Q: You’ve said that your band’s new album, ”Elephant,” is about the ”death of the sweetheart.” What does that mean?

JACK WHITE: The sweetheart, the gentleman — it’s the same thing. These ideas seem to be in decline, and I hate it. You look at your average teenager with the body piercings and the tattoos. You have white kids going around talking in ghetto accents because they think that makes them hard. It’s so cool to be hard. We’re against that.

MEG WHITE: The message everywhere is it’s O.K. not to care about anything. Everything can be judged, everything can be trashed.

So are you proposing that people embrace the values of a previous era?

JACK: No, I don’t want to be considered old-fashioned or a Luddite or conservative. But it’s sad to see young kids today — they’re sitting around listening to hip-hop or new metal, with a Sony PlayStation, a bong of marijuana. This is their life. It’s a whole culture. And the parenting is so relaxed about that.

In other words, kids need discipline. That sounds counter to the rock ‘n’ roll ideal.

Well yeah, Kloserman himself doesn’t even live by these dictates anymore, given his increasingly bitter attitude toward the Internet. The main problem with his argument is the idea that “culture is just there.” It’s not! It’s something we shape and create, and that’s what I think we’re really arguing over. And I think that’s a legitimate thing to argue over, or even a rational one. Your preferred brand of culture being triumphant doesn’t merely mean that you “won,” it also means that more culture like yours will be produced, and the cultural values embedded therein will gain more approval and have more say in the wider culture. It’s especially weird to expect that critics shouldn’t take the direction of culture seriously. Who becomes a critic without thinking that significant numbers of people are wrong? Who would become a critic if no one became irrationally offended about the popularity of Nickelback?

The real problem here, I think, it a misunderstanding of politics. In the article, Klosterman uses as his primary example Gina Arnold’s claim about “how allegedly awesome it was that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was on the radio, and how this was almost akin to America electing a new president.” Klosterman thinks this is stupid, and that we shouldn’t think about culture like we think about politics. But maybe we should. And to do that, we’d need to think about politics in a different way, too. We would have to be aware that people who don’t agree with us exist, but also that they are just another group like ours, and that there are many groups, and sometimes they happen to all come together around a shared issue/song, but that doesn’t mean they agree on everything. (“Smells Like Teen Spirit” got “elected” because it appealed to more than punk fans, reaching out to metal and hard rock fans too, which allowed its values to be spread to, say, me, by alerting me to the associated discussion around Nirvana and causing me to listen to the Pixies.) Tolerance in politics requires taking it precisely as seriously as it deserves: being aware that issues are important, but that they are never black and white, and that there are many competing perspectives. For the average person, politics is nowhere near as serious as we tend to think it is, and our influence on it is about as important as it is in culture.

But for people like Chuck Klosterman—and at least some of the people reading this right now, I’d wager—we are the pundits of culture, or at least of music. We are actually precisely the ones that need to not take Klosterman’s advice. Because our opinion does matter and can have an effect on the shape of culture in some small way, even if we generally can’t see that. Klosterman’s value-neutral approach to culture is only possible because he is, you know, a straight white dude. Those are the “neutral” values of culture. And if we want to change that, those people with louder voices need to not simply accept culture as it is.

Culture can’t be wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s always ‘right,’ nor does it mean you always have to agree with it. But culture is never wrong. People can be wrong. Movements can be wrong. But culture—as a whole—cannot be wrong. Culture is just there. …

If you feel betrayed by culture, it’s not because you’re right and the universe is wrong; it’s only because you’re not like most other people. But this should make you happy, because—in all likelihood—you hate those other people anyway. …

Now, it’s quite possible you disagree with me on this issue. And if you do, I know what your argument is: You’re thinking, But I’m idealistic. This is what people who want to inflict their values on other people always think; they think that there is some kind of romantic, respectable aura that insulates the inflexible, and that their disappointment with culture proves that they’re trapped by their own intellect and good taste. Somehow they think their sense of betrayal gives them integrity. It does not. If you really have integrity—if you truly live by your ideals, and those ideals dictate how you engage with the world at large—you will never feel betrayed by culture. You will simply enjoy culture more. You won’t necessarily start watching syndicated episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond, but you will find it interesting that certain people do. You won’t suddenly agree that Amelie was a more emotive movie than Friday Night Lights, but you won’t feel alienated and offended if every film critic you read tells you that it is. You will care, but you won’t care.