In this week’s NYC mailer, Flavorpill editor Alex Abramovich takes an in-depth look into culture, compassion, and Celine Dion.

Carl Wilson’s new book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, is the 52nd title in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, and the first to set the series’ mission statement on its head. Instead of bringing his critical faculties to bear on a single, seminal album, Wilson — who writes for Toronto’s Globe and Mail, blogs at Zoilus.com, and reads this week in Greenpoint and on the LES — confronts Céline Dion’s multi-platinum (and much-despised) record Let’s Talk About Love. But the diva’s just a jumping-off point: Wilson uses Dion’s record as a crowbar, and pries open the assumptions and prejudices which shape our tastes in the first place.

Despite the abundant preconceptions surrounding Wilson’s ostensible subject (or, perhaps, because of them), the results are subtle, and startling enough to give the most jaded of readers pause.

“As far as I knew, I had never even met anyone who liked Céline Dion,” Wilson writes in the book’s opening pages, dismissing the singer as “Oprah Winfrey-approved chicken soup for the consumerist soul,” and likening her music’s wail to “metal on estrogen.” Noting that the album is anchored by the Titanic love theme “My Heart Will Go On”, he compares Céline’s fans to “people who, aboard the Titanic, would have perished in steerage.” But then Wilson brings us up short: “If my disdain for her extends to them,” he asks, “am I trying to deny them a lifeboat?”

What follows isn’t a reevaluation of Céline’s record, so much as a look at the basic building blocks of taste itself: An account of the Canadian singer’s leap from a low-class, Québécois background to superstardom in China, Ghana, Afghanistan, and Jamaica (where, according to Wilson’s source, “Bad man have [to] play love tune [to] show ‘dat them a lova too”); an appeal to David Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste,” Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgment, and especially Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste; and — because philosophy only gets Wilson so far — a visit to Las Vegas, to take in Céline’s stage show, and a deep delve into the looking-glass world of her fans.

Coming up hard against living, breathing, feeling people whose lives were enriched by an artist who critics are practically obliged to dismiss out of hand, Wilson shifts his focus from aesthetics to ethics: when the ship of state begins to look like the Titanic, and every social and cultural signifier is suddenly set adrift, how are we, the people, to locate our place within the amorphous mass of “we, the people?” According to Wilson, we locate it by suspending value judgments altogether: by giving up the cultural center and spinning off in atomized subgroups, united only by their contempt for figures like Céline. It’s a short-term solution: Ultimately, we give up on each other.

“We are omnivores,” Wilson concludes. “We devour everything. That way we never have to answer the question, ‘Who do you mean, ‘we’?'”

This last question is equally about community and democracy; about what it means to define oneself in opposition to the mainstream when, in reality, all of us are caught up in the same current, and can’t help but recognize the faces floating beside our own. As Wilson would have it, “through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves.” And so, he calls for a new, 21st-century criticism, rooted in compassion rather than the elitist impulse, and gut feeling rather than cold, intellectual response — a new criticism which is “something like a tour of aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir,” which uses the culture as a means of helping us understand our neighbors and, finally, ourselves.

It’s similar to the function we at Flavorpill have been serving, on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, since 2001. And here at Flavorpill’s International Headquarters, in New York, it gives us hope to see we’re not alone.

Wilson reads this week at Word in Greenpoint (Tue Jan 22), and as part of the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series (Wed Jan 23). Alex Abramovich joined Flavorpill’s editorial team in September. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Slate, Bookforum, and other publications, he’s also the author of a history of American music, forthcoming from Riverhead Books and Penguin UK.