Article Response: The Death of Pop, Part 1

In his various posts above, Glenn identifies an ‘us’ who analyse why they listen to music and a ‘them’ who fail to. He seems to want to join this up with his perception of the lack of political and aesthetic awareness of “anonymous millions succumbing to the marketing machine.” I can see how that parallel might be appealing to him, but from direct experience I’ve see no correlation between people (variously intelligent) who listen to music critically and those who become politically engaged. So calling pop “soma, poured into the water supply of a city that needs to wake up” seems outright wrong to me, perhaps disingenuous.

He also, despite a fair number of words, fails to make any case for his implication that while ‘mindless pop’ treats ‘teenage girls’ as an undifferentiated mass, any other music made and distributed as a mass-produced product (that includes 1000-issue 7” singles, or anything which isn’t created as an individual artefact) treats its audience as individuals.

Personally, I've never met anyone who enjoys music but finds none of it "meaningful". Presumably there are people buying Britney and Ricky Martin CDs because they encourage booty-shaking, because they can play them at parties and because Britney and Rickey and the like are sex symbols and MTV icons. Everyone I know that buys music ( Live, Counting Crows, Limp Bizkit, Moby ) does so because said music contains some measure of meaning and value for them. Maybe I should hang around an all-girls school, grilling 12 year olds about the Steps disc rattling around in their knapsack? Perhaps then I'd observe the effects of mass-marketing and unending hype on impressionable minds ( NB. I'm not sure if I'm actually joking here). Is buying music solely because it is sonically pleasing without any "meaningful" lyrics or rhythms unacceptable ( btw, I have no idea how we might satisfactorily discern a meaningful rhythm or melody or bassline from those devoid of meaning )? Glenn, if the next Roxette single contained no discernable positive message or little "meaning" then might you enjoy it less, even if it was replete with hooks that you couldn't forget? Or would you enjoy it, without endorsing it? Does increasing self-awareness in Pop mean less pop to enjoy, but more to endorse?

A side issue: I think the Us vs. Them distinction ( Us being the neurotic pop elitists and Them being the unwashed masses who happily consume whatever MTV and radio tell them to ) is something most of us here buy into, even semi-consciously. It's why we have to mention Autechre when talking about Radiohead and Max Martin when discussing Britney. It's important to display our status as the informed consumer that is catering to his/her specific tastes as opposed to the android-like buyer who equates quality with popularity.

I don't know what I'd have to do to *prove* this to anyone, except maybe by being EVEN MORE FLIPPANT AND IRRESPONSIBLE (possible? oh yes) but I REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY don't buy into that distinction, Mitch: IN FACT I *HATE* it, I think it's rubbish sociologically AND politically AND culturally (not least becuz it's the complete opposite of what it thinks it's claiming it is) AND strategically. Glenn calls it "uncontroversial": well, if not, it SHOULD be controversial. Does it obtain as a given here?: No, otherwise I would never have stopped by, except maybe as a v.malevolent troll. Making distictions and value judgments is NOT THE SAME THING as choosing always to articulate them within a framework patrolled by those you don't trust: esp.within a framework you intuit is SO patrolled that WHAT YOU SAY can ONLY be misread.

Re: saying what you think you are expected to say: MTV is just LESS GUILTY here as a tool of patrol than are the protocols of ordinary academic discussion.

I realized that perhaps my last post was rather misguided. Of course intelligent music discussion might include obscure ( to the casual music listener ) reference points- not as to distinguish the *true* music lovers from the "mindless consumers" but to support a considered viewpoint or an accurate analysis. But I was going to leave it up there undefended for the controversy value. But now I just feel ignorant.

I just thought of a way to say what I mean CLEARLY!!! (A first....)

