My pal Nick Giuliano, midday show host at New London's hit music station Q-105 (and The Day's estimable Fenway Frankly Red Sox blogger), is a truly fine human.

As such, I do not envy him, this weekend, when the Q-105 job requires that he attend and interview the participants of the latest American Idol Live! tour landing Saturday in the Mohegan Sun Arena.

Now, for all I know, many or even all of the AI performers are great folks -- friendly and perhaps humorous and certainly delighted by their new-found celebrity. And Nick is witty and clever on his feet and he'll do his usual excellent job.

But WHY is this necessary? Why is this tour sustainable? Why is AI popular and how does is resonate in a Thinking Society?

Because, to me, it's not music – or, rather, it's music on the most mundane level: the artistic equivalent of a Pepsi-stained shirt-cardboard hanging in a gallery next to the Caravaggio or Hockney.

Seriously: are the AI winners and finalists of the recent years providing you with the songs and performances that will stay with you for life — joyously imprinted as the soundtrack to your youth or (frighteningly) your adulthood? If so, that's, ah, not good ...

But enough of my screed. Perhaps, in context, Rick Koster is the music-blogging equivalent of shirt cardboard.

I'll tell you, though, who gets to the heart of everything musical as represented by AI and its sibling shows: Steven Wilson. Yes, THAT Steven Wilson. (And here's a song you'll never hear on American Idol because, well, they're clodhoppers, is what they are!)

In the film documentary about the making of Insurgentes, Wilson's first solo album, he tells an interviewer his thoughts about the phenomenon of American Idol and the music industry.

Here's that specific clip.

I've also transcribed it below, in case you wanna just keep reading while you're listening to the afore-linked music clip. (Read in a British accent for authenticity). Wilson says:

"It's become mind-numbing, really. And music now has become reduced, particularly with that whole American Idol, Pop Idol thing … music has been reduced to this kind of charade where people who really should be doing – you know, if they're musicians at all — they should be singing on cruise ships or in wine bars. That's about the level of creativity they have.

"But instead they're being elevated to this level of music icons, music superstars … and inspiring a whole generation of people after them to aspire to that, too … that the most important thing in life is to be famous. The whole thing about American Idol is it's almost a way for the music business to regain control of pop music because they were really losing control of it.

"If you think back to the kind of post-grunge, sort of Nirvana era when a lot of the most important rock music then was coming out from independent labels, kids making music in their bedroom, and the way the major music business, the big record labels, found to kind of regain that ground was to literally create manufactured — I mean, they've always manufactured bands in pop … you go back to the Bay City Rollers and stuff like that — they've always manufactured music but at least they were a bit more subtle about it. They tried to perpetuate the myth that these bands actually had, you know, come together through their own volition and created and written their own songs.

"Now they don't even pretend. They actually put the whole charade upon the screen for you and say, 'Look, we're manufacturing this. This is a complete fake – and you're STILL gonna buy it.'"

Wilson's quote is the most brilliant and concise explanation for what's happening in the Music Biz today that I've yet seen expressed.

Oh, Wilson's newest solo effort, the double-disc Grace for Drowning, is due out on Sept. 26. I've been privileged to hear it, in all its myriad charms and stunning creativity, in advance. Investigate for yourself at the CD's web site here.