Because it’s my belief that Pete Townshend is innocent. Or rather, he could be. View the charges he’s suspected of — as well as his defense — through the prism of his work, some 35 years of it, and one thing becomes clear: Pete Townshend, from the very start, has always issued reports from the sexual fringe. He’s turned into pop poetry the things that we cannot help liking, and all that we disdain, as well as (perhaps most important right now) all that we doubt about ourselves, sexually, emotionally and socially.

As early as “Substitute” — one of the Who’s breakthrough singles — Townshend had articulated a kind of muted, blushing rage about traditional sexual roles and how lots of people just don’t fit into them: “I’m a substitute for another guy/ I look pretty tall but my heels are high,” declared the protagonist, all too aware that he could never measure up to whatever was expected of him by society, his date or both. It just wasn’t that simple. Similarly, “Pictures of Lily,” one of the great Who songs (as well as probably the all-time greatest rock song about obsession and masturbation), looked very early on at a sort of modern sublimation of and guilt about sexual expression of any kind. And as much as these songs held disarming doubts about a young man’s place in the (sexual) world, they were also great rock ‘n’ roll — outsider tales, one and all. By the time Townshend and his mates came up with the rock opera “Tommy” — about a deaf, dumb and blind kid molested by his uncle — the Who were treading on the kind of terrain previously only inhabited by guys like André Gide. Heady stuff, to be sure, and making it all rock couldn’t have been easy.

Or maybe it was. The greatest thing about the Who was that they were always railing against something. And sure, it might be a level of historical revisionism to say that they were marauders against sexual provincialism — rather than the preconceived (and easier to digest) notion that they were just out to wrack the nerves of the older generation — but go back to the music, to say nothing of Townshend’s comments about it over the years, and it all checks out.

And, until we know more, so does Townshend’s defense today. “On the issue of child-abuse, the climate in the press, the police, and in Government in the UK at the moment is one of a witch-hunt. This may well be the natural response triggered by cases like that of my friend who committed suicide. But I believe it is rather more a reaction to the ‘freedoms’ that are now available to us all to enter into the reality of a world that most of us would have to admit has hitherto been kept secret. The world of which I speak is that of the abusive paedophile. The window of ‘freedom’ of entry to that world is of course the internet.”

That’s Pete Townshend himself, in an essay he published on his Web site — a year ago. In it, he relates the story of a friend who was abused as a child (and later committed suicide) and then he talks about child porn as both a shadow industry and a phenomenon, as well as his own childhood and his suspicions that he might have been abused as a toddler.

Like many who heard Townshend’s “research defense” — that he did indeed browse child porn on the Web a few times but that it was in the service of something he was writing — I scoffed. Does one really need to see atrocities to be convinced of their existence? Wasn’t there any other way he could have commented on the subject without diving headlong into the pedophiliac fray?

I suppose it’s possible, but then again, maybe not. Pedophilia — along with many other greater or lesser pathologies based in and around sexuality — has a vocabulary all its own, as horrifying, disgusting and beyond the pale as it might be. Even an episode of “Law and Order” would tell you that. And perhaps, to get the impact of it, if indeed Townshend was writing about it, he wanted to see the horrors firsthand. Is that, in and of itself, shameful — to try to confront and process an atrocity firsthand? I don’t know.

But I do know this: We live in a hysterical time, one in which technology has outrun our capacity to come up with the ethics to go with it. There are elements of Townshend’s dilemma that reek of McCarthy-era thought crime, where to investigate the lunatic fringe is to be suspect of sympathizing with it. Especially in this sort of neo-Puritan age where to be accused of a sex crime is, for all intents and purposes in the court of public opinion, to be declared guilty of it.

Rock stars — just about all of them — are given over to excess and ridiculous levels of self-indulgence. And in a way, that’s what we like about them. There was a time when Pete Townshend could not take just one drink, could not do just one line, could not pen just one rock opera. But even in the throes of all this, there was something about the guy that spoke to more than just that excess and indulgence; in so many ways, Pete Townshend has always been the anti-rock star. His looks, his demeanor and his music have always suggested a sort of worldview that acknowledges the ridiculousness of his own fame and fortune; even when he has been reeling out of control — band members dying, fans getting crushed, the lot of it — he has known himself more than most in his station. Maybe more than any other rock star out there, he’s earned something most of us don’t even remember anymore: the benefit of the doubt.

I mean, who the fuck picks a fight with Moby? Moby is a Christian — and not even the weird scary kind either, just the cool Ghandi/E.T. kind. And Triumph the Insult Comic Dog? Man, that is just folly, starting shit with a puppet! Because as sure as shit, the next day, there’s Triumph the Insult Comic Dog having a press conference, saying what everyone’s been thinking all along:

“Everyone, please. Let’s all try to be easy on Eminem. At the end of the day, he’s just another white guy trying to make an honest living stealing black people’s music.”

Ah, 2002. So fresh, so clean, so … dirty. The megastarring of Em wasn’t the only thing that left a bad taste in my mouth this year, but it was the one that stuck the most. Every time I saw a review in which some dopey film critic was all like, “Duhh, heyyy, Eminem can really act,” it was like drinking a beer someone had ashed in. It brought Triumph’s barb that much closer to being true; it made me embarrassed to be an American, where people were actually willing to buy Em’s whole “I don’t hate fags cause look: I’m down with Elton-John!” jive; it made me think that the points put forth in “Bowling for Columbine” were not just more liberal set-em-up, knock-em-down defeatist bullshit — that all of that was true, that we’d been beaten just by the sheer, manic mass confusion that is Life in America. I felt like that scene in the Big Lebowski where Lebowski shouts the Dude down the hall, smugly crying: “I have news for you, sir! Your war is over! The bums lost! I suggest you go do like the rest of us and get yourself a job.”

It was that kind of year. Because up there on the podium was Marshall Mathers, easily one of the most hateful people on the planet, doing one of the more ridiculous things I’ve ever seen on television — threatening Moby — while accepting an award. Now, don’t get me wrong: Moby’s music is kinda dumb and, hey, not for nothing, at the end of the day might be almost as ill-at-ease with the race issue as Eminem’s (i.e., Moby made a mint off sampling dead black people; Em made more just by being friends with ‘em and selling it upstream as something “dangerous”). But still: It’s nice having Moby around. The man owns a tea shop, for Chrissakes.

It is not nice, however, having Eminem around. You think the bully culture in this country is bad? Eminem plays to every teenage boy’s worst instincts enough to soundtrack one Columbine per month. It’s a slippery slope we got on when we made Eminem famous; and it only got worse this year when we made him, somehow, not a joke, a slur, a snide rallying cry for all that is cruel and sick-hearted.

Nothing for me, articulated the year’s tone of drawn-out disappointment more perfectly: Frivolity whilst waiting for the other shoe to drop. And for once in a good long while, that tone was not just a comment on the music industry itself — still stealing souls and now selling fewer $18.99 CDs than last year and continuing to blame it on the Internet — but rather, something that is in the air out there at this very moment, a bad-trip electrical current known not as War, but maybe worse, the Waiting for It.

It was out there, and as awful as the feeling was, it was at least something everyone could relate to. Because, really, that’s the same feeling we all had in the ’80s. And you could hear it everywhere, with the electroclash movement speaking perfect Reagan-ese, teen pop morphing into Justin Timberlake’s year-long Jacko paraphrase and stupid white guys — Stripes and Strokes and Interpol — feigning indifference a la the Jesus And Mary Chain, the Cure, et al. With so much restless quoting of the more or less immediate past, it was a miracle that any actual art got produced at all.

