A kung fu fighter in a disco

I have been trying to explain on the teenpop thread why I hate having to crate-dig for pop - it makes me feel really wrong. I want my pop UBIQUITOUS.

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You're quite right to feel this. The idea of pop is closely linked to the idea of being available to everyone or to anyone: the whole 'I have found the perfect pop record, it was made in Latvia and never released' actually means 'I AM KING OF THE INDIES'.

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YES I KNOW! And, like, I don't care if obscuro Estonian pop or Fefe Dobson album track is any good - one of the best things about consuming pop is the knowledge that everyone everywhere knows it, can sing along to it, that it's a communal experience despite its non-sceneness.

No one seems to understand though, the teenpop thread is all "check out increasingly obscure myspace x" or "scour youtube for y".

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I recall one

byebyepride dissing me when I invoked the communal experience claim on an FT Sugababes article. I think he was probably right. Networking/myspace/youtube/profile sites etc. have surely replaced the communal for an ever-increasing segment of pop's core audience.

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i.e. EVERYONE is indie now! (There's no more pop but no more indie-as-opposite-of-pop either)

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yay, I was right!

I don't think it's about communal experience so much as an orientation towards public dissemination. i.e. by the mere fact of being released, a record becomes 'pop' (and hence even if a song is still in the mind of its writer it is always already pop) but some records choose to close this openness down, while others celebrate it. Just as no record could appeal to everyone (because of social divisions marked out in cultural forms, and the dialectic whereby popularity provokes little local antagonisms into forming), there can be no such thing as 'pure' pop (horrible horrible indie expression); and yes, everyone is indie because they pick and choose -- they are not lazy in dubdobdee's sense. (Except possibly people who listen to local commercial radio.) Best 'pop' radio station = Smash Hits on digital, but I am totally indie when I listen to it!

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That communal experience claim is one which has really stuck with me! I wouldn't claim it's an essential for great pop but it's a really great feeling.

It's less the communality of it than the effort involved which repels me - maybe if I had home internet I wouldn't feel this as much. I suspect

dubdobdee was totally otm when he made his laziness claim last week - though I think eg dancing all night isn't effort at all.

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I think for poptimists of a certain age (over 20 probably) the desire for a vanished communal can be pretty strong (it's constantly a devil on my shoulder writing Popular, for instance). This is also what motivates 60s nostalgia too though.

Maybe the new paradigm is

pop - sharing knowledge
indie - guarding knowledge

i.e. it's in yr attitude to networking and finding things.

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But surely even indieists share knowledge with each other, rare b-sides and all of that malarkey.

I don't know how accurate my intuitive paradigm of "pop = when listening you imagine that the best setting for Song X is with other people, indie = when listening you imagine that the best setting for Song X is in your bedroom" is.

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It's the "with each other" that's the clincher though - also I guess there's a pop and an un-pop way of treating people who have arrived late to the knowledge. (Though in this sense maybe NOBODY is 'pop' - I guess there's always a lot of jealousy and hierarchy among fans of big teenypop bands as to who is the biggest fan, who's more of a fan etc)

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

to be fair, i think this has evolved along with the emo-isation of indie

thebopkids esp.will (rightly) note existence of a actual real live danbcing till dawn community who believed that what constituted indie in (say) 1984 was the same as and would again soon be pop's idea of pop

and

koganbot will (rightly) note that modern pop exists because of the eruption into the mainstream of of all manner of small-label R&B (50s defn)

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cis.livejournal.com

I don't think this intuitive paradigm is right at all - or at least it isn't right if we're using your man-in-street defs of pop and indie! For one, there's the gig, which is often assumed among indie-ists as being the best setting for song X, which is a lot about communal experience. Indie for indie-discos isn't for sitting in yr bedroom but for hanging out and dancing with yr mates.

Also people seriously INDIE EVANGELISM, it is strong and it is there, the difference I think is that indie sharing of musical knowledge etc is more hierarchical - the granting of information, the educating of others in what is the 'right' music, the recognition of other gatekeeper types by certain codewords and handshakes - whereas pop sharing of musical fu is more a dissemination, more taken for granted, somehow more egalitarian.

