The reason splitting up into villages doesn't work is that it builds one community at the expense of all the others. We need the two least-connected people on the planet to be one degree less than that apart. Music can help. It can help a lot, actually. Powerful songs, carefully placed, can alter worldviews.
Obscure brilliance can spin a web from one detached person who chances upon it to the next.
It doesn't matter if you know the words or sing it phonetically, but the story, if you follow it, does a credible job of confronting jealousy and disassembling it, properly, into admiration and self-assessment, and even if it didn't, falling in love with your best friend's girlfriend is, like the tendency of cellos to drift out of tune, a maintenance problem for a noble enterprise, not a sign of moral decay. I don't want to give up on mass entertainment, any more than I want to give up on cities, and on the possibility that the person next to me on a London subway train will be reading the same book I am. If we can't retreat to villages, then there has to be a way to make mass culture function, otherwise we're doomed. I haven't found a way to enjoy the Spice Girls' music, yet, but Karma has me as mesmerized as anything I've heard this year, and I've spent so much of the past four months mesmerized that it's a wonder I've remembered to eat. The album is predominantly escapist, and resolutely mainstream, but it is, at least for me, irresistibly effective escapism, at a time when I badly need it.