What A Palaver!
I’m going to stay out of debates about pop for a while, I think, because
– I don’t feel intellectually sharp enough at the moment
– (more importantly) I end up unintentionally upsetting or offending people I respect or admire.
– (more selfishly) They don’t do me any good. They don’t introduce me to new music, they don’t make me think about the music I do listen to in different ways (OK sometimes more defensively but that’s really negative), and they don’t change my listening habits and pleasures at all. So the only joy in them is mental jousting and currently (Freudians look away) my lance is a toothpick. This is zero reflection on the other very intelligent people who’ve been talking about pop(tim)(ism) on NYLPM and elsewhere, whose role in life is after all hardly to please me.
Like most pledges this is one I will surely end up breaking but for the moment it’s away with the tetchy a href tag and back to descriptive froth.
Lucky, then, that all this week I will be guest-writing at Fluxblog on the (rough) theme of ‘The 90s Revival’, one post a day with an exciting POLL involved too.