A: "What 'we' share makes us smarter. What 'they' share makes them dumber." OK, A is the shape I hate. WHAT IF:

B: "What 'we' share makes us dumber, and what 'they' share makes them smarter?" It's not that I kneejerk *believe* B (how cd I?): what I kneejerk believe is that if you don't examine B properly (= openly, as A REAL QUESTION, not just nervously batting it away), then your smarts (which in many other respects may be VERY VERY smart) are nevertheless in the process of self- immolation (= eg the story of Indie, from the Velvets to the Strokes...)

1. When did I ever mention politics? People who don't listen to music critically may have all sorts of other virtues and expertises. But that doesn't make their uncritical music-listening any more sophisticated.

2. I agree with Mark that Mitch overstated the us/them distinction a little bit. I'm sure there are plenty of people who consume music thoughtfully who don't write about their thoughtfulness in online discussion forums. But there are people who consume music thoughtlessly. This is more or less a premise of the article we're supposedly discussing, which in a sense sets out to defend thoughtlessness as a listening strategy.

3. Also, I wasn't trying to make a detailed case here that anything is better than anything else. It's another premise of the article that there's a difference between pop and some music that isn't pop. I'm objecting to Tom's claim that pop ought to be exempt from the kind of criticism applied to every other kind of music. I think about Roxette the same way I think about Low. That is, the same questions apply, even if they're answered differently. Tom's argument implies, among other things, I think, that your (Tim Hopkins') question about whether any music treats its audience better than pop does is one of many that can't be answered, because pop is immune to the kind of analysis that would be required to make sense of the topic. I think it shouldn't be. (And I think it's pretty certain that if the kind of pop Tom is talking about gets subjected to the same analysis used on Radiohead, it will not come off very well. And I think Tom knows that, so I wonder to what extent this article's argument amounts to "I can't defend pop, so I'll have to argue that it can't be attacked.")

Yes, one premise of the article is that there is a difference between one kind of music (which I'm calling pop) and other kinds of music. This difference rests - I'm suggesting - on the presumption or presentation of an autonomous artist behind the music. What I don't follow is how I'm then defending thoughtless listening. I'm defending a listener-centric listening, perhaps, but that need not be thoughtless.

I'd argue that different critical approaches are more appropriate to different musics, yes.

In terms of how I listen, it generally works like this. I hear something, I react to it, I try to analyse and verbalise my reaction. Inasmuch as this involves actually thinking about the music, this analysis will involve the music. As I understand it, Glenn's listening process, (or his listening-for-writing process), is a bit different, in that he has an end in mind, a 'review' which will present a value judgment of the thing.

Hmm. Well, I'm not against a certain amount of listener-centricity (as I said in a recent interview), but excusing non-autonomous-author pop its non-autonomous- authorness is exactly what I'm objecting to. It seems to me that art in which the author is irrelevant, and which thus doesn't constitute an attempt at communication, misses the point of art. It's one small step from your "machine pop" to pop that's actually produced by machines, and one small conceptual step from that to wireheading.

Oh, and my reviews often do not involve value judgments. People sometimes complain that they don't...

Re: authorial intention... Pop is no more "intention-free" than Cage is, nor does Tom's argument imply this. Of course the mode shifts the burden of communication from lyrics (or artist statement in interviews), or literary and anti-reader modes of operation.

Part of the point re so-called "mindlessness" is that in machine-pop a HUGE AMOUNT OF MIND (as in choices and techno-resources) goes eg into things like rhythm-pattern or basslines or texture, yet the EASILY READABLE element in these is indeed pretty fugitive, as Mitch pointed out. But to jump from there to "meaningless" is clearly nonsense: the meaning derives — same as ALL meaning, actually — from the interaction between performer and performed at, and from which meanings get noticed and cemented and reused as overt dialogue, and from which ones fly low and free, appreciated yet unremarked. A lot of otherwise intelligent unpop [ps not a Momus ref] gains its somewhat pompous narrowness from the artist's assumption that he's meant to be more in control of "total communication" than (a) he's competent to be, (b) anyone remotely wants him to be. Most "machinepop" is collectively created, with diff. aspects delegated to diff.teams, with result that it's dense with tensions and even contradictions more apparent to outsiders than insiders. This makes it i.exciting, ii. a much more valuable guide to the present — where most things wor like this — than eg novels or poems, where the author is believed to have TOTAL CONTROL and COMMUNICATIVE RESPONSIBILITY.

