This summer marks the 40th anniversary of Synchronicity, the great record by the rock band the Police. 2023 is also the year when the British rock band the Cure is touring to sold-out venues around the world. And David Bowie’s 1979 concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars is being reissued.

What do these things have in common? These are all rock and roll acts whose music is steeped in literature. The artists are from a time when pop music often led fans to books, and often not easy ones, to understand the music. Taylor Swift , arguably America’s biggest pop star, is praised for her "self-confessional" songs about boyfriends and fame. Swift is a clever lyricist, yet she lacks the literary depth of previous music stars.

In 1983, my senior year in high school, Sting inspired me to read the novel The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky, about three American expatriates in the Sahara desert, is a dour and depressing read. I read it when I heard "Tea in the Sahara," a song that Sting wrote that was based on Bowles’s novel. Further, Synchronicity the album was named after a concept explored by both Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, whose anti-communist masterpiece Darkness at Noon I had also read in high school.

It wasn’t the first time rock had sent me to the library. The Cure’s magnificent song "Charlotte Sometimes" was inspired by the book of the same name by Penelope Farmer. "Such a Shame" by Talk Talk was based on the disturbing novel The Dice Man. Kate Bush’s "The Sensual World" is an adaptation of the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Then there were the space oddity explorations of David Bowie, which were often based on science fiction novels, and the work of Bruce Springsteen, heavily influenced by both Sherwood Anderson and pulp crime writers like Jim Thompson.

At the top of the heap is "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel, which I consider the best pop song ever inspired by literature. It celebrates the work of the poet Anne Sexton. Sexton suffered from terrible depression, her poems about enduring the pain while trying to live a normal suburban life. Gabriel portrayed her beautifully:

Pulling out the papers
From the drawers that slide smooth
Tugging at the darkness
Word upon word
Confessing all the secret things
In the warm velvet box
To the priest, he's the doctor
He can handle the shocks

Poets were also a major reference point for the Smiths, a British band that was popular in the 1980s and in the years since has achieved iconic status. Singer and lyricist Morrisey mentioned Keats, Yeats, and Oscar Wilde. The title of the album The Queen is Dead is not a punk taunt to the royal family but a reference to Last Exit to Brooklyn, the dark and gritty 1964 novel.

The decline of literary rock mirrored the general decline of literacy, as well as the embrace of "poptimism." Poptimism is, as Washington Post music critic Chris Richards put it, "anti-elitist, holding that all pop music deserves a thoughtful listen and a fair shake, that guilty pleasures are really just pleasures, that the music of an Ariana Grande can and should be taken as seriously as that of a U2." Grande is a show-stopping singer, yet it’s difficult to imagine her writing a song, as U2 did, about Chiba City, a dystopian Japanese locale from William Gibson’s science fiction classic Neuromancer.

I’m all for poptimism — as a conservative, I think songs about cars, girls, and beaches can be just as important and poetic as so-called important songs about racism or politics. But perhaps poptimism has gone too far, excusing unchallenging music and venerating artists just because they’re famous. That’s a shame because while songs about eternal things like love and jealousy will always be around, an artist writing about a book that shaped their imagination offers insight into what makes a performer unique. It adds a subjective perspective, and without it, artists tend to become homogeneous. The Top 40 begins to all sound the same.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.