Now here’s the part where I talk about what was good — briefly — before going back to all that wasn’t good, like that stupid new Beck album where he pretends to be Jackson Browne, so I should warn you now: This is also the part that people who have trouble with the collision of indie and mass culture each producing equally great and awful artifacts better leave. Because, um, you know what was good?

Mash-ups were good. Good like Whip-Its. Like, the one where Kylie Minogue sings over New Order’s “Blue Monday?” Brilliant! What about the one where they put the vocal track from Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” over “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by the Stooges? Possibly the best record ever. At long last, the widespread availability of computer programs like Acid did everyone some good: Now anyone can strip the vocals out of one song and drop them over somebody else’s copyrighted hit. That makes mash-ups they year’s real advance in populist art, an everyman joke on the pop music world melded with dancefloor deliverance. They might be disposable — we’ll certainly be sick of them in five minutes if we aren’t already — but damn if they weren’t fun.

And not that kind of forced-fun that the Hives were promoting, either, by dressing up garage rock and acting like there’s something new under the sun with that. No, no, no: There was crazy fun to be had — albeit vaguely spooky end-of-the-world fun — in Nelly’s rally against the tyranny of proper spelling, “Hot in Herrre,” to say nothing of the aforementioned Kylie Minogue, whose airbrushed photos actually look real when you see them next to a picture of Christina Aguilera going for the same pop diva prize, but now, with skankified alien powers. Even indie-rockers, those endless sources of fun-in-sarcastic-quotation-marks, pitched in on the fun drive: The Yeah Yeah Yeahs kicked ass without letting polemics get in the way, and Interpol made a record so hilariously indebted to Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen that you just had to smile.

But no one — and I mean no one — produced an album that could do in 70 minutes what Missy Elliott’s “Work It” did in just three. “Work It” breathed new air into hip hop — if not music that is heard on Top 40 radio as a whole — in such a way as to remind us everything that was good about it in the first place. And even though it was sandwiched between two classic hip-hop loops (“Request Line”/”Peter Piper”), the track wasn’t a throwback — in fact, Elliott innovated willy-nilly all over it: backward rhymes, funny animal sounds, pidgin Chinese rapping — the whole magilla.

But these were deviations from the norm: What else could you expect but bummers in a year when Enrique Eglesias affects a “rock” look, emo becomes the new hair metal and the arrival of a forgotten Nirvana castoff is praised as manna from heaven? In the year of the bummer, oddly enough, though, even the bummers were lame because we all know this much is true: Popular (or even un-popular, best as I could tell) music still failed at producing an appropriate response to 9/11. But maybe that’s as it should be. After all, it says something about the kinds of times we live in that we’ve even been expecting one — do you think that people back in the day were bitching about how there were no good songs about, say, the Hindenberg disaster or the Spanish Inquisition?

At the very least, though, people were trying: Springsteen’s reappearance in the wake of “The Rising” somehow seemed more important than the album itself; it turned out that we needed him — if nothing else, just as a reminder that you could have dignity and soul during this time without being bloodthirsty — more than the songs, which had their hearts in the right place but were probably written too soon. That’s the thing about 9/11 in art and culture: It’s gonna take awhile before any artists can really see the forest for the trees. In the meantime, we’re going to have nice trys (thank you, Boss) peppered with things like Steve Earle’s “John Walker Blues,” which came off as overly simple, a touch opportunistic and generally boneheaded no matter what side of the issue you were on. For the moment, it seemed like Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” — recorded well before the tragedy occurred — would have to suffice as pop music’s most succinct comment on The Way We Live Now. Better that, with its wispy intimations of a limping modern world, than the head-in-the-sand hope-against-hope of “We Are All Made of Stars” or even worse, the tired flurry of blame that is Marshall Mathers. Because in 2002, you had to take dignity wherever you could find it — even if it was from the year before.

Even at 6 years old, Joey Sweeney sees the power in this: You can use music in your brain to make all the awful things that are happening to you somehow romantic and character-building and, better than all of this, cool in a way that will, one day at least, show up all the kids who, even this early on, are calling you a faggot and a sissy. Through this rock music, thinks Sweeney, you will show them. It will add a romantic dimension to your life by making it explode with light and music; it will add layers to what is now bare. It will cover things up. It will make boo-boo better.

In the service of this, while his mother is working as a nurse assistant and his father is off God knows where, he spends his time in his grandmother’s musty basement where his two aunts — 14 and 16, respectively, and really young enough to be his sisters — have been equipped with a cheap record player, hand-me-down hippie tapestry and all kinds of girly stuff that is still a crazy mystery to him. (Such a wacky age range of aunts, moms and grandmoms, he will find out later, is a strange blessing when compared to the rest of middle-class America, but for now, Sweeney doesn’t know that, having landed from space in the white ghetto of Philadelphia where he is 6 and his mother is 22.)

Among the records that get played down there as a soundtrack to the girls’ primping and strange, codified innuendo that is totally over his head, sometimes even now, is “Born to Run,” the breakthrough 1975 album by Bruce Springsteen. And though Sweeney doesn’t realize it now, “Born to Run” is as much a part of the aunts as the aunts are a part of “Born to Run”: Sandra and Lisa Tuno hang out on the same corner every night. They wear white high-top Converse, make out with boys and get in fistfights with other girls. It is only a matter of months — 18, 36, whatever — before one of them has a child of her own.

Whether they know this or not, they’ve taken Joey under their wing, letting him fall asleep at their secret beer parties, sing with them into a hairbrush and say funny things for them in his pipsqueak voice that will not be going anywhere, up or down, for quite a while. In return, he is allowed to wear Lisa’s black-and-white baseball jersey that is silk-screened with the cover art for Springsteen’s first album, “Greetings From Asbury Park.”

Feb. 25, 1981
Monica from Salmon Street is my babysitter, and although I do not have the words for it in the winter of 1981, I am in love with her. She talks to me like a human being, allows me to curse mildly and watch television right up until I fall asleep. She has also introduced me to the college radio station that plays music that I do not exactly understand. Monica has noticed early on that I am almost helplessly drawn to pop music and as it turns out, she is too. Together, we watch “Solid Gold” and regale each other with stories about this new thing called MTV, which we have seen in glimpses at distant relatives’ homes but will not really be able to watch for at least seven more years. For this is Philadelphia in the early ’80s, and a deadlocked, lazy union and a string of ever more ineffectual mayors has prevented the entire city from getting cable TV — a cultural shortcoming that will dog us as a city for most of the decade and arguably even beyond.

With cable — and the electric music it transports — an ever-more distant hope, our only contact with the rock ‘n’ roll world is through magazines (which, as a 9-year-old, I can neither afford nor find) and the rock radio monster that is WMMR. In the pallid wasteland of early ’80s mainstream rock, there are few choices — especially in a working-class town like Philly that, in a very self-conscious way, almost immediately (and wrongly) associated punk and new wave with clueless rich kids, homosexuals and college students, three species of people who could not possibly be farther away from the intellectual and spiritual short-stack world view of Fishtown.

All of this is to say that, in 1981, Bruce Springsteen still reigns supreme as the past, present and future of rock ‘n’ roll to all Philadelphians who fall under his stoned and beautiful FM gaze. To so many of us, the man is rock ‘n’ roll, and the local media make no secret about desperately wanting to claim him as our own; for every time he brought the house down at the Stone Pony in Jersey, the next night, he was probably playing some place down here in Philly, where everyone knows at least someone who saw him play for five hours straight before sending the crowd home in ecstatic exhaustion, each adrenal gland drained of its last ampoule of sick rock throttle.

