Well, right -- the discussion of how and why specific performers are being misrepresented is exactly the kind of place where we might draw in writers and thinkers who have no personal interest in these performers' music necessarily, since this is something that doesn't just apply to one performer but instead indicates a set of behaviors on the part of the people doing the misrepresenting.

I think "narrow" is a good word for Yglesias's takes on pop culture (my argument in the "Summer Girls" thing was basically "why are you treating this differently than you treat other 'more important' stuff; why don't the intellectual processes for one thing seem to hold for another thing?" -- especially given the fact that he seems to be a pretty good & reasonably intellectual sports writer, another leisure activity), but this sense of narrowness really doesn't transfer to his political writing at all, which is quite evenhanded and rational. I also don't mean to conflate him with the more coalition/tribal-identification-hungry sites I read with far more ambivalence -- Huffington Post and the like, often including ThinkProgress, whose webspace he shares.