post eighty-eight (theme: pop!)

[amethysting.livejournal.com]

All I Wanna Do
Sheryl Crow
Tuesday Night Music Club
1993

I found this theme to be much more challenging than I initially thought it would be.  I think there is often a general assumption that pop music is not as...valuable as other genres of music--that it rates low on some kind of hierarchy of art some people subscribe to.  I guess mainly I am bringing this up because--especially in looking at "pop" with the idea of picking one song to represent it--"pop" (both the label and the music itself) is actually so incredibly complex.

What makes a song "pop"?  That is the question I keep coming back to--every time I finally settle on a song to post (only to change my mind the very next instant).  The category on iTunes throws a wide net--encompassing artists as varied as Justin Bieber and Martha Wainwright.  Even thinking of "pop" as "popular music" didn't help narrow things down--"pop" is a hard genre to pin down.

Sometimes, more than any other type of music, a pop song can define a particular time.  Maybe because it is so prevalent; unavoidable.  Tuesday Night Music Club is inextricably linked to a summer vacation spent at my Auntie Connie's house in North Bay; my cousins, Lisa and Sara, and I sprawled out on the chocolate-brown carpet colouring detailed pictures in specialty colouring books.  I didn't really like "All I Wanna Do"--I thought it was irritating, inescapable.  That, and my little brother owned the album on cassette tape.  But, those days in the cool dark of my aunt's sunken living room, our hair still wet and smelling of chlorine after a morning in the backyard pool--the rest of the album drew me in.  It was the first time I really listened to an album as a whole or understood what an album could be.

All that aside, in terms of this post, I started to think about what songs I consider "pop" have in common.  And, despite my ten-year-old-self's initial opinion, I picked "All I Wanna Do".  It is a song I love now, I think partially because it is tinged with nostalgia (that, and I can't help but like the scritch-scratchy sound of the guiro throughout).  I think any good pop song has an infectiously catchy chorus, and "All I Wanna Do" is no exception: "All I wanna do is have some fun/I got a feeling I'm not the only one."  There is something about a good pop song that sticks with you.  That worms its way into the back recesses of your mind and clings on tight.  A pop song can come on the radio years after it was released and the lyrics will come tumbling out of your mouth without even having to think about it. 

There is something about pop that continues to define and to shape us.  I think that is what made this theme so difficult.  Because, despite the fact that much of pop may seem a passing trend, it is, in actuality, an important part of who we are.  In that respect, it is lasting.

eighty-eight. [THEME: pop!]

[cabaretlights.livejournal.com]

Here (In Your Arms)
Artist: Hellogoodbye
Album: Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!
Year: 2006
♥: I unabashedly love pop. You know this. Anyone who's read more than a few of these posts or spent more than a few months being my friend knows this. The secret is that I've always loved pop. Even when I was an angry goth girl, blasting Type O Negative and Static-X, I giddily danced around my room to the All-American Rejects and Avril Lavigne (yep. full disclosure.). I guess I pretended, for a long time, but I never really fought that battle. Pop and I are old, good, friends.

I often wonder, though, what makes a song radio-palatable ---- what makes a song "pop"-worthy. There are tons of songs I'd classify alongside pop, and songs which are very popular but not quite "pop" (Florence's new album being a great example). Obviously it has to follow the current musical trends, has to appease the masses and thus not shock or unsettle anyone, at least not really. See Rihanna's "S&M" -- Rihanna being a pop star I cannot fucking stand, except for "Umbrella" -- it's subversive! it's banned everywhere! it's a musical version of Shades of Grey: incorrect, pathetic, and annoying. Intelligent, edgy and interesting --- it is not. That's not to say a pop song can't be any of those things -- just that chances are, it isn't.

But what pop songs are, really, is earworms. It's gotta get stuck in your head, it's gotta have good production values, it's gotta have a hook, and it's gotta be simple enough to keep people from getting too worked up. Not too many layers -- keep things smooth! BUT: what happens if you love music (like, really love it, enough to have a going-on-two-year weekly joint-blog about it), love all those layers and complexities you just don't find on the radio....but also, somehow, sometimes, love what you hear on the radio?

I'd venture it has to do with musical and emotional processing...how you hear a song, what wires are activated, what's happening the moment you hear it, what the earworm brings you back to. There are a whole bunch of music theorists and neuroscientists who could make a better case than me, one way or another ---- so suffice to say: a pop song brings me back, hard, to the state I was in when I first loved it. Maybe it's because I get sick of pop songs really fast, so they don't become associated with anything other than the moment they were first in: little time capsules, waiting to be picked up and have timebomb emotional memories shaken out.

I was waiting for the perfect excuse to post this song, and it's now. There's Autotune. There's a hook that worms its way into your friggin head and will not leave. There's a golden opportunity for all the hipster tweens to indulge in pseudo-indie dancepop. I'm not sure why this song didn't end up on the Top 20 Billboard Hits of 2006, to be honest with you: it's got every element necessary to have done it...maybe the world wasn't ready for it, if you look at the type of music on the charts then --- but let me tell you, this'd be way up there if it was released today.

But I like that it was released in 2006; I like that it's become a little bubble of happiness -- a split-second in my history, when I listened to this song nonstop for two days straight, and have only cursorily returned to it since. It's like what we were talking about at Santropol -- that feeling of being right back in, right where you were. This song brings me back to when I was 20, grinning for two days in September in my second year at McGill. Of course ---- the connotations, as always, have changed. ♥