Latter = a dud also, because more of WRITTEN communication is pre-fab than pop communication? (Do I believe this?)

The "author" isn't irrelevant in machine pop - it's just that the "author" isn't one person or a handful of people (who surely must give up some autonomy anyway, writing in a group). Why don't you have this same problem with films, Glenn? (Or maybe you do...) I would think that if your answer is something like "auteurs," then Max Martin would be the hook on which you could hang your Backstreet appreciation.

And liking the Backstreet Boys because you think Max Martin is a genius would be entirely comprehensible to me. But I think Tom is saying even that is invalid, that anything outside the song itself is inapplicable. Or was the stricture against bring up "biography or career" only applicable to the singer?

Surely 'machine pop' can only attain as much self-awareness as the market will allow? However unwilling pop becomes to speak it's own language, it still has to exist within it's own framework ie. sales charts. And N'Sync's "Pop" isn't really tearing up those charts, is it? Ultimately, if 'aware pop' doesn't move units, then it'll have no choice but to revert to it's former existence as purely listener- centric and mostly critic-deaf. And pop will be reborn?

I can't find it in the FT archives, but I remember that faux- interview with Jessica Simpson contained some writing that talked about context and pop. It seemed to suggest that Radiohead and the like are "unpop", in that they are able to comment on matters existential, they are allowed ( and encouraged ) to examine the World Around Us while pop *is* The World Around Us. There's nothing wrong with Radiohead making a record about their last record, while pop most certainly shouldn't.

If "critic-deaf" means that 5ive's creative team aren't ILM-lurkers, yeah, sure. But "critic" includes (a) lots of media which is dim-and-distantly influenced by ancient NME-type args, albeit lame versions thereof (eg the Sun's pop columnist, whose name I'm glad I've forgotten); (b) it includes OTHER POP FIGURES. Just yesterday, Betty Boo AND Saffron from Republica both had a go at boyband-ism. Obviously I'd walk thru fire for BB, just for that Space 1999 video, even tho she hasn't meant anything for HOW LONG NOW? (Plus didn't her career tumble when she was booed offstage for miming to tapes in Australia?) And Saffron has always been an industrial-strength pinhead: nevertheless, they were on Jamie Theakston's Pop Quiz- thing, which is a "friendly" not a "critical" space. And crit for nobodies and from idiots can hurt MORE: Westlife wouldn't gve a fuck if Michael Ignatieff slagged them (not that he isn't a bigger pinhead than Saffron, but you know what I mean).

The moment of worry and of death-by-self- doubt came — didn't it!? admit it!?!? you all laughed at me back then!?!?!?!?!?!? — when Myleene the high-graduating classical music student treated Hear'Say's #1 as the Oscar speech chance to condemn the merely airbrushed and pitch-adjusted within boyband zone, and to raise the issue of MEASURABLE MUSICAL TALENT!! (ie an objective craft-skill she demonstrably has...) *That's* criticism; that was a stinging aesthetic challenge from within the territory, by the REAL new kids on t'block. POPSTARS changed the pop landscape (largely thanks to Kym Marsh), by shifting the locus of value and potential communicative meaning.

(Beside, Mitch, the answer is actually NO: this isn't the early 60s, when popsters had no perspective on WHAT ROCK MIGHT BE... Ronan can read Mojo as capably as you or me; it's just NOT a one-way viewing portal...)