Springsteen is a local shaman — even Monica tells a story of her girlfriend driving up I-95 one day, only to be accosted by a van containing Bruce (bearded, rasta-cap era) and his boys, asking her if she’d like to pull over and take some “tea” with them. From Monica, I infer that “tea” is some sort of drug, although it feels lame to ask what exactly it is, and instead I concoct in my head some substance that falls somewhere among pot, hash, heroin and red wine. By the time I reach my 20s, I subconsciously will try to uncover this mystery drug every weekend, always falling short of the sweet, languid high I can only imagine Monica’s friend enjoying before committing to a lifetime of servitude to the memory of that very thing.

It is under these circumstances and myths that the spirit of Bruce Springsteen will visit me again, when Monica, for whatever reasons, convinces me to trade her my copy of Tom Petty’s “Hard Promises” for two albums from her collection: the Cars’ “Candy-O” (I know that I’m supposed to be aroused by the redhead on the cover, having already spied my stepfather’s Playboys) and “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. “Darkness” strikes me as strange and off-balance even at 9 years old, and even though I don’t have the intellectual equipment in place to tell you why that is, I still can’t deny that it’s oddly compelling.

At first — and for a long while afterward — I think that I got gypped in the trade. After all, Monica got my Petty album that had “The Waiting” on it, as well as “Nightwatchman.” But the more I stare at Bruce on the cover of “Darkness,” blank and clearly wounded at some kitchen door or other, the more something dark and truthful in myself stares back. The look he’s wearing is the same one that both my folks and I have on the morning after there’s been a big fight, a look that says, I am standing by the kitchen door in disbelief at the way love has failed us. I am threatening to leave, but I desperately do not want to.

That look is as desperate as it is blood-angry, and when I flip the album — the giddy heights of “Badlands” having long subsided — and hear “Adam Raised a Cain” with that long, low moan in the middle eight, I finally begin to know what rage might feel like, what an angry desperation to elevate above your circumstance might feel like. I think of my father, who I haven’t seen in a good few months at least. I think of my stepfather and how futile it must feel to be fighting the raw memory of some shadow-dad. I hear it and think, on some precognitive level, holy fuck. This is what it must feel like when you’re a man.

From this moment on — and throughout those last few dodgy pre-teen years, before hip-hop and then punk will give me an identity — Bruce Springsteen becomes this rock ‘n’ roll John Wayne, and I delve into his world with the same fervor as boys reserve for comic books. Fate will have it that a similar mythic world of rain-slicked streets, cars and girls named Candy will get blown to wide-screen around this time in movies like “The Outsiders” and “Eddie and the Cruisers.”

One day, my mother’s youngest sister Lisa is babysitting me along with her boyfriend Tommy. They’re sitting on the couch across from me as I sit with my headphones on, running my finger down the lyric sheet of “Born to Run” in time with the music. Between songs, while I still have the headphones on and they think I can’t hear, the following exchange:

“See that?”

“What?”

“He’s reading the lyric sheet in time with the music. What a little weirdo.”

Sept. 30, 1987
In the 1980s, after the “Born in the U.S.A.” juggernaut has run over the entire United States, it is as easy as it will ever be to misinterpret Bruce Springsteen. Although this is probably not what is on my mind when I see Bruce Springsteen in the flesh for the first time. What probably is on my mind is something pretty harsh, for I am now 13 years old, have discovered the willy-nilly world of punk, post-punk and the accompanying disdain for all that has gone before. Karen Akers and I are in the stands at JFK Stadium on a late-September night, tiptoeing on the bleachers so that we can see U2, nearly 100 yards away as the crow flies. Karen is goth before goth is goth — Siouxsie hair, blue-black lipstick and nails, and so on — and this is also that strange moment when U2 are playing stadiums and can still be considered alternative.

In the fall night, we are exhilarated — not only by the band, which is already playing stadiums and will soon be even bigger than that, but also by the fact that we were almost crushed at the gates of the show, on the way in, like English soccer fans. We’re happy to be alive, but when Springsteen comes onstage to perform the Ben E. King classic “Stand By Me” with U2, it is like someone has farted in our sleeping bag. For this is the era when as much as he doth protest, the Boss was in his darkest hours of synthesizers (and not even the cool kind that OMD used) and jingoism, mislaid or not. It is all I can do not to boo him, because I am a teenager now, and that vulnerability and sincerity that Bruce so naturally tapped into feels like a kind of death. Everything is affected cynicism now, and I believe that Bruce has no place here, onstage with my avowedly political and anti-establishment Irish band. And playing that corny song to boot! Send him away, the creepy Little Lord Fauntleroy inside me intones.

But it’s not as easy as all that, and some part of me knows this, even while navigating the black and cold waters of early high school. Because they did not want to see me get beaten up every day at the local high school, my parents have scrimped and saved to send me to a prep school, where the culture shock is such that at school events, my mother (now just 31) is often mistaken for my sister. As a result, I often find myself at a socioeconomic crossroads: All around me, there are rich white boys (rich by my count, at any rate) flopping around like fish on land, searching desperately for some kind of identity to cling to — no different from me, really, when you take away the money and the easy comfort of suburban living and so on.

What matters at this crossroads — 14, 15, 16 — is the same thing that will matter for college and, sadly, even beyond that for some of us. It is a quest for authenticity — that years-long process of grafting what you say you are (punk rocker, hippie, snarky activist) onto what you actually are. The process is arduous and I’d be lying if I said that the entire time, I am hanging by a thread, as I am caught between two worlds: one that is defiantly, stupidly poor, uneducated and paralyzed with derisive fear of all that lies outside of it, and another that is made bored and too comfortable by wealth and education, and still paralyzed with derisive fear of all that lies outside of it.

It is easy over these next bunch of years — right on up to my 20s — to feel as if I hate everything, to feel that all there is are these two worlds, nothing between, nothing after. But there is hidden solace, and it comes from Bruce. Though I’m not listening to him, his words are haunting me — on the bus home from school, after an argument with my folks, late at night when I am alone on the kind of insomniac jag that only a diet of Dr. Pepper and Tastykake chocolate cupcakes can produce. All these kids, the voice says, man, just look at them. They’re all on a race for some kind of authenticity, because deep down, they know that money has not and will not ever buy them the soul you have by accident, simply because you were born into shitty circumstances but with real people around you, who told you the truth and did not hide things in that uptight, white suburban way. Your curse is your cure, but you’re still a misfit: You wanna find one place that ain’t looking through you, you wanna find one place, you wanna spit it in the face of these badlands.

This is the type of thing I think at 13, 14, hell, 19, 20, 27, as I fall asleep at night, pathetic and self-congratulatory and narcissistic as all hell, all at once. And it contains things that are not so much nuggets of truth as they are almost prayers. And when they bring me comfort in this dark hour, when I am cutting my hair like Morrissey but still thinking on some level like Bruce Springsteen, I am thankful, and laughing at myself and guilty, especially on this night when I get home from the U2 show, so far from the couch and the headphones and the lyric sheet and the basement.

March 1, 1994
Joey Sweeney is standing in the living room of his first apartment, a hovel in South Philadelphia that is, at this moment, completely dark save for the blue light of the television and the snow reflected in the night outside. He is on mushrooms. Between the TV and the snow outside — from a blizzard that only subsided in the last 18 hours — there is an otherworldly glow and when he remembers this, even to this day, he still cannot remember if he is alone in the room or not. On the stereo is a record he rescued just days before from the dollar bin at the Book Trader — “Nebraska.” And if the cover image of bleak, high, lonely plains beyond a windshield suggests his soul, when he places it on the turntable and turns it up, it sounds like that even more so.