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blue-russian.livejournal.com

Really good discussion that I missed here. :(

I am somewhat surprised that no one has voiced the way I think about these things. The "communality" and the "effort" aspects are important, but what makes something "pop" for me is some kind of intrinsic quality that makes something memorable and approachable -- the best pop must, by definition, be ubiquitous, because everyone who hears it immediately likes it, e.g., this is why 'Dragostea Din Tei' must be a really great song. How else could it come out of nowhere and become popular in so many places, despite being in a completely unintelligible language?

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

haha when i made this very point some days ago F.KOGAN sed i wz wrong

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dubdobdee.livejournal.com

obv w.my LORD SüKRåT coronet on i am ALL FOR crate-digging

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well yes, and at least you accept this is a dialectic -- or something -- rather than going my crate is more pop than your crate. But I think Frank doesn't really get what we mean when we talk about pop in this way -- not a bad thing, necessarily. I'd be interested if we could work out why, but I fear it would lead to some ferocious disagreement.

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katstevens.livejournal.com

I once dug around in an MVE crate and found Man Not A Boy by North & South. I was so happy!

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koganbot

Well, I basically disagreed with Mark's connecting "pop" and "laziness." This has nothing to do with reality. It'd be like claiming that there was an inherent connection between skateboards and laziness, or crossword puzzles and laziness, or dances and laziness. The opposite of "lazy" isn't "work" but "active.

"Sweet Little Sixteen
She's just got to have
About half a million
Framed autographs
Her wallet's filled with pictures
She gets 'em one by one
She gets so excited
Watch her look at her run"

But also disagree with the notion (not that anyone has explicitly stated it here, but someone might) that being pop precludes making intellectual and moral demands on the hearer, that pop doesn't ask something of you.

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We're right!

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koganbot

No it doesn't necessarily mean "I AM KING OF THE INDIES." It depends on the song, what it sounds like, what you can do with it. The term "indie" isn't the only alternative to "pop." You might try the word "semipopular," coined by Xgau.

Semipopular music is music that is appreciated--I use the term advisedly--for having all the earmarks of popular music except one: popularity. Just as semiclassical music is a systematic dilution of highbrow preferences, semipopular music is a cross-bred concentration of fashionable modes. I'm not putting it down, for this is the music I am always praising ecstatically--the r&b takeoffs of Van Morrison and Randy Newman and Nolan, the easy electronicism of Terry Riley, the Wayne-Newton-with-a-bite of Nilsson, the self-conscious hillbilly plainsong of Tracy Nelson Country and (a very convoluted case) the Everly Brothers' Roots. Indeed, since writers and musicians usually prefer semipopular music, some of it even becomes popular; The Band and the Grateful Dead and Rod Stewart could all be argued into the category. My favorite examples, however, are untarnished by such associations. First is the Flying Burrito Bros., who on their first album offered the most outrageous combinations of pedal-steel and wah-wah distortion, verbal obscurity and country soul, all through the medium of a lot of ex-Byrd not-quite-stars. But even better is the Stooges, whose sole purported attraction, Iggy, continues to possess every star quality except fame.

I suppose semipopular music is decadent. It wouldn't be the first time that decadence has been the source of acute aesthetic pleasure. And indeed, the way it is so often enjoyed--quietly, stoned perhaps, in the company of a few friends, on a sound system that can convey its technological nuance--is very insular. But because it originates in a certain fondness for what other people like--a kind of musical populism much more concrete than that of the folk music of the early sixties--I think it is basically salubrious, a source of private strength that doesn't recoil from public connection.

And I'll add something about Iggy that Xgau didn't: Iggy reached for the populace and made claims on it. First three lines of the first song on his first album go:

It's 1969 OK
All across the USA
Another year for me and you

That makes the song more pop than indie even if he'd only played it once, in his attic.

Of course, it would never occur to me to say I like a song because it's pop or because it's indie. I mean, what boring reasons to like something!

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koganbot

Oh, and here's a link to the Xgau piece:

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/obsolesc.php.

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