Glenn:

1. "...like debilitatingly superficial and conformist propaganda aimed at precisely the most impressionable. I can see all sorts of socially- encouraging, self-awareness-inducing, self-image-improving things ...[in]... Shampoo and Kenickie and Alanis ... I haven't been able to discern any such potential value in Christina Aguilera or O- Town ... This is pop going nowhere, targeted at people in exactly the life-stage where they have to start deciding where to go. It's soma, poured into the water supply of a city that needs to wake up..." [Apologies for chopping chunks of the para. for brevity]

If you don't think that's mentioning politics, then we understand the word 'politics' very differently. If, as I suppose is possible, you mean the 'city' needs to wake up to a state of critical music litening, then we are also working with two different meanings of the word 'need'. I understood you to be saying that 'the city' 'needs' to become more aware of issues of social importance ("socially- encouraging" etc) which, it seems clear to me, is all about politics.

2. I assumed your comment that specifically "this sort of pop" treats its audience as an undifferentiated mass implied that some other sorts of pop didn't. Apologies if I misunderstood. If I didn't misunderstand, I'd like to know which sorts don't.

crit for nobodies = crit FROM nobodies

Mark: I'm confused. I've no doubt that Ronan can read Mojo and redirect his career accordingly to follow a more rockist approach to music-making (for instance) but ultimately, if the public rejects that approach then he'll be back to his old act, yes? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding Tom's piece..are self-awareness and "authenticity" qualities that the public now desire in their pop or is that an assumption made my pop stars that are hoping to avoid the backlash and lengthen their stay on the charts? Does the fact that pop is making these assumptions automatically indicative of what society now expects from it's pop music? I'm off to bed to sleep on it.

My suspicion would be that once the genie is out of the bottle it can't be put back.

Meanwhile: appreciation of 'art' possibly requires communication (I don't think it does actually but this is another bigger question). Appreciation however need not work as part of an artistic dialogue - when we look at and appreciate a cloud, the only communication is between us and whatever part of ourselves we want to project onto that cloud.

Now of course I'm not calling Pop a natural phenomenon (and of course our appreciation of nature is totally mediated) but in its diffusion of artistic autonomy it perhaps becomes possible to appreciate pop more in this fashion, more 'directly' maybe (and open up perhaps fruitful lines of listening to more 'communicative' music forms, too).

(The corporatisation that makes this possible also makes pop ubiquitous, and I'd agree that this isn't a good thing at all, but it's the fact of the ubiquity that's bad, not the specific products that have become ubiquitous.)

But I still don't get it Tom (despite making the effort.) If the product literally exists to *be* ubiquitous, if it's purpose is incorporated into it's design, if in essence it is inseparable from ubiquity - how can a person do that? And moreover, why does anyone want to? It all seems terribly dangerous...

Tim:

Ah, I thought you meant politics politics, as in governments, my mistake. To re-respond to your point, then, it's not that I'm saying critical music-listening is synonymous with these positive awarenesses (self-, social-, philosophical-), nor that it's necessary or always sufficient, but it's one route. To live an examined life, you have to start examining something. I happen to believe that music is one of the most powerful and accessible art forms, and thus one of the most obvious candidates, and that's why it seems like such a loss to me if we, or they, or anybody, passes up the opportunity to take music seriously and demand, at least some of the time, that it be more than just entertainment.

And yes, I do think that there is plenty of music that doesn't treat its listeners like a potential-consumption blob, it just wasn't part of my response to Tom's piece to explain what, since I think it's a point of agreement between us. I think a lot of my weekly column is effectively devoted to examining what kind of reactions different kinds of music are prepared to produce, but here are three quick examples of what I mean:

- Mark Kozelek's "Ruth Marie", my favorite song from last year, is (oversimplifying) a first-person portrait of an invalid old woman's willingness to die. It is long, slow, repetitive and quiet; there is no way you'd ever mistake it for a fight song, and I suspect very few people would manage to appreciate it without paying attention to the lyrics, because there's not that much music to distract from them. And because the text is emotionally complex, and Kozelek does not provide any interpretation of his own, you are left as a listener to figure out your own reaction to it, a reaction that will probably have an emotional character.

