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

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

I wuv the clever, and indeed the "clever", very very much. It can totally turn off all other quality criteria for me when in effect.

Actually I recall using the exact words "clever = brilliant" in an old ilm post about The Divine Comedy's "If", which has clever wordplay going on on different timescales: the bit that was quoted in reviews etc was the couplet "If you were attacked, I would kill for you / If your name was Jack, I'd change mine to Jill for you" -- lovely doublerhyme -- while the thing that floored me were the lines "If you were a dog, I'd feed you scraps from off the table" & "If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable", which also has lovely doublerhyme, yet appear in different verses!

It's probably connected to my love of puzzles, quizzes, cryptics etc; the discovery of a hidden something buried by the artist (which can happen by eg musical allusion as well as wordplay) giving me a hit of pleasure -- and I must admit that this pleasure is totally selfcongratulatory in the "ooh amn't I clever too!" way.

Kinda related: There was another old ilm thread about The Monochrome Set, where (if I remember correctly) Tom said that a thing which hindered him from getting into them was that they were "too droll" -- which actually led to me checking them out further. I suppose one could approximate the connection by droll : clever :: delivery : content? I also think that the "droll" dimension is the one that has really been ruined the most by bad britpop rather than the "clever", though it is not always easy to distinguish them from each other.

Also, erm, Carter USM.