One of my favorite word twists, which I think I only ever used on  my blog, is "common groove"

Basically I have this perspective that the best black music, whether it's funk or disco, tends to be the most commercially successful stuff. The cream rises to the top. 

Because of all these obscurantist reissue labels, you have a generation of hipsters who have listened to all this objectively second or third division disco, funk, etc  - but never actually listened to Rose Royce or Stevie Wonder or whoever - the stuff that got into the charts and that masses of people bought and listened to.  

All that stuff is common groove because there are loads of vinyl copies lingering in the world, going cheap - and full of wonderful music. You could probably pick up 7 albums worth of it for the price of one of these stupid reissues. 

It relates to Northern Soul actually - that was the original 'rare groove'  although they didn't use that term, they talked about "rare soul".  

They had a whole inside-out perspective where they wouldn't play Motown because it was 'commercial' - meaning simply that it was so indisputably good that normal people liked it and bought it!

"The highest criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not."

- Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist:

"I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful and lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them; and I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humor"

- Philip Larkin

Art should be independent of all claptrap – should stand alone...and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism and the like." - James McNeill Whistler

 The death of Leslie Philips at the extremely ripe age of 98 had me thinking about his suave upper-class persona versus the fact that he came from a working-class East London background, as did other professionally posh actors + showbiz personalities of the same era such as Terry-Thomas and Frank Muir. The latter quipped that despite appearances "I was educated in E10, not Eton."  There are many other examples of artistes who did a kind of auto-Pygmalion job and taught themselves to speak proper. But this thing of performers adopting received pronunciation upon entry into the entertainment world is long gone. If anything, their modern equivalents would try to blunt any poshness in their speech patterns. There's this weird disjunction between a cultural ascendancy of the demotic, even as class divides and economic inequality are worsening and Eton rather than E10 continues to fill the cabinet.