- Low's "Violence" has potentially interesting lyrics, but they're much less narrative than "Ruth Marie"'s, and not as much the focal point of the arrangement. But the song is so disconcertingly spare, by most people's pop standards, that it immediately raises some interesting questions about the nature and boundaries of pop and rock. It's fairly hard to imagine that Low had any illusions of it becoming a chart hit, so arguably one way of treating your audience as individuals is to make art that quite clearly seeks a limited audience, rather than aspiring to ubiquity.

- And to pick one example of a very different sort, I don't know if you ever saw the video for Vai's "Deep Down Into the Pain", with Devin Townsend's berserker vocal performance, but coming at a time when musical aggression levels and macabre imagery were not yet nearly as common as they've become in the eight years since, I thought the song, and especially the video, were pretty bracing, thought-provoking in much the same way that punk initially was. And unlike with Marilyn Manson, later, I didn't think the song tried to dictate the terms of anybody's reaction to it. If you like Marilyn Manson, or like liking Marilyn Manson, it's pretty clear what you're supposed to do about it, how you're supposed to dress, what you're supposed to claim to be interested in or not. If you liked "Deep Down Into the Pain", I don't think it was at all obvious how you were expected to express it.

We could argue about these examples, of course, but I hope we won't. I'm just trying to give you an idea of some of the kinds of things I don't find in "I Want It That Way" or "Genie in a Bottle".

What I want to know is if the people that are supposedly consuming pop thoughtlessly are doing so with the preconceived supposition that the artist-listener relationship is present in music, or listening to pop as the ubiquitious form it is.

"arguably one way of treating your audience as individuals is to make art that quite clearly seeks a limited audience, rather than aspiring to ubiquity": have to say I think that the OPPOSITE of this is true... "Aiming for a small audience" = treating everyone not IN said small audience as uber-blob.

By the way, about 'Us vs 'Them'.

There are some reasons why this way of thinking can seems convincing and plausible. There are some reasons why it can seem unhealthy and unfair. But from my POV, the simplest reason why I suspect it doesn't work is that I don't agree with 'You', so I am not part of 'Us'. I mean, I think loads of you are terribly intelligent, and some of you are very charming, but we don't share enough views about pop music to be a 'We'. And possibly this goes for many other people on ILM and elsewhere, too.

Don't be silly. If aiming for a small audience is being impersonal to the rest of the world, then saying something directly to a single other human being is the most impersonal form of communication short of introspection.

Also, disagreement doesn't invalidate us-vs-thems. The point of that exercise is to look for commonalities of viewpoint among groups that share characteristics, not to stipulate them.

Re: teenage girls - having a 14 year old sister and talking to her about music (we both agree that Mya's "Free" is perhaps the best pop song of the year - an unexpected conclusion for both of us) leads me to think that there is definitely analysis going on. After all, any value judgement requires analysis, even if it is arguably rudimentary and at times inarticulate. I don't expect my sister to wax poetic about "Free" as I have and will probably do again in the future, but our reasons for liking it are similar. I don't see why her analysis of it would be any different to her analysis of a book she read for school; while her exposure to either medium is not yet fully autonomous, surely her ability to form a reasoned opinion is.

Tom's article is great, BTW, and while parts of it surprised me I found myself agreeing with it. Like most other styles of music, Pop (and "Pop", for that matter) fails when it attempts to second-guess itself. Similarly, the more clearly defined the critical discourse surrounding a given field of music, the more tightly constrained the rules dictating its creative development become. Which is why the surprising consensus in the Focus Group is vaguely disquieting rather than cause for celebration: machine pop has been characterised by its very unpredictability these past few years - the yawning gap between the product and a critical context in which to place it. Obviously therefore, it's a sense of excitement that exists in an inverse proportion to the field of music's critical rehabilitation (a euphemism for the entrenchment of critical orthodoxy).

