♪♫ ♪ ♪♫

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.