Joey Sweeney has been doing a lot of drugs lately, because it is the early ’90s still (and the late teens, still), and, well, it just seems like that’s what people are doing. He listens to “Nebraska” all the way through. That dull fire-alarm whine of the harmonica resonates with him to a degree that it feels like all he has ever known. When it is over, he just sits in the room, listening to the hail on the snow and the red light changing outside the window and he feels as bleak and as exalted as he ever has.

And then, his most lucid thought ever on the music of Bruce Springsteen: There is so much power in this music, he thinks, that even when it’s making me feel bad, it’s making me feel good. And that power is both beyond me and within me. The thought happens to be something that can be summoned, and also, for that matter, summed up, in one immortal Bruce line: It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.

Just saying the line has mantra-like power; it’s no accident that a Boss bio came out a few years later with that very title. That sentiment is out there in the cosmos, and as sure as it lands on someone else a few years later, tonight, in South Philadelphia, it lands on Joey Sweeney, cracks his ‘shroomy daze and propels him to, at long last, stand up and turn on the lights!

Over the last few months, in one various stoner diversion or another, Joey Sweeney has purchased the entire pre-”Tunnel of Love” Springsteen catalog out of various dollar bins and yard sales at a grand total of no more than $8. As he arises, he recalls this, and thus begins a ritual — which is really the right word for it, as the intent is to produce the same elation and abandon and love for life as you would get from, say, a gospel mass — which he refers to in his heart of hearts simply, with no cheek or irony, as the Megamix. This is how it goes:

“Rosalita.” “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” “The Promised Land.” “I’m On Fire.” “Glory Days.” “Badlands.” “Adam Raised a Cain.” “Hungry Heart.” “Born to Run.” “Thunder Road.” And always, always, “Tenth Avenue Freezeout.”

From this moment on, the Megamix becomes an intermittent fixture in Sweeney’s life, a litany of FM hits that harness every transmuting power that rock ‘n’ roll has ever had to offer. The order may change, but the result is always the same: At the end, the living room floor is a gallery of Springsteen album sleeves, the long headphone cord is twisted up every which way — Sweeney alternates between blasting the stereo and listening on headphones, sometime within one mix, because some rock needs closer attention — and at least five of a six-pack emptied, ghosted, gone. It’s like praying, Sweeney thinks sometimes, except better.

Sept. 21, 2001
It is but days after the nation has been shattered, and on every network, even the ones that don’t matter, Bruce Springsteen is the first performer to appear on something that is called, with hushed tones of reverence, “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” even though a lot of us still aren’t sure whether this is political doublespeak because, hey, up until a few days ago, everything was. As a hardened music critic, guys like Sweeney bear a certain duty to be ready to chop their heroes at the knees in moments like this, when the portent is gooped like greasepaint. But as the screen goes from black up to churchy orange and Springsteen, surrounded by candles, black ladies and his wife, lurches into the first few bars of “My City of Ruins,” Sweeney finds that he is a puddle.

This goes against everything writing about rock ‘n’ roll has taught him. This goes against everything one could reasonably assume in the rock world about a man like Bruce Springsteen and his relevance in the years 2001 and 2002. After all, the future of rock ‘n’ roll was made to be torn down by riot grrrls 10 years after the fact, in the sense that whatever used to matter is always torn down by trends whose most explosive, creative moments have already passed. Which is to say that the women-with-guitar bands of Ladyfest should be way more important than this white guy from New Jersey singing fake gospel — with his wife, of all people.

But none of this matters because fuck you: Bruce Springsteen is healing a nation. Not the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Not Moby. Not even, since we are traveling in descending altitudes of coolness, the fucking Goo Goo Dolls. Bruce Springsteen is on the television — every television — and he is healing us. Because we have been hurt. And because Bruce Springsteen not only cares about America, he is America, and what’s even better, he understands just how fucked up it is and has always been to be an American, the ridiculous mix of the grand and pathetic, the painfully self-aware and the mockworthy clueless spiritual state that has gotten us so far ahead and so sadly behind the rest of the world. Some sick mojo the man has is melting us on our couches, making us into puddles of microwave-popcorn butter and that nasty aloe shit they put on Kleenexes now. We are a tired, huddled mass, punch-drunk and lucky as fuck that it wasn’t us. And as Bruce is so humbled to remind us, well, it wasn’t us this time, at least. And hey, remember the mantra: It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.

On our side of the velvet rope there is the usual shop talk, grousing, gossip and drinking. On the Strokes’ side there is the music and the spirit and the life of youth, spurred on by a brand of rock ‘n’ roll — obscenely lifted from the Velvet Underground and Television — that stumps all of us when the question of its actual worth comes up. One thing is for sure in this foggy haze: There are girls literally lined up, literally begging to make out with any of the Strokes, a New York band of fashionable pretty boys who supposedly signify the return of everything that’s supposed to be cool about rock.

Being children of the ’90s, in the days before the rock pornography series “Backstage Sluts,” back when musicians were ostensibly having the same girl problems as their fans, none of us have ever seen anything quite like it. Julian — the one whose daddy owns the modeling agency — has his tongue in some guy’s ear; Fabrizzio (my favorite, and to prove this, I am drunkenly shouting his name in my thickest Dago accent: “heyyyyyyyy fab-REETZ-EE-o!”) is nodding vacantly and staring into space as no less than five women talk to him at once; and the vaguely Swedish-looking one is sitting at his banquette, also — you guessed it! — staring into space.

Around them, hormones are raging, cellphones are exploding — “Janet! I touched his ass! You have to get down here!” — and we are all green-eyed, doing everything we can to stave off what will surely be our virulent hatred of the Strokes, due the second each of us catches himself in the bathroom mirror the next morning and realizes that — fuck! shit! — we are not them.

This was the color and shape of music hype in 2001: beer-bottle green and in the form of a heart-shaped box of chocolates, delivered by a lover who knows he doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance.

But it’s just that kind of hype — desperate, sweaty and loaded with lies — that was the order of the day in the music biz, 2001. And depending where you’re sitting, its unmitigated failure was either a triumph or a tragedy.

Worse still, the year was hallmarked by an ennui that was, in most ways, not genre-specific. Even before Sept. 11, there were signs that nü metal was finally waning; after the tragedy, many pundits put forth that the music — with all of its unjustified anger, put-upon sense of entitlement and willful self-obsession — was rendered obsolete by noon on that fateful day.

Electronic music — dance and otherwise — continued on with a fantastic flaccidness. Daft Punk’s long-awaited sophomore album came out, and even had a few great ahead-of-the-curve synth-revival tracks, but it was ultimately crushed under the weight of its own self-conscious over-ness. (That is, the state of feeling like their whole deal — the funny French disco fills, the vocoded vocals, the fetishy sneakers, the Spike Jonze videos — was just so 1998, so Internet boom-years, so … over.) English house gods Basement Jaxx put out a fantastic flop in an even more extreme manner — most people didn’t even know the record came out. To the delight of about 137 people, out-sound experimentalists like Matmos plugged onward with the burgeoning form of clip-hop — a hookless, beatless hybrid of musique concrete and the fast-forward button on your CD player — and old heads like Stereolab managed to put out a serviceable album of “songs” that you could “hum” to. Even the best-selling, worst-sounding music under the electronica umbrella — that brand of soul-sucking formulaic techno known as trance — just staggered on, with Paul Oakenfold appearing every weekend at a club near you, a booking delighting no one but people two weeks away from rehab (or graduation). If I could draw the year in techno with emoticons, I think it’d look something like this: \/. (For all of you reading this on your cell phones, that’s an arrow pointing downward.)