Tim F: with respect, I don't think that music necessarily does go off when it 'tries to second-guess itself'. I think that doing that can be a good thing. But I may have a diferent (and doubtless vague) definition in mind from yours.

Don't think I agree with Glenn M about commonalities. Not sure I understand his point about 'stipulation' vs 'searching'. I could find some common ground with some people on ILM (or at Goodison Park, or in the House of Commons), and some non-common (uncommon?) ground. The 'we' that might be produced in the process would be at best pragmatic, provisional and strategic, and could easily be undermined if we decided to start talking about what divided us rather than what united us.

Like the pinefox, I'm afraid I didn't really understand Tom's essay.

It wasn't supposed to be an obscure point. Defining an "us" that thinks about music critically doesn't mean that we agree about anything when we do so, just that we do it. Like defining an "us" that equals "people participating in this ILM thread" doesn't imply, obviously, that we agree within the thread. There are people who think about music critically, and there are people who do not. We could argue separately about the size of these groups, and who's in which, but do you really disagree that the groups exist?

[I think this is an interesting discussion, but I do sometimes feel like it's the victim of the Zenotic Method, which consists of demanding clarification of every term in a point, and then demanding clarification of every term in the clarification, etc.]

but glenn: participating in this forum is (quite) easily defined and/or agreed-on; we all just look. But "critical judgment" is NOT so easily defined, let alone agreed on. All up this thread a variety of alternative versions of what constitutes (ugly phrase alert) "critical engagement" have been proposed, and you have casually batted them all away away without examination. OK, fair enough — you are not interested in these (many) modes of engagement. But your apparent judgment that those who ARE are a. themselves mindless, and/or b. victims of the imposition of mindlessness can ONLY BE A JUDGMENT OF CONTENT if you DO engage with their systems of value, from within, to see if they are i. onto something ii. fooling themselves. You have to risk being wrong before you're allowed to be called "right": I think your mechanisms of personalisation and communcation are (no, that's REALLY a generalisation: have historically had a tendency toward being) taste-baffles and filters to ensure that no information intrudes which will disturb the worldview of those within the Magic Circle of Personalised Communication and Intended Art.

The only reason I brought up any sort of us/them distinction in the first place was to point out that pop without an autonomous author is consumed by a very large number of people who either do not notice, do not examine, or do not worry about the lack of an autonomous author. That's clearly true. The question is whether the music should be judged differently because of this. Tom, by saying that the usual critical questions are irrelevant to pop, implicitly rules out asking them in connection with the music's ubiquity. But he only explains how they're irrelevant to why he likes pop, not why they shouldn't be applied for other reasons. To me this is like somebody saying that the appeal of McDonald's fries is how they taste, so talking about their nutritional value is irrelevant. I'm saying 1) that this makes no sense, the two are separate conversations that can co-exist, and 2) that McDonald's markets, deploys and prices so aggressively that the nutritional value of their fries is especially relevant, tantamount to a public health question. Note that the fries in this example, Britney et al, might have nutritional value. That's a separate argument. I'm just trying to convince you it's an argument worth having.

I'm still a little confused about the enjoy/endorse disparity. Can one enjoy a piece of pop music without endorsing it and vice versa? How can we ascertain the "nutritional value" of certain music? Should every pop song attempt to convey a positive message that contributes to the betterment of its listeners' lives?

