One chance, usually perfunctory, and then you're sent back home. I thought Emm Gryner's major-label debut, Public, was as perfect an example of 1998 production art as the year allowed, and "Summerlong", in particular, was a heartbreakingly flawless pop song, but either everybody else disagreed, or else, more likely, they never got to decide. Or maybe it was Emm's fault, for doing things in the wrong order, for neglecting the requisite stint as a British soap-opera actress before beginning her music career, for spending all that time learning to operate instruments when she should have been fronting a grunge band, or getting punched in the throat by Courtney Love. Whichever, one album was all she got from Mercury before mergers swallowed her place on their roster. Warne Livesey, London studios, expensive session players, they're all gone. This time, back on her own label (Dead Daisy Records, invented for her pre-Public debut The Original Leapyear), she can't even afford for the package art to be in color. Eleven songs, all eight-track demos, self-recorded over a couple Spring weeks, that's all her follow-up consists of. Imminent celebrity, and then complete isolation. State of the art, and then borrowed pianos. It's the familiar story-arc of defeat, or at least tragedy, and however wildly we applaud the small victories at the end, like the ex-quarterback who gets hired as an assistant coach by his old high school just in time for the state championship, we know that by the rules of the form, this is a consolation prize. The trophy in his hand, or the plume of water spraying off the test track as a car-commercial Hyundai fishtails in slow motion, are icons of diminished expectations, ways to intimate that real, mundane lives can be filled with adrenaline, like the marquee lives of idols, if you can pretend to ignore the scale. The suggestion, of course, is corrupt. Real lives aren't ennobled by imitating decadence in miniature, but by recognizing that the hovering Grails in commercials are worthless, whether they're illusory or not. A high-school football coach who lives for the trophy will neglect (and mis-perform) his real job as a disciplinarian and role model. If your Hyundai ever skids like that, you're probably about to crash it. Your session musicians may be excellent, but they aren't you. How did this simple truth become clouded, in music? We look down on ghost-written novels, and we don't even have a term for painters who hire other professionals to carry out their brushstrokes, yet the mercenary union owns popular music. Christina Aguilera's three-minute lip-sync medley during halftime of the MLS Cup was in a way the definitive mainstream pop spectacle. Her headset had a microphone on it, to preserve the thinnest possible fiction that she was actually singing, but instead of a band, she just had dancers on the stage with her. Who made the music she was squirming to? Nobody knows, nobody cares. Arguably her "performance" had less to do with her singing than with her bare stomach, anyway (exposed despite the potential late-November Foxboro chill, but then covered, comically, by a superfluous parka, as if she hadn't noticed that the New England weather chose to cooperate with soccer for once). And on TV, maybe it worked, but in person the stomach was too far away to inspire much awe, and the dance-routine, without hyperkinetic post-production to animate it, looked all too human, especially as the portable stage shifted back and forth, unsteadily, in sympathy with the dancers' lurches. Later, during the Cup-presentation ceremony, one edge of it collapsed, spilling a couple United players back onto the field. Indignation surfaced one event too late.

But then, just as I'm working myself into a judgmental fury, I remember three of the reasons why a simplistic equation of individual presence with artistic worth isn't as productive as I might have been about to think. First, it's perfectly possible to have an enormous degree of individual control despite the physical involvement of a lot of people. Peter Greenaway and Kevin Smith films are no less unmistakably theirs for the length of their credits. Second, it's insane to claim, on the one hand, that art is about communication, and then insist, on the other, that it has to be created in isolation. Glen Ballard, and Glen and Alanis' creative synergy, are inextricable components of Alanis' Jagged Little Pill and Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie; Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman's collaborative dynamics with Cyndi Lauper and Patty Smyth are significant factors in my love for those records; it's hard to argue that Veruca Salt were on their way towards Eight Arms to Hold You without Bob Rock's intervention. And third, often you simply can't tell. I liked Public. I liked it when it was all I knew of Emm, and I still liked it after I heard The Original Leapyear, so Science Fair is no sudden revelation. I still like Public, for that matter. And I liked Chantal Kreviazuk's plainly mainstream debut, Under These Rocks and Stones, and I like her second album, Colour Moving and Still, even more, despite the fact that it doesn't appreciably alter the formula. Maybe, locked in a cabin with an eight-track for two weeks, Chantal would make a record that sounds just like this, and maybe she'd make one that consists of three twenty-five minute ambient polkas built entirely out of belching samples. I don't know. She wrote seven of these songs herself and co-wrote the other three (two with Raine Maida of Our Lady Peace), and plays piano and organ on them in addition to singing, so you don't have to be outrageously charitable to assume that she had a lot to do with how the record sounds, but then again producer Jay Joyce is credited with enough instruments to explain most of the noises, so maybe she didn't. Not only is the question unanswerable without resorting to (shudder) journalism, but because it can't be answered by inspecting the artwork, on one level it has to be irrelevant. If we can't tell whether these songs are individual catharsis or calculated commerce by listening to them, then we're asking a meaningless question. Either we find things to like, or we don't.

And the fourth complication interfering with this laudable (or smug, depending on your perspective) scheme to base all evaluations of art on the honesty and directness with which it was fabricated is that even honesty doesn't always matter. Your nerves have as much to do with how you understand art as the artist's intentions do, and every once in a while, despite your best attempts to intellectualize your senses, a song made with no good reason will seem to pull you close and speak an eternal truth into your ear, a truth that you know, somehow, is passing through its body without being absorbed, the song a conduit for an insight it is itself immune to. And so, at the end of Bandits, a 1997 German film in the understaffed genre of fugitive-all-girl-rock-band pursuit thrillers, long past the point where my irritation with its clichéd manipulations has begun interfering with my vision, after the motley band of the title (butch, erratic singer/guitarist; pretty, naïve singer/bassist; older, maternal, possibly-insane keyboardist; diffident, ambitious and ultimately nihilistic drummer) has run through a chaotic (but self-written, at least partially self-performed, and opportunistically sung in English despite the movie otherwise being in German) repertoire ranging from glib jangle-pop to manic, distorted thrash, via a surging cover of "All Along the Watchtower" and a drunken massacre of the German traditional song "Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär", all of which may be found on the over-generous seventeen-song soundtrack, the band, minutes from eluding the authorities for good, opt to stage an impromptu one-song concert on the roof of an abandoned building conveniently located next to their escape port. Time, taste and information-flow collapse in standard movie fashion, as the population of the city flocks to the streets below them and the police converge, all within the first half of the song, leaving the second half for the SWAT team's clumsy assault on the building, the musicians' improbable forty-foot stage dives, a photogenic cross-tarmac sprint whose presence in the trailer is mostly why I went to see the movie in the first place, and an idiotic concluding over-reaction that unwisely attempts to cross Emilio Estevez's Wisdom and Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil. The whole thing is baldly inane, relying on the mass-media-Bonnie-and-Clyde phenomenon, familiar to pursuit movies but never seen in life, in which everybody but the designated antagonists become ardent supporters of the fugitives. Somehow along the way a slimy, cocaine-addled record executive has turned their non-demo-sounding demo-tape into a commercial CD as well, allowing the producers to line the public thoroughfares with self-referential posters for, essentially, the movie's soundtrack.