The blizzard of teen pop melted into a sweaty, nervous rain in much the same way. With Britney Spears angling for a Shania Twain-like adulthood that finally put fathers and their right hands at ease, and ‘N Sync going all whiny and high-concept with “Pop” — well, high-concept for “Total Request Live” viewers, at any rate — teen pop heaved a heavy sigh that was the musical equivalent of the Freshman 15. And while the genre still proved that you can’t kill off Swedes and marketing departments with just marriage and sex — after all, who doesn’t wanna bone the trashy one in Dream? — the bubble unquestionably burst this year, the second Staind and Cold initiated the 20-years-too-soon revival of grunge.

And with it came Weezer, who always probably fancied themselves the poppy vaccine of the grunge era in the first place. After a year of touring and reintroducing themselves to the disenchanted 14-year-olds of the world, the band was cresting atop a wave of the best kind of publicity: the word of mouth of those self-same teens. And then they released the worst record of their career, their cute new bass player left and suddenly, it seemed like people weren’t so crazy about Weezer anymore.

That was a shame, because in 2001, you didn’t hear many songs on the radio that were filled with as much brutal angsty honesty (“Hash Pipe”) or hope against hope (“Island in the Sun”). Hell, if you lived in a town dominated by megawatt radio and concert dillweeds Clear Channel, chances are, you probably didn’t hear many songs at all. In the days after Sept. 11, some of the company’s programmers issued a now-famous bonehead list of songs not to play — including such disturbing numbers as John Lennon’s “Imagine” — for fear of letting music do the one thing that is still free: mean something.

Clearly, the music-consuming public was increasingly sick of something, and that something was the goddamned record industry. It was that sort of revolt — to make music mean something to people again — that led to some of the year’s most thrilling upsets. After all, who (other than fans) would have predicted that in the wake of Napster’s shutdown that CD sales would actually drop? And who else (other than anyone with a brain) could have predicted Michael Jackson’s unmitigated flop of a comeback? And whether you like their brand of Moby-era Pink Floydisms or not, who in their right mind would have ever predicted that Radiohead would have entered the charts at No. 1 with an album of difficult neo-prog-rock? In the parlance (and on behalf) of snickering high school boys everywhere, that shit was priceless!

On the other hand, I don’t know. Maybe I’m reading an entire sea change into a few blips on the musical radar; there was just as much business-as-usual bullshit every time you turned on the MTV. There was Mariah Carey’s perfectly timed meltdown-with-a-popsicle in front of Carson Daly on “Total Request Live”; there was heretofore white-gal-Eminem contender Pink turning herself into a much skankier version of No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani (upon which Gwen morphed into a less skanky version of Pink); and there was all that Macy Gray silliness all over again, still stoned, still essentially hitless.

Oh yeah: Lenny Kravitz had some kind of album out — with songs on it, I guess — and he even played on the Mick Jagger album that had, like, no songs on it (but still got five stars in Rolling Stone). Somewhere in here, I think a rapper might have gotten arrested, too. I hope it wasn’t Redman. I like Redman.

But back at the Five Spot, where the lager is flowing and the bathrooms are strangely crowded again with men and women — drugs are back! — this is not really what is on the minds of my sniveling cabal of rock critic friends. What we are thinking about, if only to drown out the sounds of our own asses getting fatter and more irrelevant with each passing Son Volt record, is what all this will mean for the music, man.

There is, after all, a reason we’re here, at party after party like this — well, not exactly like this (it’s usually a steak-and-greet with some loser like Tal Bachman), but still. And that reason is music. Just like all the sad fuckers who have to pay for their own records, we actually have an emotional investment in this stuff. For seven years now — after the last post-Nirvana indie boom that gave us such now-negligible names as John Spencer and Superchunk and, oh man, do you remember Ben Lee? — we’ve been straining our tired eyes to see an ass crack’s worth of light at the end of the tunnel. And we’re trying desperately to weave it into a story. Or at least, I am.

Which is precisely why this year’s crop of nu-soul felt so mixed-up and fallen-off. Sunshine Anderson had one of the catchiest singles of the year with “Heard It All Before,” and India Arie’s “Video” followed likewise. But then Alicia Keyes started with all that “I am a Serious Musician and look how I can modulate notes like a coffeehouse Mariah” crap and I just got turned off. Similarly, Jill Scott took the nu-soul formula — which is a good one, borne of street-savvy, ambitious arrangements and low, low pretense — and devolved the form into something so close to smooth jazz that, as a hometown writer, I just felt bad for her. This was the future of soul? Bummer.

But whatever. (How ’90s to say so!) You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have … the facts of life. And the facts were, that in the most awful first few moments in the New Kind of War (That Will Probably Last The Rest of Our Lives), the people populating our current pop landscape had it together enough to do something for the relief effort that was patently not embarrassing — namely, “America: A Tribute to Heroes.” In fact, from the moment Bruce Springsteen stepped out into a silent, lonely spotlight to play “My City of Ruins,” a moment of sheer intellectual whiplash went through almost everybody within viewing range: This was what music could do. This was how music could move and heal and embolden the tattered soul. There was even a chance that, if the music so moved you to call in and donate money, Benecio Del Toro might be on the other side of the line.

That’s a strange kind of comfort, to be sure, but even before the tragedy, there were plenty of spaces to let a joy, however temporary, creep in — you just had to know where to look for them. Like the White Stripes wreaking havoc on industry weasels (by flatly refusing to sign to a major since their record was plastered all over the place to begin with) and the press (by saying that they were brother and sister when in fact they were lovestruck divorcees) while endearing themselves to audiences everywhere by simply entertaining in the rawest, most primitive fashion they could muster. Like seeing Wilco, just days after the tragedy, play that new song that says “I salute the ashes of American flags” to a packed house, stunned and moved. Like seeing Bob Dylan at 60, at the peak of his powers, at all.

That’s a highly subjective survey of joy in music — as well as one that leaves out tons — and I recognize that. But you like what you like, and being Americans — and perhaps even more than that, searchers on an expedition for the redemptive powers that it seems like only music has — this is hardly a time to be an apologist. If I had a chance, you can bet your ass I would have made out with one of the Strokes, too.

What follows, then, are those other glorious stolen moments. I hope you got as lucky as I did.

Best Use of Vincent Price’s Moustache on a Record Cover: Bob Dylan, “Love and Theft” (Columbia)

And that wasn’t even the half of it. “Love and Theft” was Dylan in an increasingly gleeful dirty-old-man guise, loose with craggy wisdom and saltier than a truckful of fishheads. “Love and Theft” rocked, rolled and swung like a drunken divorce: At its heart, it ached, sure, but mostly it wanted to just keep moving. And so it did.

