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.