33 1/3 is a series of books that each take one album, and examine it in exhaustive detail. The series to date tends to split the difference between older rock albums universally recognized for their brilliance—MC5’s Kick Out the Jams, the Band’s Music From Big Pink, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited—and albums that any self-respecting college radio DJ has on vinyl—Guided By Voices’ Bee Thousand, DJ Shadow’s Entroducing…, the Replacements’ Let It Be. So it came as a surprise that their latest offering was a look at Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. Even more surprising was that the book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, completely knocked me on my ass. Written by Carl Wilson, an editor and critic at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, the book uses the Canadian diva as a jumping off point to examine the idea of taste itself, shot through the prism of class and social belonging. Why do we like what we like? When we say we don’t like an artist (and nearly every self-respecting music nerd would say they don’t like Dion) what are we really saying? How much of what we like and dislike is bound up in our social class? The book is smart, moving, funny, and will have you questioning every aesthetic judgment you’ve ever made. You may even find yourself giving Celine Dion a listen. Wilson was kind enough to answer a few of my questions over email.

Crawdaddy!: Were there other artists besides Celine Dion that you considered for this project? Could you have examined, for instance, Kenny G, or is there something unique about her?

Carl Wilson: I considered some other artists—Kenny G is a good example, and I thought about the Eagles, for example, who have the best-selling album ever; while I was working on the book I came to think that the current most-reviled act, the equivalent of Celine’s stature earlier in the decade, is probably Nickelback, who are also Canadian and therefore a band that I take somewhat personally. I have to confess that I’m happy I didn’t have to spend a lot of time listening to Nickelback. But Celine presents some special qualities: everyone agrees that what she does is at a high level of musical accomplishment, for instance, no matter how much they dislike her, so that combination was striking to me; it raises a particular puzzle. (How can music be at once good and no good? What does the word “good” really mean?) As well, she is kind of in a genre of her own. Obviously there’s a whole adult-contemporary realm, but her version is especially intense and operatic, at the same time it’s in soft focus. Plus she brings this European pop influence that makes her extra confusing to a lot of North American rock listeners. Nickelback doesn’t do anything quite so exotic. In my friend Ann Powers’ phrase, they’re “bread and butter music,” and while Celine falls into that category, too, she brings a lot of other baggage that seemed worth springing open.

Most of all, though, as I say in the book, I think I had more of a personal grudge against Celine, and that edge made the project more compelling to me: why did she piss me off so much? Kenny G just bores me; he doesn’t actually make me mad. (Although sometimes I get territorial about the word “jazz” and am annoyed that he gets called “contemporary jazz.”) To think about taste you have to start from the way it feels so personal and deep. The question then becomes whether it’s actually more adopted, more constructed, than experience makes us think.

Crawdaddy!: What do you think is the biggest misconception most people have about Celine Dion?

Wilson: The same misconception that they have about a lot of pop stars; that she’s phony, just in it for the money. When you start getting to know her biography and her persona, it’s clear that she’s kind of helplessly sincere. Yes, she works the pop game—to her, that’s her job. And she has people around her whose marching orders she takes, primarily her husband. But she cares about her job, has a strong work ethic; that makes her work personal to her. She probably doesn’t conceive of herself as an artist-with-a-capital-A at all. She’s more like a very conscientious, enthusiastic craftsperson, like a terrific plumber. (An analogy that comes to mind because people are always talking about her “pipes.”) That may not meet with our expectations, but it’s a long tradition in show business, and none of us disrespect, say, Judy Garland for being primarily concerned with being a great performer rather than a creative original. It’s just that in many ways that social role has become disreputable.

The reaction to it is rooted in an upper-class and upper-middle-class self-actualization ideology that, in a vulgarized form, has been dispersed throughout the culture. Celine herself falls prey to it, in the sense that she sings songs about self-empowerment and does projects like that awful Miracle book and CD that fetishizes newborn babies as if they were sacred objects. But in her way of being a performer, she’s an old-fashioned workhorse, and that deserves more credit than it gets.

Of late she’s occasionally let it slip in interviews that she wishes she’d done something else with her life, and I think that’s because she would have been happier in another entertainment culture than the contemporary one. Though that’s very armchair-psycho-sociologist of me to say. Maybe she just really wishes she’d married someone her own age. Who knows?

Crawdaddy!: When I tell friends that I’ve been reading an amazing book about Celine Dion, every single time the response is laughter. What was the response when you told people what you were writing about?

Wilson: There were two different ways I told people: Sometimes I’d do it knowing they were going to find it funny, so I’d set it up like a joke: “I’m writing a book; it’s part of this series of books about albums. All the other authors have written about one of their favorite albums. I decided to do the exact opposite, so my book is about … [pause] … Celine Dion.” Other times, when I was feeling less secure, I’d leap ahead of their reactions: “I’m writing a book that’s ostensibly about Celine Dion, but it’s really about the gap between critical or elite taste and mass taste.” I’ve never used the word “ostensibly” so many times in my life.

I always wanted to say, “Yeah, I’m writing a book about a Celine Dion album,” and leave it at that, but I never had that much nerve.

Crawdaddy!: Were you ever able to get to a point where it wasn’t embarrassing to be heard listening to Celine Dion?

Wilson: It was only after I’d written the book, really. I didn’t write the section where I admitted how embarrassing I found the whole process—playing this Celine album repeatedly in my badly soundproofed loft—until late in the process, and once I admitted it to myself, that helped get me over it. So when I received her new album, Taking Chances, I found myself playing it out loud fairly unselfconsciously. It was also the first time that I found myself liking songs of hers without having to work through them first, because it was the first time I had a new store of Celine songs, music with no history of knee-jerk antipathy on my part. About half of the new album I can listen to with not-so-complicated pleasure. And the other half I’m kind of comfortable with disliking, too.