Best Record Available Only on Quicktime: Wilco, “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel”

The rumor goes that when Wilco found out that a rep from its record company stole the “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” tapes in an effort to remix it and get the hit that had always eluded the band — despite a standing status as the foremost of American rock bands fighting the good fight, despite the fact that their previous effort, “Summer Teeth,” had become a sort of bona fide, cross-cutting classic of the kind that is simply not made anymore — the band went apeshit. And rightly so. Having found a loophole in their contract that prohibited such antiquated (or at least we like to think so) music-biz shenanigans, the band walked out on their label, record completed, in debt to no one. So they did what any smart band would do: Until they found a new label, they’d stream it off their Web site. The story is great — Rock Band Emboldened by Art and Truth Tells Major Label to Stick It! — but the killer is that “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” is an absolute fucking monster of a record. Sad and psychedelic, jazzy and poetic, breezy and weary, the record is loaded with all the clammy portent of the human experience. It begins with the lines, “I’m an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue,” and just gets even braver from there. Now if somebody could just convince them to take on Clear Channel.

The Michael Penn Award for an Artist I Liked for Five Minutes and Then Changed My Mind About Completely: India Arie

“Video” — the debut single from India Arie, a nu soul empress who, ideally, should take us all straight back to the heady days of Arrested Development and the first season of “A Different World” — strummed its way into heavy rotation during the summer. And with its vocal hook — “I’m not the average girl in a video/I don’t have the weight of a supermodel” — it was easy to love. But by the time Christmas rolled around, something in India — in fact, maybe in all of nu soul as it was seen on TV — had turned. There she was on the Gap’s “Give a Little Bit of Your Love to Me” ads, emoting like crazy, pointing her fingers at all the crazy wavering notes she was hitting, like a professor at the Mary J. Blige School of Humorless Histrionics. Tragic, that.

Best Badly Drawn Boy Side Project: Gorodisch, “Thurn & Taxis” (Leaf UK)

In which Stephen Cracknell — sometime Badly Drawn Boy guitarist and apparently a young genius himself — makes a mini-album driven entirely by his own whimsical pairing of John Fahey/Leo Kottke-esque acoustic guitar figures propped up against scratchy rare grooves, feathery bossa nova rhythms and long, loping cello arcs. The result is not, as it would be easy to categorize, two-years-too-late trip-hop, but rather, something bold and new in instrumental music. But something happens, and the world yawns, failing to notice its raw enchantment and melancholy spark. It makes me crazy when this happens.

Best Homemade Elliott Smith-ish CD-R Album: Bill Ricchini, “Ordinary Time”

CD-Rs have become the cassette of the ought years, and as such, they’ve also become in most music quarters, an object of pure dread, often containing some of the worst music you’ve ever heard. That’s the taint in the DIY world that no one ever wants to talk about, but it is as certain as the rain. So when one gets passed your way that is as much a homespun work of quiet beauty and low-key charm as Bill Ricchini’s “Ordinary Time” is, it’s something to talk about. Billy Ricchini is an unassuming South Philly boy with a genuine knack for the kind of hushed pop that made Elliott Smith’s first few acoustic albums one of the defining artistic statements of ’90s and Belle and Sebastian a cottage industry. After getting the ol’ dot-com heave-ho — who knows how much of the art of the next decade will result almost directly from the dot-com fallout? — Ricchini sat up in his room for a year making “Ordinary Time,” and then sent off a copy to everyone he could think of who might possibly like it. Within weeks, he was a touring member of the indie pop group Mazarin, “Ordinary Time” was one of the biggest selling CD-Rs ever to grace the indie shops of Philadelphia and he was mulling over which local label was finally gonna put it out, you know, like, for real. Long story short, the record is due out in the spring on the Red Square label, but if you can’t wait until then, make Billy’s day and order one from wr43@hotmail.com. I love it when technology is not used for evil.

Best Ryan Adams Album: Whiskeytown, “Pneumonia” (Lost Highway)

Because, really, there were three to choose from: Adams’ solo debut, “Heartbreaker” (Bloodshot), which came out at the end of last year; this one, the vaunted (and apparently, much-MP3′ed) swan song from Adams’ old band Whiskeytown; and “Gold,” his bid for major label son-of-a-gun status. Given that Adams is, by anyone’s count, a talented and prolific (perhaps too much so) songwriter with an entire palate of classicist rock, pop and soul motifs at his disposal, the breakdown of product went thusly for his solo efforts: “Heartbreaker” was sheer, wired genius, raw and hillbilly with just the right touches of “Highway 61 Revisited”-style sneer thrown in, and “Gold” — damn you, Elton John! — was pure schlock that even Hootie would have deemed perhaps a bit facile. But it was “Pneumonia” — the record that Adams almost seemed to want to suppress — that showcased Adams, with the aid of Mike Daly and Caitlin Cary, at the peak of his songwriting powers. The record played havoc with American musical theater, Laurel Canyon-ified big FM pop and even the much-worn alt-country formula of sad eyes, boozy breath and a suitcase full of regret. “Pneumonia” was a big production, to be sure, but something about Whiskeytown made it stately and grand in a way that neither of Adams’ solo albums managed to be. Doing press for “Pneumonia,” Adams joked that the band was trying to make the last alt-country album ever. That remains to be seen — in fact, it is completely unlikely — but that doesn’t take anything away from “Pneumonia’s” random-access, broad-minded glory. It was probably the best record I heard all year.

Best Reissue of 13-Year-Old Girls Doing Stoner Samba: Wendy & Bonnie, Genesis (Sundazed)

The only album ever recorded by San Francisco’s Wendy and Bonnie Flower was a masterpiece of jazzy flutes, high harmonies and odd meshings of personal and political lyrics. Wendy was 17, Bonnie was 13 and this record they made in 1969 intuited stacks and stacks of minor musical movements to come (twee pop, post-Riot Grrl softness, the E-Z listening revival) as well as all the ones going on while it was made. The perfect symbiosis between the Mamas and the Papas, Astrud Gilberto and the Shaggs.

Best Indicator That We Have Lost Michael Stipe Forever: “What’s Going On”

This thing was a travesty, from start to finish, even before they made that awful, presumptuous video that, thankfully, Stipe had the good sense to not show up for. (Witness Fred Durst whining, “I can’t be watching people die!” thereby translating the tragedy of human suffering into something the dudes who date-rape to “Break Stuff” can get behind.) But there was something in that vocal line, that wavering, quivering sincerity while behind him, Marvin Gaye was propped up and reshaped and molded like a Silly Putty of mixed intentions, that all but shouted that Stipe had, perhaps not for the first time, lapsed into cluelessness. This was the Michael Stipe who wears funny T-shirts, hangs out with Jane Pratt and spends lots of time mulling over Bumble and Bumble products. What I wouldn’t give to have the old one back. Oh, wait, that is the old one. Shit.

Best Example of the More Things Are Changing, the More They Are Staying Exactly the Same: The “Now That’s What I Call Music!” Phenomenon

Something about these CDs — which compile in a bustle all the hits of the current day the moment they are not mega-huge anymore — takes me straight back to the days of Tiffany and outlet shopping. And I suppose that thing might be a recession-borne sense of getting musical hand-me-downs, just slightly out of fashion and going for the low, low price of almost free. That makes the “Now That’s What I Call Music!” CDs somewhat sad, but it also helps us to understand a little better the battered English pop psyche — after all, their charts are even stranger, and they’ve had these things for years.

Biggest Beatle Bummer Almost Above and Beyond the Death of George: “Freedom,” Paul McCartney

Apparently written in five minutes and recorded in possibly even less time to meet the release date for Paul’s new album, “Freedom” was barely a song, which contained barely an idea. It went something like this: “Why would anyone do this? They envy us our freedom! Why? ‘Cause freedom is great! Yay, freedom! FREE-DOM! Freedom is great!”

Most Unintentionally Hilarious Rapper: Ja Rule

He’s like the kid in 8th grade who uses the scary death metal voice, like, all year long.

