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I have absolutely no problem with a song being light and entertaining, as long as it's a good song. I love Jimmy Buffet...he can be deep, A Pirate Looks At Forty, but most of his stuff is light-hearted party music, but it's *good light-hearted music. I don't wallow in elitism when it comes to music of any genre...my simple criterium is "is it a good song?" There's good music and there's bad music, of any kind. You don't have to like country music, and, many of us here, I know, loathe it, but in its own context there are good country songs and bad country songs. Old time Tin Pan Alley songs were production house stuff, but a lot of them are fun and hold up to this day. Loudon Wainwright III's Dead Skunk is a frivolous humor piece, but it's a great song. Pop music, too, from Al Jolson to just before the present scene, always seemed to produce some listenable and memorable stuff. In fact, most of the past icons from Elvis to the Beatles and on to Michael Jackson and Madonna (who worked with good writers) produced, at least, a couple songs, that were familiar to just about everyone of all ages, even if you didn't follow them or, indeed, disdained of them, some of their songs you just couldn't escape. In contrast, Britney Spears, supposedly an icon as big as any of these, doesn't have *one song I, or anyone I know of any age, can readily identify by the music or words. I know radio formatting is more specialized these days, but someone that *big should have one or two stand-out signature tunes that almost eveyrone knows (like Madonna's "Like A Virgin", for instance)...the same for the boy-band icons. Because the music and writing is just bad, bad, bad, even for light entertaining pop music.
And I like good country music, a genre vehemently disdained by a few on this board, so how can I be an elitist?
A Whiter Shade of Pale (Procul Harem), Cap, was a good song...the reason you're citing it now, the reason it has survived. So, for whatever reason, the words worked.
I've been involved with many songwriting groups, and currently attend a weekly workshop and songshare, and *most songwriters work *hard on their craft and art, they don't just throw words at music.
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Mr Snob.Huh? So whattiya think of country music, Mr. Openess? 
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Who or what is Phlebas, please? Excellent points, Flatlander; and, your post illustrates eta's, and something I was trying to say way back: what is art, indeed, and who gets to decide? :-) Some people look at a painting of a big red dot and see all kinds of meanings in it; I'm afraid I would see 'a big ol' red dot' and nothing more. Back in about 1970 I bought a paperback called "The Poetry of Rock", and just loved it. Came across it some years later, and tossed it. I wonder if audiences who loved songs such as "Some Enchanted Evening" and "Don't Fence Me In"--and the writers of these songs--thought songs such as "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" were trash songs?
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I found this at WikiPedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_PhlebasFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Consider Phlebas (ISBN 1857231384) is a science fiction book by Iain M. Banks first published in 1987. It is Banks' first science fiction novel, set in The Culture, and takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land; Look to Windward could be considered a follow up because of both the storyline and the fact that both titles are from that poem.
The novel revolves around the Idiran-Culture War, and Banks plays on that theme by presenting various microcosms of that conflict. read here, for more on The Culture... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
formerly known as etaoin...
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And then some of us have been finding poetry in spam email subject lines, the sole purpose of which is to get past spam filters. I'm sticking with 'just because you wrote it…'
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I porbably ought to start a new thread just for this "Culture" stuff, but, oh well... from Iain Banks description of Marain: ...enables the Culture Minds fully to indulge their seemingly congenital predilection of unnecessary obfuscation, wilful contrariness and the fluent generation of utter and profound confusion in others.  http://homepages.compuserve.de/Mostral/artikel/marain.html
formerly known as etaoin...
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The great thing about language is that if you put two or three words together, people will try to understand what it is you intended to mean. It's why Chomsky had such a tough time finding ungrammatical sentences. Even "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" has some kind of meaning for some people. This human urge has led to a whole branch of philosophy called hermeneutics. Named after Hermes, the patron god of merchants, thieves, linguists, and bible exegetes. You gonna tell me that the poem Fleas "Adam / Had 'em." ain't high art? For shame. I'll go back to my roots and verbs now.
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Some people look at a painting of a big red dot and see all kinds of meanings in it; I'm afraid I would see 'a big ol' red dot' and nothing more.
I know what you mean. It has to be a really good, big ol' red dot, for me to really like.
The last time I visited the Louvre I marvelled at all the folks elbowing each other out of the way to look at La Gioconda behind all its security. They were not looking at a piece of art. It was something else. As I pondered this, I notice that I was standing by myself in another room in the museum with my back to a smallish painting. I looked at it and it was a Vermeer. Now that was art. Being ignored by the plebes (consider ye whom?). But seriously, I never understood why folks genuinely liked Rothkos and Pollacks until I saw them up close and personal rather than in small pictures in some Time-Life series of art books. There was something there that I really liked, and in the end that's all that matters. It wasn't representational or maudlin, but it was art.
I think that art is a contract between the artist and her/his audience. The artist chooses something to show us, and we enjoy it or we don't. But like most tastes, it's hard to share this feeling that a work of art causes us to have. A lot of people complain about difficult works of art, say a film, and how they just want to be entertained. Well, I was entertained not by one piece of moderate genre art (i.e., the Mona Lisa), but rather by the crowds fighting over a glimpse of it. Does "meaning" in art mean a paratext that explains the art? Or is the emotional state it evokes in the viewer?
I think one of the gravest sins that modern academics have done in the eyes of J Q Public is to attempt to come to terms with popular art / culture using the same apparatus they developed for critiquing "serious" art.
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...the same apparatus they developed for critiquing "serious" art.
"serious" only because of that apparatus.
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