1. Tim, I think I might also object to the idea that pop necessarily fails when it "tries to second-guess itself". I recall that when I first heard of Britney (I guess when "Hit Me Baby One More Time" was just about to be released) I thought it felt engineered to make as much cultural noise as possible: the combination of Britney plus school uniform plus chunky pop beats plus lyrics-which-might-refer-to- domestic abuse seemed primed to hit a lot of media, from the tabloid end through the prurient middle market to the high-minded cultural commentators). I think pop has always second-guessed itself, that's a major part of its 'nature'. What I understood Tom to be saying was that when machine pop starts explicitly talking about itself, it is dead. I would contend that pop continually talks to and about itself, and that it has done so more or less explicitly since I've been interested in pop, and probably long before. [A thousand curses on all of you, incidentally, because I can't get the Reynolds Girls finest moment out of my head now]

2. Glenn, I don’t agree when you say that Tom’s argument is that ‘the usual critical questions are irrelevant to pop’: he seems to me to be saying one route of criticism – a direct link between artist named on cover and content on record - is foxed by the way this pop is produced and consumed. I can’t see him saying any other of the ‘usual’ critical questions (whatever they may be) aren’t relevant. This may be my poor reading of the article.

3. Glenn: I've known so many people with fabulous art-critical abilities and terrible critical ability as far as their own lives or the lives of others are concerned. You may argue that thinking about what you [/I /they] are listening to is a start, better than nothing, but I could equally argue it's a stopping point, ‘soma’ of a sort for too many, and not very 'socially encouraging' at all.

4. Glenn (again, sorry!) I understand that you engage intellectually and emotionally with the records you mention above (I've no desire to argue about them, or your enjoyment of them which is your own business and of course completely valid... and very eloquently put, if I may say so). I don't, however, buy that those records treat you any differently than they treat me, or anyone else. We might react very differently, but then it sounds to me as though we would react very differently to Destiny's Child, or Elephant Man, or Sizzla. If (say) Mark Kozalek were to leave me cold and Destiny's Child were to move me to thought and / or motion, then should I still believe that MK's record was made *as if I were a critical individual* while DC's wasn't?

- Sure, you can enjoy things you don't endorse. I enjoy old Helloween records, but I also think they're terrible in a lot of really serious ways. I enjoyed the first Eve 6 record, but I think it's not materially different from the rest of a movement I think we'd be better off without.

- Yes, by "the usual critical questions" I meant the ones that assume there's an author responsible, "usual" used in the same way Tom says "most criticism of the teenpop boom". You're right that eliminating the author doesn't eliminate all critical approaches, but a) it sure undermines a lot of them, and b) some of the ones that are left, like musical innovation or independent lyrical invention, aren't often machine pop's strong points. Except for a point about "physical onomatopaeia" that sounded intriguing but I couldn't follow it, I don't see where Tom, or anybody else here, has offered what I would call a "critical approach" to machine pop, other than "I just like it" or "It's more exciting this way", which I think are equivalent. How, other than just comparing how happy we say these songs make us, can we talk about non-autonomous-author, non- self-defeatingly-self-reflective machine-pop? What are the valid questions to ask about "...Baby One More Time"? I don't mean this rhetorically; what are, in your opinion, the valid questions to ask about it?

- I agree that exaggerated critical abilities don't necessarily correlate to any other life skill. Nor do extreme math skills, massive historical knowledge or much of anything else. But you've got to learn to think by thinking about something. And music's advantage over math and history is that if you learn to think about music you implicitly learn that thinking isn't something you just do in school. If you think thinking about music is more likely to turn people into socially-maladjusted geeks, then well, that was exactly the point of soma in Brave New World, wasn't it, discouraging people from developing unbalancing passions?

- The point about how music treats its listeners is a bit slippery, I grant you. But I think there's something important there, closely related to the rest of this discussion, about whether art is primarily aiming for ubiquity or primarily trying to communicate something. But I'm an admitted elitist. To me dumbed-down culture like "...Baby One More Time" and Bay/Bruckheimer films and prime-time sitcoms are insulting, and the fact that so many people seem to enjoy them is no excuse at all.

