Céline Dion — with her flailing scrawny arms, her bedazzled dresses, her sketch-com accent and her ability to project broad, octave-spanning sentimentality with all the force and subtlety of a leaf blower — is just about the easiest, safest cultural target for derisive humour we have. She’s the soulless, sexless (one prays) insect leader of a robotic army that watches Oprah, shops at Wal-Mart and votes Republican, right? Well, if you think so — if you, like 98.79 per cent of arts critics, routinely toss out Céline’s name as shorthand for aggressive mediocrity — Carl Wilson wants a word with you.

Wilson is a Globe and Mail editor and proprietor of the influential music blog Zoilus. His book, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (Continuum Books, $11.95, 176 pages), represents a bit of a departure for Continuum’s 33 1/3 series exploring classic records. Unlike previous titles that explored love affairs with hipster-friendly classics (Meat Is Murder, Pet Sounds, Songs in the Key of Life), Wilson’s book takes on an album and an artist that has been, for him and virtually everyone he’s ever known, an object of contempt. His project is to unpack that contempt and see where it comes from and what makes it tick.

Wilson has emerged from his trip to the mass-cultural mountain ready to drop bombs, and not on Dion and her fans. In Wilson’s estimation, Dion is sort of the equivalent of a high-school nerd, red-headed and allergy-prone, sitting in the corner of the cafeteria building a gorgeous model of her level-nine wizard. Meanwhile, the Pavement disciples who mock her are no different than jocks as they engage in bullying tactics designed to cement their superior status and mask their fundamental insecurity and fear of emotional vulnerability.

If that sounds like a leap, you need to understand that when Wilson talks about Let’s Talk About Love, he’s really talking about the way we relate to each other as human beings. Readers of the dizzyingly dweeby intellectualizing that often makes Wilson’s blog an exhausting pleasure to read will not be surprised that, for him, a discussion of the love theme from Titanic must encompass an examination of Quebecois culture, the history of parlour entertainment as it relates to the immigrant experience, the philosophies of Hume and Kant and the sociological experiments of Pierre Bordieu.
Through all this, he paints (in charmingly easygoing prose) a credible picture of Dion as an impoverished outsider artist in an outsider tradition who rose — Horatio Alger or Sean Combs–style — to the top of the world’s music-sales heap. Wilson’s reading of philosophy, social theory and his own conscience pretty conclusively demonstrates that the revulsion Dion inspires in the cultural elite is a function of class. We like what we like because of our social circle and education and cultural and economic prospects, and we dislike most intensely that which we perceive to be beneath our station.

He makes an argument for a more open-minded approach to listening to music and evaluating the tastes of others, one that recognizes that you have a certain set of tastes that are different, but not necessarily superior or inferior. Wilson can’t bring himself to like Dion’s music by the end, but he can appreciate what others like in it, and from there he can hope to engage them in conversation.
One might uncharitably say that Wilson, recently divorced and staring down his 40th birthday, is just in the midst of a mid-life reorganization, recognizing that the energizing anger of youth needs at some point to give way to a more mature, understanding outlook. (Isn’t this the story arc of High Fidelity?) We all have different moccasins, the wise old Globe editor tells the angry young music fans, and you shouldn’t judge a man until you’ve tried to dance in his.

But a dismissal of Let’s Talk About Love as the work of a cultural warrior gone soft won’t change the fact that in the days after reading this book you’ll notice dozens of smug shots at Dion in your morning paper (hello, Halifax!) and all of them will look like mean-spirited wedgies administered by popular kids looking to assert dominance. And even while her music still leaves you cold, you might wonder if Dion and her fans maybe, just maybe, deserve a little respect.