What is good about Pop Music?
Definition One: Pop = Music in The Charts
No really! It's catchy I suppose, but then so can music which isn't popular be. It has no exclusive grip on the memorable, marketing power puts many tracks which aren't memorable, even hummable, in the charts. A great deal of those tunes by Jennifer Lopez. What puzzles me even more, in finer detail, is why so many people on the Internet hold pop music in high esteem. Why do people collect it? Why do they write about it? Why does it interest them? I'm genuinely mystified. Pop doesn't need them, they're definitely surplus to requirements. Smash Hits suffices.
Some people I know argue that Pop is the true barometer of the times. Like Sociologists they analyse the political currents of the times and draw (often very convincing) parallels between what's happening in the Charts at a particular time and that which is happening in the broader culture. I suppose the apposite example may be The Specials "Ghost Town" (coughs, good tune, coughs) and the urban riots of that year. But, forgive me for this, isn't this always a bit like those crummy TV Dramas in which Arsenal's Victory/The Miner's Strike/Tony Blair's coming to power is compared to the existence and travails of John Doe that very same year? How he overcame his fear of social exposure just as Naomi Campbell defeated The Mirror in a lawsuit. I always find themes such as these, well I find them to be a bit wobbly. Even in novels they're more strained and far-fetched than they are illuminating and engrossing.
It's such a seductive idea isn't it, that the micro mirrors the macro? But isn't it a comforting fantasy? Granted, sometimes clever artists capitalise on this, moulding their content so it fits with people's erroneous notion that there is indeed such a flimsy cosmic organisation. Like Bob Dylan. "There's something going on here people" (counts money). I'd argue that more often than not anachronistic music can shed more light on a time, show it in its true hue, than current music.
(scratches head) What other reasons could people give to find pop interesting? I guess old Pop is geist-y, but then so is any old music. Perhaps to laud it as some surreal index over which you have no control? On to the next defintion......
Defintion Two: Pop = A Marketing Term
I've been quite honest about this since day one. When I discovered that by Pop music people meant "music for imaginary rather than real communities" I was depressed for about a month. That people could consume Grime as "Pop", that they could do the pick'n'mix shake and vac ting and "consume" something oblivious to its source, well for me it just didn't bear thinking about. That all music could be subjected to the whim of the consumer like this, that there were people out there for whom all music was essentially reducible to a quotient of it's entertainment value (a mark out of ten, an "A" minus, a four star rating in their iPod ratings menu)...... sad innit. Each song becomes a unit, an equal unit, stripped of anything approaching life. How murderously void.
Though to just live an everyday life and get pleasure out of music like this must be fine, but to theorise music under this banner, to attempt to shroud this approach in a gossamer skein of intellectualism, well it's a travesty isn't it? Isn't it? Is it? I don't know, I mean I'm obviously horrendously out of kilter. Like a miserable old Jehoviahs Witness cunt.
Post-Modernism hasa lot to answer for here. It made these clean surfaces theoretically acceptable. Pop was "interesting", being a hard headed grey persistent twat, loyal and dogged was "boring". This is going to be a brutal reduction of theoretical thought, so apologies if I loose some finesse here, but Modernism, Modernism wasn't ahistorical. Andy Warhol, Le Corbusier and Jung were ruptures but they weren't abandoning history. Warhol with his tondos, Le Corbusier's fanatical love of ancient Greek Architecture, Jung steeped in Alchemaiacal lore, none of them simply wrote clean of the past. Furthermore it's a corny adage, but without embracing their past they couldn't have been free. To turn this on the mechanics of Pop appreciation: meaning is always dwindling in Pop, it's never accreating in the way it does in the underground rhizomes.
A friend I met at the weekend told me a story of how a colleague of his, not aware of the history of Typography, used a font designed under the Nazis for a poster for a museum for the Holocaust. It's a very extreme example but it does sort of encapsulate how I feel about the barren landscape of culture. Look into your font folder on your computer, how many of those fonts mean anything to you? Yet you'd be amazed how enriching it is to understand a bit about them. Check this out about Eric Gill (http://www.linotype.com/7-391-7/ericgill.html).
I suppose everyone's wary of history. I've begun to blush a little at my rampant indexing of music in relation to it's sonic precursors. But isn't it a good thing? From a Marxist point of view of course its really important not to abandon history, to let Capitalism consign it to the waste bin marked progress. I suspect my "Online Pop Straw-man" is timorous of exploring history. He is afraid some self-appointed old-fart-at-play will castigate him for his ignorance (me I've never pretended to be an authority on anything, I can't even work out the difference between Dogzilla and Durrty Doogz) He is cautious about aspiring to belong to subcultural groups (like, er, Grime) on the basis that he's Middle Class, White and Old. But really no-one gives a toss and what's the alternative anyway? To accept something less-threatening and fake in some compromised quasi-ironic manner. To give up on the real because it underlines the uncomfortable reality of one's own situation?
Defintion Three: Pop's charm = The Drama of High-vs-Low
Is High-vs-Low even an issue here? I dunno. I think not. It used to be quite a thrilling notion to me. It still is. I love it when I find out things like the fact that Bernard Parmegiani designed the sound for Charles De Gaulle airport. It's always sort of exciting when improbable "underground" things stray into the pop landsacpe. Like More Fire's "Oi". Or even to roll back to point one, when The Specials are number one. But this isn't my issue really (besides isn't this just folk music swelling in grandeur prodigously?). My issue lies with the reception of Pop, with people taking that Pop tack. Explain the appeal to me. I'm genuinely curious.
