“The point is to like pop as well as everything else”
Skip this entry if you don’t want to read editorial metastuff: music content minimal.. Tim has some very interesting things to say about the the quality of pop 2000, and one absurd but flattering thing to say about NYLPM (I can’t even define pop satisfactorily so I wouldn’t like to take a stab at a paradigm, plus 200 hits a day doth not a paradigm make!). One thing I’d like to point out is that Aaliyah’s “Try Again” isn’t really that alien or weird – it’s an R & B single with an acid wobble all over it. It’s bloody good and in a very effective way innovative but not strange or abstracted or ‘difficult’, even for pop music.
As for thirteen year olds and pop, sod them: the point isn’t to like pop music by itself, the point is to like it as well as everything else, and by and large they don’t (for obvious reasons). I do have a weird nostalgia for when I was eleven because I had much broader tastes then than now (broader being expressed by a music liked divided by music heard equation), and this was down to me coming to music without any context. In my happy prelapsarian state I didn’t know whether something was pop or rock or dance or cool or not or who it was ripping off, it was just there on the radio and I listened to it. That still seems a pretty good way to hear music to me.
No, that’s naive. There was loads of personal context, but I couldn’t have articulated it. The point, anyway, is that I can be nostalgic for this without wanting to go back to it. One thing that pisses me off a bit is when people say I “listen too hard” to music or “over-intellectualise” it. Sorry, I don’t try and be ‘intellectual’ (whatever that is) about music. I’m an adult and I think about stuff. I hear music: I think about that too. It just happens. There’s lots of music I hear which I think nothing at all about (some Coil track playing currently, for example), which doesn’t make it any purer or better, it just makes it less written about here.
I think sometimes I give the impression that I don’t love music, possibly because I don’t have some intro page where I talk about how much I love it. A friend e-mailed me recently to say that he thought Freaky Trigger is “more about not liking music than liking it” – I’d be interested if anyone else thinks that’s true. I also think that I give the impression that I like pop – in the Top 40 sense – exclusively, or at least more than anything else. That isn’t true either, though I may well have been guilty of stressing pop a bit in reaction to the general tendency of the online music world to big up indie rock and little else.
Tom in New York London Paris Munich • Pop • 259 views
I don’t think you’d be discussing it in such detail if you didn’t like it. There’s a very modern mentality that seems to say, “If you’re criticising something then you don’t like it.” That includes criticism which is not necessarily negative, but just observant. It is possible to see flaws in something you like, and it’s possible to see positives in something you don’t. But we live in a hyperbolic age, everything is “The best thing ever” or ” The worst thing in the world.” The truth lies somewhere in-between.
What’s the point in stating you love music up front? Who doesn’t? Every teenager’s Myspace page says what they love, and it usually starts with “Music, Movies…” etc. Everybody likes those things, *everybody*. When that is established, you simply have to say what you like and why. It’s the *why* that usually throws people. I can still recall when the ‘average’ teenager would have only a few CD’s (I grew up in the late 80′s) as a ‘collection’. The idea of going to a second hand record shop and buying ten £1 albums for the price of a CD was alien to them. They wouldn’t do that because the music wasn’t in the charts, because the reality is; a lot of people (especially younger, but often older too) buy what is marketed at them. We live in an age where teenagers routinely have 20,000 songs on their Ipod. Does that mean they ‘love’ music more than teenagers of the past? Absolutely not. In fact, I’d say that the cultural importance of music has actually lessened, due to the increase in all forms of media and the ease with which that media (along with music) is consumed (another discussion for another time).
I’ve always understood how the music I liked worked for me – what buttons it pushed and how. I’ve never been entirely convinced that everyone thinks about those things. Anecdotally, I was criticising the NKOTB was I was about 15; I said to some girls that the reason I didn’t like or respect them beyond a ‘tune’, is that they didn’t write or play on any of their songs. Their response; “So?” To me, it made them karaoke, to them, that didn’t matter. I had the same thing in my late teens when I was talking about songwriters; a friend said it didn’t matter to him who wrote songs, but I felt that knowing who wrote a song was as important as who performed it, because just like the performer, you may like more of their work. To him, that didn’t make sense, because (and I’m editorialising) you couldn’t buy the poster or go to see the writer ‘live’. Many people just don’t differentiate in anything, and maybe that’s fine for them; they can still hear songs they like and enjoy them. But it also leaves them much more at the mercy of the marketers that determine what is or isn’t going to be rammed down their throats. They’ll swallow anything. As far as I can tell, it’s the musical equivalent of junk food; as long as you aren’t aware of what you’re putting into your body, you’re always going to end up eating the worst stuff because it tastes better (Boybands for example).
Maybe I’m being unfair. Point is; I’m with you. Dissect away. List what it is you love and why. Without doing that, people are no more than dogs with their tails wagging whenever they hear a song they like. To people that say you sound like you don’t like music, I say; “Woof!”
well yeah, except that if you have to judge a record’s worth according to a whole load of external factors (is it written by the singer/someone i can respect? do they play their own instruments? even so, are they vulnerable to being considered a boyband?) before you know whether or not you like it, aren’t *you* the one who is more vulnerable to falling prey to the dastardly marketing people?
if the only criteria someone has for liking a song is whether they, er, like it, then where is the room for marketing to interpose itself in the relationship? if, on the other hand, you require an artist to have sat in a garret for twenty years before pouring out their pain onto wax, then its very easy for marketeers to tell you that that’s what they’ve done and that it is therefore your moral duty to like it.