EXCERPT ‘Be yourself’ is the wisdom Joan Baez dispenses to aspiring musicians after a fifty-year career.44 When the pop subject is understood as an artistic subjectivity, singularity is all that counts. For pop places its reliance in ‘being oneself’ in a sense vague enough to accommodate the most diverse conceptions of identity. What’s important is that it should represent the irreducible bastion of a mode of expression that will belong only to oneself and to one’s own individual spontaneity. Provided that an individual knows how to be a virtuoso of themselves, the art of pop will be accessible to them.…