Certain popular songs seem to not only evoke deep longings but to do so in a way that is universal for, if not everyone, then all who belong to the same broad cultural wave, citizens of a certain epoch. They may do this by drawing on biblical overtones or such overtones may arise due to the broad embrace that is part of the song's presentation, earning it the epithet of anthem. Part of what our cultural knowledge contributes in bringing the song before us is a sense of the breadth of its address, a quantitative and qualitative dimension inseparable from its pragmatic meaning. Music offers to make us a part of its audience and our taste may be for the audience we wish to be counted in as much as for the music itself. When the offered audience overflows the distinctions by which we foster our identity, or rather when it offers the idea of such an overflowing, then the music takes on a spiritual, almost solemn quality. In a concert songs of this kind are reserved to late in the performance, after the audience has been suitably primed, one watches the singer become the impossible incarnation of the song's emotions, a powerful will completely surrendered in the moment to its unchecked flow; but behind them the accompanists, while focused, seem oddly detached, their eyes abstracted and filled with quiet irony. For them this is the repetition of a technical exercise whose results are entirely predictable. The effects of this spiritual machine however are equally strong, or even stronger, when any of its attendant ironies are added to it. Only a paltry spirituality is put off by irony, a robust one eats it. This is just because what makes it spirituality is the harmonic sublation of the boundaries of the self, while irony is an elaboration of those boundaries. It deserves to be counted as one of Michelstaedter's 'ornaments of darkness'.