Man, those were the days. And this brings us back to Kim Carnes.

“Unconcerned by cool, and possibly unaware of what cool was, he was a clean-cut, sweater-wearing authority, somewhere between disc jockey and anchorman,” Sarah Larson wrote on the New Yorker’s site, “who could present KISS, Marvin Gaye, Toni Basil, the Oak Ridge Boys, or Color Me Badd as equally valid acts, by virtue of their presence on the Top Forty charts. His show was democratic, a great leveller.” It makes you wonder: “Elvira” as democracy? Maybe. but if so, it’s a twisted democracy as gerrymandered and driven by corporate cash and elite interests as our own.

And here’s another slam at those mean people who try to tell you that there’s something to music besides how well it sells: “Casey Kasem was the original poptimist,” argues Slate’s Chris Molanphy, describing the school of pop-music critics who advertise their populist, Britney-is-better-than-your-favorite-indie-band point of view. Like them, Molanphy writes, Kasem believed “that a full range of popular music can be as important and worthy of appreciation as rock. He championed centrist pop even when it was unfashionable to do so.” Now that seems to be ascribing an ideology to Kasem he didn’t hold. “Though he is constantly asked his opinion on music, Mr. Kasem is not necessarily a music fan,” observed the New York Times in a rare late-life interview with Kasem in 2004. (Asked about rap, however, Kasem does note that “I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I had a feeling it was a reflection of what’s been happening in the ghetto.”)

Listen closely to these tributes and you can hear something resembling what my Salon colleague Thomas Frank calls market populism: The belief that what sells is both a measure of the people’s will, and perhaps can even set the individual free.

What we’re also getting here is a blind championing of centrism, and the claim that it was bold or brave to stand up for, well, the most popular songs, and often the richest musicians in the country.

What we’re hearing a lot less about is the way shows like his work on the culture, how they seep into our psychology, how they change the playing field for musicians and other artists and craftsmen. The pop charts, especially back then, reflected the stale playlists of a few stations and the investments of a few labels and likely a lot of wink-wink under-the-table payola: They are not a pure vehicle for the people’s will, for good taste, or for anything other than record-industry marketing. You can take popular culture seriously, sure, but it’s another thing to tell us that what’s packaged and promoted most effectively is somehow democratic or virtuous.

(Compare the top songs of 1981 — which we’ll use randomly because it’s when “Bette Davis Eyes” came out — from Billboard magazine and from the Village Voice critics poll, and decide for yourself which list is more interesting, diverse and what you actually might want to hear today. Hint: I’ll take the list without Kenny Rogers’ “Lady” at No. 3, REO Speedwagon’s “Keep On Loving You” at No. 10 and the “Greatest American Hero” theme at No. 11.)

You get a bare glimpse of the contradictions of popularity in some of the appreciations, though you typically have to read past a lot of good cheer. “Syndicated to hundreds of stations, ‘American Top 40’ — along with many other factors — worked instead toward homogenizing pop, playing the same tunes coast to coast for four hours a week,” Jon Pareles wrote, aptly, in his New York Times assessment. “And since airplay breeds airplay — until that odd moment when a ubiquitous hit suddenly outstays its welcome — the spread of ‘American Top 40’ tended to make hits national rather than regional, reducing the variety that makes American music so vital.” (There’s clearly a poptimist on the Times copy desk: The headline on the piece makes the opposite argument. “Host in a big-tent era of pop music: Remembering Casey Kasem, D.J., for a more eclectic pop radio.)

There certainly were lively and eclectic strains in music back then, many from urban or college-town scenes, but “American Top 40″ tended to be the absolute last place where you would hear them. So in the early ‘80s, while the show was (like the rest of the radio dial) playing a lot of Captain and Tennille and Kenny Rogers and Air Supply and REO Speedwagon and Survivor and Billy Joel’s heart attack-ack-ack and Christopher Cross’ “Sailing,” there were actually smart, vivid songs you probably didn’t hear. The Clash’s “London Calling” came out in the States in 1980, the same year Elvis Costello put out “Get Happy,” The Jam released “Sound Effects,” and the Pretenders dropped their debut. It was the era of the Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” U2’s “Boy,” Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Kaleidoscope,” Kate Bush’s “Never For Ever” and “The Dreaming,” of the Cocteau Twins and King Sunny Ade, the English Beat and the Cure and the Funky Four Plus One. Not to mention what was happening in jazz or old-time music or the better singer-songwriters; Lucinda Williams’ second record came out in 1980 and made no impression on the radio or the charts.