The Good, Bad and the Ugly Award: Missy Elliott

Elliott dropped what was easily the best hip-hop record of the year. “… So Addictive” was adventurous in scope — it played with hip-hop’s new digitality in a way no other mainstream rapper has to date — and hilarious in execution. After all, how could she make such an obvious put-down song like “One Minute Man” sound so seductive and blithe without secretly having a wicked sense of humor? Coupled with her other megahit on the album — “Get UR Freak On,” soon to be heard at a football game near you — “… So Addictive” rattled and rolled the way everybody always knew Elliott could, since the day that “I Can’t Stand the Rain” track came out. So that was good. What was bad — and I mean, patently bad, totally without merit — was the Reebok commercial she did later this year, in which she rapped about a woman’s world and in just 30 seconds seemed to reduce all feminist theory that had gone before to some kind of you-go-girl sound bite. It was painful to watch, and not only because you knew Elliott knew better: The raps were wicked stale. Oh yeah, and then she was in that “Ugly” video for no-neck white boy hick rapper Bubba Sparxx, riding a tractor as Bubba sampled her. That was kind of lame.

The 15th Minute Award: Uncle Kracker Sir, I have the list in my hand and I see no “U. Kracker” on this list. I’m sorry, sir. You might want to try the club down the street …

The Chicago Award for the Most Unbearable and Most Ubiquitous Artist: Creed

Everything they do hurts my feelings.

The Mike Watt Award For Tireless Road-Dog-ism: Clem Snide

From spring ’till fall, Clem Snide were everywhere this year, doing it the old-fashioned way: earning it. The Brooklyn nerd-rock outfit probably played every beery bunghole in these United States this year — and even a few of the ones they have over in Europe, that is, before all hell broke loose — in support of their most recent record, “The Ghost of Fashion” (SpinART). That record — and more immediately, the live shows that supported it — got to the heart of why Clem Snide have become the world’s favorite pet band: They’re smart, they’re funny, they’re sincere, they rock and they can even write songs about Chinese babies and Corey Feldman without sounding like Cake or some other joke-rock band. In their hands, a song like that even sounds tender. When they weren’t playing these songs, they were either doing the new theme song for the TV show “Ed,” dedicating a cover of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” to Osama bin Laden or sleeping in the van. But apparently, not much.

Best Album to Feature Buddy Rich Samples: Solex, “Low Kick and Hard Bop” (Matador)

Those decrying the early and unfortunate death of electronica need look no further than Solex — aka Dutch record geek Elizabeth Esselink — to find everything necessary to carry the genre on, and notice everything it was missing up until her. Noticeably, that amounted to a sense of humor, which “Low Kick and Hard Bop” has in spades — big-band drum rolls and Ramsey Lewis overbite grooves mesh into song after song of delirious white-girl musings (delivered in a Liz Phair-y singsong rap style) that can only make you smile. Rich would have been pissed, but he secretly would have loved it. How could you not? The gal’s got moxie.

Best Sideways Cleavage: Nikka Costa, “Like a Feather,” from “Everybody Got Their Something”

This was the best sideways cleavage to be seen anywhere this year. Ms. Costa is not here this evening to accept this award, so I will gladly accept it for her, taking special care to honor her requests that I thank God Almighty, her fans and the makers of Scotch tape.

Best Symbiosis Between Nick Drake and an Actual Volkswagen: Maximilian Hecker, “Infinite Love Songs” (Kitty-Yo)

Maximilian Hecker is a male model — quite popular, apparently, with the same Berlin-at-night scene that produced shock feminist Peaches and her own brand of bloody Salt-n-Pepa tributes — who at heart is but a softy of English folk proportions. His overlooked debut album referenced Drake so heavily — as well as Cat Power, Jeff Buckley, Radiohead and all the other great mopes of our time — that it felt like a deliberate attempt to squeeze the singer’s sensibilities into a modern context. It was shockingly, blissfully successful. Give it a crack and you won’t believe you missed it.

Best Reissue of a Record From the Immediate Past: Pedro the Lion, “The Only Reason I Feel Secure/It’s Hard to Find a Friend” (Jade Tree)

Sure, it’s easy to grouse about Pedro the Lion muddying the waters of punk rock — more specifically, post-emo — with all that icky spirituality and highfalutin straight-edge judgment calls. But this reissue proved that Pedro — mostly the work of one David Bazan, wearer of a young man’s beard and seemingly an honest-to-goodness nice guy — has become Bono for guys who still wear dickeys and gas-station attendant jackets. Bazan’s guitars are pristine, his voice is affable and honest without ever resorting to indie faux-coyness and the production on his records — which he does mostly by himself — is crystalline and, at times, oddly joyous, never steering away from a big pop payoff. That his vision was this clear this early on — way back in the late ’90s! — only proves how many more great records the guy has in him.

Best Foreign-Language Frug Freakout to Appear on a Movie Soundtrack: Mohammed Rafi, “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” from the “Ghost World” soundtrack (Shanachie)

“Jaan Pehechaan Ho” plays during the opening credits of “Ghost World” — a wondrous (if flawed) film adaptation of the Daniel Clowes comic — as the camera pans from one blue-television-lighted suburban window to another, looking desperately for signs of life. As the camera finally happens upon the window of the film’s protagonist Enid (played masterfully by Thora Birch), we realize that it’s “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” that’s blaring out of her bedroom TV in an absolutely raucous ’60s Bollywood sequence. That sense of otherness — and the sly charm of it — goes on to inform the whole movie, but it never hits this early apex again. “Jan Pehechaan Ho” is Enid’s freak flag brought to speaker-bursting life.

The “20: That’s a Nice Age” Award: Britney Spears

Well, you knew it was inevitable that Spears would grow up — I mean, the signs were everywhere. Ahem. But it took her enlisting Jon Voight on her HBO “Live in Las Vegas” special — wherein the actor debased himself in a bit of fatherly playacting that went beyond camp and into sheer (but cruelly hilarious) vulgarity — to realize how much her love had matured, and in turn, just how cold and calculated it had become. Spears’ maturation-in-public might have gotten a lot of sweaty dads off the hook, but its handling was so hammy and preapproved that you couldn’t help but feeling something very essential about what we loved about Spears was lost in the process. And the overarching message of Spears-as-young-adult wasn’t very comforting, either — that she would survive, not because she’s got chops or great looks, but simply because she is now an enormous personality-driven corporate entertainment presence. That, oddly, puts her now in the same boat as Martha Stewart.

Best Comeback When You Could Have Just as Easily Assumed All Was Hopelessly Lost, Consigned to a Different Age: New Order, “Get Ready” (Warner/Reprise)

“Get Ready” perfected the poncy jock-rock formula New Order had been working on since the late 1980s. That it came without warning — just as I finally joined a gym — made it even more of a delight. All the pieces were in place: Bernard Sumner’s deadpan winsome vocals, Peter Hook’s octave-favoring bass runs and no end of post-Manchester disco groove. I thank you, everyone waiting for a new Morrissey album thanks you — after all, this was the next best thing — and eventually, my cholesterol count will thank you, too.

Michael peering out from under the dust is postmodern T.J. Eckleberg. He’s the eyes and ears of a dirty world gone even more awful. For me, it asks one pair of questions: Is he judging us, or is he just completely doped up?

