5pm_weds | eighty-eight. [THEME: pop!] (Reply)

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. ♥