(33 1/3) www.continuumbooks.com

Imagine my surprise when it wasn’t the 33 1/3’s series’ new book on Throbbing Gristle's Twenty Jazz Funk Greats in my mail slot but rather a nasty but even-handed treatise on the soulless chanteuse and a dramatic nearly Foucault-like look into the spirit of tackiness and taste. Yes; the Canadian Carl that edits The Globe, writes for Slate and runs Zoilus.com has the temerity to bring Milan Kundera's essays on kitsch into the fray while discussing the Lady Celine. Tearing down the rococo emotionalism of the slack jawed Dion is one thing – how it so easily played/plays into the market’s dictate for such feeling, be it the harshness of the Spanish language and English speaking markets, the suppleness of the French language or other competitors in the tailor-made stakes. But to put her within the context of all that’s base – obviously and deviously so – is deliciously bold.

Now, Wilson couldn’t do this if he wasn’t a sharp music critic. Calling what she does bland monotony raised to a pitch of obnoxious bombast is good. Calling her pounding sound “R&B with the sex and slyness surgically removed… French chanson severed from its wit and soul… Oprah Winfrey–approved chicken soup for the consumerist soul… a never-ending crescendo of personal affirmation deaf to social conflict and context” bolder still. And that’s nearly one mouthful. But as a wizened historian of Camp Celine – the intervention of schlock’s godfather David Foster, her mawkish poor childhood, her weird husband, her overarching efforts to reach as many and all as fast as possible like a speedball – that’s where Wilson’s most needed. With one, er, titanic 164-page rush, Wilson’s written the most crucial ad catty tract in this series. Brava. A.D. AMOROSI