There's no business. Here's showbusiness.

I've reached the point in my life where if I tried to write about a modern pop star I would get it wrong. This was standard in the sixties, seventies and eighties, when pipe smoking, be-cardiganed men tried to engage with the idea of "rock 'n' roll": a ludicrous fad full of screaming girls and moronic, monosyllabic young men with too much hair. God help us if there's a war. 

They always got it wrong. They looked down on it. They sneered. It was all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Grudgingly, they'd give you that John Lennon appeared to be quite bright, and the Beatles did "Yesterday" which was a lovely toe tapper. But The Rolling Stones were neanderthal thugs who took drugs and urinated freely at petrol stations. And by the time punk came along they were vindicated. 

How I laughed at these dusty fustions. Seeing comedy punk trailblazer Ben Elton, in his mid-eighties mullet and glittery suit pomp, confessing a deep love for Dire Straits on Wogan's couch was embarrassing. Why were these guys so laughably out of touch? 

Now its my turn not to get it. 

Popular music has changed so much in the last twenty years in terms of its values, its accessibility and its use that I can no longer properly imagine its manufacture or the lifestyle of the people who make it. There has been a break in continuity from the hoary old rock ethos. Or perhaps "rock 'n' roll" was the snap, the diversion, the dead end. Pop stars are in show-business again. Singers are hardworking grafters, vocally trained and technically accomplished. They are the friendly, customer facing, human element of a larger machine, and people want the machine. Like a top end meal-for-one there is, at least, consistency. 

I know there are still bands out there. Indie bands who sound like BBC6. But they are unlikely to be asked to judge The Voice or appear on Strictly. The myth of realness is over. The gatekeepers of authenticity have been trampled underfoot. Music is just noise for jogging now. It has a utile function: it is for stuff. Algorithms are your DJ and they'll find music that is like the music you like and you will like it. You will feel happy when you feel like being happy and sad when you need to feel deep. There's an app for that. Arguably this has always been the case, but now there is none of the preciousness of meaning, none of the grit or grain, no poetry beyond Hallmark platitudes. 

You're getting me all wrong - I don't know that this is bad, it's just the way it is. Music as a power to change society was a mid-twentieth century blip, and palpably achieved nothing. The hippies were as bad as the uptight parents they inherited the world from. 

Modern performers are not artists in a Romantic sense: they're grafters, craftspeople, and they are rewarded for their perfection, their technical ability, for their breathing techniques and virtuosity. And if Pete Doherty is the last of the Romantic, rocker poets what are we actually missing? His exploits are not "legendary". They are woeful and pathetic: minor theft, public drunkenness, shilling paintings in his own blood for drug money. Glorious. His voice is a rasping whisper, his face as powdery and swollen as a deployed airbag. 

I don't know what platform HRVY even appears on, though the fact that he was introduced on "Strictly Come Dancing" as "pop star HRVY" is telling. I assume he's Insta or Youtube famous as I don't understand young people's obsession with Youtube. I might have assumed he was a children's TV presenter or a junior cast member of Doctors or Britain's Youngest Butcher if he wasn't specifically introduced as a popstar. That was his character, in the same way that Bill Bailey was "funny but old" and  that girl from Eastenders was "bratty actress" (that poor girl - screeds of abuse). It doesn't really matter: he's an all round entertainer: some singing, some dancing, some influencing. Good teeth, good team player. A bob-a-jobbing scout or a cheeky redcoat who's not threatening. 

He's a 21st Century Tommy Steele. A light entertainer. And that's good again. This is what they want.