Two acts is a coincidence, three is a SCENE!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

So...

Gwen Stefani
Robyn
Fannypack
Annie maybe??

sure there must be others* - acts making pop music with i) a fair degree of autonomy, ii) a confident consciousness of it BEING pop music rather than s'thing more 'authentic', iii) an immersion in / borrowing from 'street-level' genres. And the examples I can think of are all women, which may or may not be significant too.

This strikes me as

- a good thing! (cos I like them all)
- an interzone between the 'pro-pop' and 'hipster' fields
- a potential way to talk about MIA which both sidesteps and explains the boring disdain for her from Certain Quarters. (NB I still don't like MIA, but I like the MIA-hate arguments less.)

*OK the moves all come from Madonna, but Gwen is maybe more important because after No Doubt she COULD have gone 'serious' for the solo career and went in the exact opposite and much more fruitful direction.

Comments

[zenith.livejournal.com]

I think the difference is that joycore is an aesthetic and fluxpop is a genre. Also, the term 'joycore' whilst 100% sinsurrr was also used frequently to wind certain people up, whilst I think fluxpop is more, um, serious. It's like: joycore was a term Matthew and then me and some other people started using, mostly on Barbelith, to talk about everything from 'Ignition (Remix)' to the New Pornographers. Fluxpop is a term that people started using to try and describe the kind of music that is often posted on Fluxblog (Matt may have used it first on mix CDs, I'm not sure of the chronology).

Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef used the term 'fluxpop' when talking about Annie at the end of 2004, and described it as "tracks with a pop sensibility and communicative, crossover potential that are nevertheless more often transferred via 0s and 1s than Hot 97s or Radio Ones" (http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/top/2004/singles/index5.shtml). Maura Johnston does the same here (http://citypaper.net/articles/2004-12-30/music.shtml).