uk pop crisis: supa-koopa.
Jan. 11th, 2007 01:32 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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poptimistsSo, according to the HQ of the enemies of pop (aka BBC), this band whose website proudly bears the legends 'This is what REAL music sounds like' and 'Against Manufactured Pop' (get fighting ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
koganbot on the case, once he's duffed up those idolators!) might crack the top 40 with full indie credibility intact, having no record label at all. (See here for story, if you can bear it). Blimey, punk or what? (ans: NO, obv.)
The obvious response: 'who knew that REAL music sounded like Mega City 4?'.
The other obvious response: 'crikey is this the future of the UK charts?'
(Or really: 'blimey, slow news day at the beeb!')
But seriously: why does the whole '4 real' thing get up my nose so much? Obviously they're wrong, but since when did truth matter over style in the world of pop? Surely this kind of thing just IS pop, or part of it, even if the music is dire? (esp. since I don't subscribe to the lex's no-guitars-in-pop / pop and rock ought to be mutually exclusive platform) Assuage my guilt, poptimists!
koganbot on the case, once he's duffed up those idolators!) might crack the top 40 with full indie credibility intact, having no record label at all. (See here for story, if you can bear it). Blimey, punk or what? (ans: NO, obv.) The obvious response: 'who knew that REAL music sounded like Mega City 4?'.
The other obvious response: 'crikey is this the future of the UK charts?'
(Or really: 'blimey, slow news day at the beeb!')
But seriously: why does the whole '4 real' thing get up my nose so much? Obviously they're wrong, but since when did truth matter over style in the world of pop? Surely this kind of thing just IS pop, or part of it, even if the music is dire? (esp. since I don't subscribe to the lex's no-guitars-in-pop / pop and rock ought to be mutually exclusive platform) Assuage my guilt, poptimists!
no subject
Date: 2007-01-13 05:07 pm (UTC)From: "Frank Kogan"
To: "Chuck Eddy"
Subject: Milking the mold
Date: Monday, November 03, 2003 3:26 PM
From the press kit to Marshall Madison's REAL:
"As witnessed by his debut album for Row Records, 'REAL,' Marshall is breaking the mold in country music. With a vibrancy and a passion for old fashioned values of God and country, he seems destined to re-write the book on what defines 'stardom' in today's music marketplace."
The passage explodes itself in your face, as paradoxical by accident as anything that Eminem or Jagger has done on purpose. I admire the PR lady's desperate backflip onto a tightrope, her trying to align "old-fashioned" with "breaking the mold" while not losing her balance. I haven't listened to the CD yet, since I fear it'll be all cliché - facial hair and drab clothes celebrated as some sort of achievement. He's being promoted as an antidote to the pretty boys in cowboy hats. But you never know, maybe he'll go for a less easy "real," or do a good job with the one he's got. Anyway, if I like it, I might re-listen to Liam Lynch's *Fake Songs*, whose cuts seemed to ME to contain telltale signs of genuine songness: verses, choruses, melodies, chord progressions. Not a symphony among them. But I recall that most of the song styles date from the pop not-quite-present, so the declaration of fakery is a way for Lynch to nonetheless declare himself an up-to-date pop formalist, he who has the pop styles of the immediate past at his au courant fingertips.