Cleverness In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Do you appreciate what I'm going to call 'cleverness' - wordplay, allusion, non-standard structures, etc. - in pop music? Is it something you look for? Who does it well?

Do you think there's an opposition between cleverness and directness (in emotional or physical impact)? Should pop be cleverer?

(Qn arising from today's Popular entry)

Comments

cleverness zones

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

it all depends on your stance with the source of the cleverness dunnit. one man's clever is another man's pretentious. (so far so obvious). also obv - it takes intense clever to be the best kind of simple and direct. but pop's cleverness might be concentrated in the non-musical marketing stuff. in the styling of a band, the 'stance' of the band. costello and the police pretending to be new wave, the spice girls papier-mache feminism, indie bands blathering authenticity, teenpop or emo 'everyman'. the ones that fool most of the people most of the time, that's clever.

Re: cleverness zones

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking that on the bus - so much 'cleverness' is really in the image the act put across. eg 'Overpowered' isn't really too weird a song, but Roisin's known as a kook and wears a strange dress in the video => it is clever-pop rather than Britney-pop.

G Stefani is fertile territory here b/c something like 'Hollaback Girl' is obv on the face of it as dumb as you get but there's a level of self-awareness there which puts Stefani firmly into clever territory (contra (the (entirely inaccurate) public perception) of Fergie Ferg).