Charlotte Raven vs Pop: British pop music is rubbish right now, says Charlotte. Hard to disagree with, in many ways. Therefore the British charts are rubbish. Easy to disagree with, that, since American hip-hop, pop and R&B is at a commercial/creative peak and is, even better, selling in Britain. You’d think the press would have the decency to suspend “pop is dead” articles while “Ms.Jackson” is in the charts.
The rest of Raven’s article touches oh-so-briefly on an interesting point. Are today’s young pop consumers listening to the music in the same way intense way ‘we’ used to? Here again it’s easy to believe she’s onto something. But who is this ‘we’? Charlotte Raven may well have listened to pop obsessively and intensely – I did, too, sometimes – but Charlotte Raven ended up becoming a writer specialising in cultural commentary. I don’t really think she can speak for most listeners.