In my hometown, Philadelphia, the Jacko buses volley up and down our main drags, gleaming in the autumn sun as weirdly imposing as they were meant to be. More than once, I’ve been walking down the street with this friend or that, stopped dead in my tracks. “Have you seen his face lately?” I’d say. “It’s like a death mask.” My friend would stare at the bus, and then turn quiet as we walked through the office district, or Chinatown, the world bustling about two people paralyzed in thought by the strange lizardly gaze of Michael Jackson, King of Pop. Whatever that means.

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If you turn on VH-1 these days, you’re liable to see a whole bunch of things that should turn the stomach of even the strongest pop aesthete: Bono murdelyzing “What’s Going On” with the help of Ja Rule or Justin Timberlake or whomever; Robert Downey Jr. lip-synching a new Elton John song, presented as a bona fide act of ars dramatis; and an episode of “Behind the Music” dedicated to the short, sad career of Blind Melon. But the strangest, most abandonedly fucked-up thing you will see on VH-1 — or for that matter, anywhere on television — is the movie in miniature that MJJ Productions has made to promote “You Rock My World,” the first single on “Invincible.”

The long-form video in length alone is meant to remind us of Jacko’s “Thriller” glory days, when with John Landis, the KoP made the “Citizen Kane” of music videos. “You Rock My World” is very different.

As best I can tell, this is what happens: There is a girl, or money, or something that a noble private eye type (played by Jacko) and an incredulous Chris Tucker have tracked to a Casbah-type location. The Casbah looks like it might have been rejected by Duran Duran for the “Hungry Like the Wolf” video. Michael Madsen apparently works at or frequents the place, and the upstairs office — any Casbah’s heart of darkness — is occupied by, get this, Marlon Brando! Brando apparently has the girl/thing in his possession, and is in no particular hurry to remit her/it to Jacko; he orders his goons on the singer, whereupon there is a bit of dialogue that goes something like this:

SLEAZY GOON: Is that all you got? Heh? (Mumbles.)

JACKO: (Motions a sort of “go screw yourself” gesture by sliding his hand up along his throat to his chin.)

SLEAZY GOON: You ain’t got nothin’! You’re nothin’!

JACKO: (Moving closer, in front of a posse we barely knew he had; stares into SLEAZY GOON’s eyes.)

And then it’s the same old thing: Jacko and his crew bust out a couple of “West Side Story” moves; then, apropos of nothing, Jacko yells, “HHHOOOHHHH!” The music comes in, and he grunts little Jacko puppy noises in a way that we perceive as musical.

I bring this up to illustrate a few things. One, there is so little new under the sun for Michael Jackson. Two, “You Rock My World” — if not the whole of “Invincible,” both the album and marketing campaign — relies on celebrity endorsements in a desperate effort to remind us that, yes, This Is Michael Jackson, You Love Michael Jackson and This Is The Same Old Michael Jackson. And three, these endorsements are used to distract us from Michael Jackson’s face.

It’s true. In a long video in which he is the star, Michael wears a broad-brimmed hat, and a do-rag under that. The hat darkens his face in shadows for almost the entire song.

In 10 minutes plus, Michael Jackson’s face is visible here for 15 seconds. And I swear, just the sight of it is enough to make you gasp — not for the pop thrill, but for its freakish pall.

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If Don DeLillo was right in saying that Mick Jagger’s lips represented the anus of a culture, then what part of our society is the face of Michael Jackson? Because the truth is, there’s not really much face left in Michael Jackson’s face. But fossils of it remain all over pop culture.

Michael’s face started out normal enough. Happen upon an old Jackson Five performance on television and it’s easy to remember what a sweet, doughy little boy he once was. Then, decked out in full pimp regalia on “The Mike Douglas Show,” 12-year-old Michael oozed soul. Eventually, Michael began sliding into his teens, which you always got the feeling that Michael and his handlers regarded as a descent — that adulthood, no matter what Michael’s fame and music might achieve, would permanently sour him, soil that grace that you hear on, say, the Jackson Five’s reading of “Who’s Loving You.” (This would explain a lot about Michael as potential pederast and go a long way into making him the sad character we have of late simply inferred that he is.)

But even teenage Michael, even Studio 54 Michael, even “Off The Wall” Michael emitted a certain kind of celebrity grace that all but pointed to almost otherworldly greatness. Look at him in those old Studio 54 VIP room pictures! See how tacky and grotesque Andy and Liza look next to him? Pre-”Thriller” Michael exuded something very Christlike — that weird sort of Gatsby beneficence. When he appeared in that sequined leotard in the video for “Rock With You” — probably the last time we saw Michael’s face in its most natural form — he may have intended to inflict puppy love, but what he really did, his eyes never staring but penetrating for the odd nanosecond here and there, was hypnotize: Sometime between “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” Michael Jackson represented untrammeled possibility, America itself, taken to some kind of spiritual, Whitmanesque plane few of us have ever inhabited.

By the time “Thriller” had gone nuclear, however — which seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, the Monday morning following his world-stopping debut of the Moonwalk — something had gone terribly wrong, and Michael spent this era in earnest, really, trying to come up with anything to stop it. To perhaps take the Jesus analogy too far, what happened to Michael Jackson in the 1980s was what would have happened to Christ if everyone believed him.

It was all too much.

Michael had no crucifixion, no betrayal, no disbelievers in the ’80s. But somewhere, deep down, he had to know he was no Christ child. Comeuppance was coming, and to dodge it, since it was as certain as rain, he’d have to delude himself into thinking that he could get away from it. He’d have to, bit by bit, shed his humanity.

And in the aftermath of “Thriller” — after that visage, now morphing by the month into something very different, very anti-soul, very anti-rhythm and blues, after his face had been plastered onto every surface imaginable for causes serving himself and everyone and no one — you could watch the humanity peel away like sunburned skin. Michael Jackson ceased to be an entertainer by trying to be the entertainer. His albums devolved into terse buzzwords: “Bad”; “Dangerous.” Each one bore a more obvious marketing fiasco than the one that preceded it. They looked like desperate attempts for Michael Jackson to retain the most valuable commodity he ever had: that spark of lusty danger, that high croon of pop salvation, that thing that thrilled. Those eyes. That face.

Meanwhile, his head changed like a broken Stretch Armstrong. Lighter. Longer. Finally, plastic surgery whittled it into the shape we now recognize as nothing more and nothing less than sickness.

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Is all this to lament the where and what that the face has become now, to show remorse over the way Michael Jackson has turned from a certain kind of uneasy harmlessness — even a salve — to something so patently harmful — a manifestation of the darkness and slippery mutability of each man’s soul once he realizes that anything is possible?

Not really. Consider this: The face of Michael Jackson is the natural correlative of the body of Elvis Presley — an ambling, streaming comment on sadness and escapism. As Elvis’ body mutated as he withdrew and became more desperate, so too did Michael’s face warp and revolt as the very same things plagued him. Fame. Sexuality. Dried-up creativity. Ego. All of it.

It’s a pop analogy that Michael might be flattered to consider. Still, it’s relentlessly true.

Just as Elvis never really returned from the Army, Michael Jackson never really returned from “Thriller.” And it’s worth talking about because of the kind of exalted company Jackson will rest in forevermore, whether he manages that ever-elusive comeback or not. (After all, once you’re the King, how can you ever come back?)

Plainly, too much was given to — and asked of — Michael Jackson. In such a situation, not only will morality and creativity necessarily crumble, but so too will reality. We wonder about these people, we wonder what the hell they’re thinking when they do the things they do: Michael Jackson, Howard Hughes, Marlon Brando — people who are so adept at success that the only thing left to conquer is their own delusions. Should we really be surprised that that’s the hardest part of all?