Pop And Me: (I wrote this in the forum but I quite liked it as an answer to an – ahem – Frequently Asked Question)
I don’t like the word “ironic” not cause it doesn’t hide a grain of truth but because it’s really big and clumsy and shoves too much else in as well as the truth. I nowadays do, absolutely, love pop music. A while ago – a few years maybe – my relationship with it was a bit more complicated. It was something – this is also too crude – I felt I ought to like rather than something I really did like. This is how I’d got into most of the music I now love, mind you.
I felt I ought to like it cause I felt a bit sorry for it. It was always getting beat on by other people, and really it wasn’t that bad and it could do with a mate. And I did enjoy it even if deep down I enjoyed other things more.
And then one evening I drunkenly posted somewhere that “Baby One More Time” was the best single of the year. And I got up in the morning and realised that a) there were loads of people telling me to fuck off and not be so ironic and b) I meant every word. And that was it really. It was like that bit in romantic films when leading lady gets dissed or is about to board a train to faraway or takes her glasses off and suddenly densely ‘friendly’ leading man thinks, blam!
Except pop doesn’t love me back. Ah well. That’s probably why I listen to Belle And Sebastian.