I’m troubled. I keep singing School Of Rock, a pastiche; for all intents and purposes I might as well be singing a jingle.

Can pastiche ever be pure pop? Or is it too knowing, too calculated? Sure, a lot of the music created by the pop industry is calculated to high heaven, but I’m talking pop music (semantics explosion!). Pop classics become classics because they manage to tap into the collective unconscious; there’s a universal quality that people respond to. Chord-progressions, sounds, noises, phrases. Apart from this ‘I-know-what-I-like’ quality, it’s built out of ephemeral, almost accidental moments, like John Lennon nearly laughing during the second verse of If I Fell, or the jangle of the singers’ jewellery as they’re stepping up to the mic on Boogie Oogie Oogie (listen to it again, with good headphones on). This is why I love Seconds so much.

Pastiche, on the other hand, is generally assembled shrewdly from nearest-common-denominator sounds and phrases. At its best it is thrilling, funny, affecting - but in an altogether empty way (I’m leaving musical comedy out of the equation here, that’s a whole other ballpark), in that you’re reacting to the concept of emotion or energy rather than the ‘real thing’. The soundtrack to That Thing You Do! says a lot about this; the songs are convincing, fun, moving even, in the context of the film - but would you actually listen to them on a Saturday afternoon, at a party, on your Walkman? Probably not.

So, all of this is why School Of Rock by Jack Black and The Kids has me tied up in knots. In so many ways it is a pastiche of classic rock - you could list five references within the first verse alone - and yet there’s something indefinable about it that pushes it into the realm of perfect pop. Here’s the clanger - I cried when I first heard it. When was the last time some adbreak piece of Matrix-penned dreck did that to you, eh?

I can pin-point ‘the moment’, the Seconds if you will, that did it for me: those plangent few bars after the breakdown at about the 3:04 minute mark where the guitars go all low-key High Voltage, you catch a far-away handclap, and Jack purrs “this is my final exam”. There’s something so bittersweet about it, like the best rock and roll, which alleviates your troubles for a moment without denying their existance. It could be in the songs School Of Rock note-checks (High Voltage, The Beatles’ You Won’t See Me, The Doobie Brothers’ Listen To The Music, Kate by BF5, Spencer Davis Group’s Gimme Some Lovin’…), but that deflects credit from Jack and the kids (and The Mooney Suzuki) since School Of Rock is more than just the sum of its parts.

It goes deeper than this; it’s the fact that Black’s apparently throwaway line (see before) is actually more affecting than first given credit for. Yes, it is his final exam (derr, like, we so know he’s gonna get kicked out on his ass as soon as the Battle Of The Bands is over, no matter how dewy-eyed the uptight parents are getting), and like The Beatles’ The End or Zeppelin’s Misty Mountain Hop or The Darkness’ Friday Night, it’s the fact that School Of Rock rocks so righteously and joyously, all the while keeping the inevitability of the party finishing firmly in its sights, that makes it that much more affecting and real. Nothing lasts forever.

Or maybe I’m just an old sook.