And one other point, because I'm wearying of circling around and around on these:

- It's hard for me to credit an account of pop's death that doesn't address its birth. Tom says pop has had a short, glorious life, but as far as I can tell pop in the last four years hasn't been notably different from pop in the decades before that. Weren't the Village People, Shawn Cassidy, Leif Garrett, Paula Abdul, Mariah Carey, En Vogue, Tiffany and Debbie Gibson, at least, just as much "pop" as anything today? What about all those Holland/Dozier/Holland Supremes songs? Seems to me that if pop survived Diana Ross going solo and Alanis graduating from _Alanis_ to _Jagged Little Pill_, a little NSync petulance is hardly going to be its death.

[Grr. This forum could use editing, or a preview function.]

Whoa, everyone's talking about talking about Pop Muzik.

I mean, literally. Go here to see other people discussing this same article (reprinted on another site)in some sort of parallel universe:

http://www. plastic.com/music/01/06/25/1517209.shtml

More discussion here.

I should at this point mention that I'm really pleased by the amount of discussion all this has generated, even if I'm not replying much (because it's kind of a work in progress). Thanks everyone contributing to this thread - not to mention on Earth-B and Earth-P!

1. I can't tell you how nice it is to hear that someone else didn't really understand Tom E's very difficult article.

2. I agree with Mark S that we cannot so easily be sure re. what is 'critical engagement'. I don't think that Glenn M, or Mark S, or Ally garance, or DJ Martian, or Ned Raggett, or whoever, are all pursuing the same grand project as me (or, for all I know, each other). I don't imagine that those people would be at all happy to be grouped with me, either. I imagine that they'd be appalled and horrified. That's to say: posting sometimes to ILM doesn't mean you're part of a group besides People On ILM.

3. To be Zenotic (??!): this phrase 'the autonomous author' is now getting a lot of unquestioned currency, like we are all sure what we mean by it. It's strange, because I always used to think that *no* author was 'autonomous'.

It's not that "autonomous author" has unquestioned currency, it's that it's the term Tom is using, and every time I try to substitute any paraphrase the discussion bogs down in arguing about whether my other term means something different, so I've switched to using Tom's exact terminology in an attempt, not entirely successful, to keep the conversation on track. Personally I prefer "puppet pop" or, more evocatively but trademark-transgressively, "Real Doll pop".

[Also: "Zenotic Method", neologized from Socratic Method and Zeno's paradox (in which you can never get more than halfway to anywhere).]

[ps I've worked out TE's strategy:
Throw dodgy tidbit in GM's direction. GM gnaws angrily at it. Half a dozen oaves leap at him from difft directions and belabour him with their best rubber truncheons. By and by, exhaustion reigns. TE unleashes pt.2, a farrago of ungrounded gibberish which renders EVERYONE PRESENT AGHAST. But strength is spent and all bestest weapons are worn but to nubbins. Slack and sleazy, Ewing the Grate Manipulator triumphs boo. The end.]

As I understood it, Tom's article was meant to comment on something that's happened to the current run of chartpop - like the last 5-6 years - the "death" thus being something of a dramatic rhetorical device. I'm sure you could argue in a way similar to Tom's for other periods of pop excitement - not sure if he intends that generalization or not. But the article itself just focused on the recent run, so criticizing it for failure to notice/admit that "pop" has been around, in similarly exciting periods of history, for a long time, just misses the point.

Here are some valid questions to ask about "... Baby One More Time":

Why do I like it? What is it doing to and for me, and my enjoyment of everything else?

This is no different than for non-machine-pop.

If you want to claim you know where the end point of this "current run" falls, I think it's fair to ask you to say where you think the beginning point was. Seems to me pop's been just like this for at least 40 years.

One thing I don't understand is why everyone thinks they know what this 'recent run' is, and whether it exists, and when it's happened if it's happened. Is this 'movement' something that Tom E has invented?

That sounds like a criticism - but I don't think it should be: because one of the jobs of a critic might, possibly, be to 'invent their object' in such a way. If so, it might be that Tom E was doing that job very well (he does lots of critical jobs well, I have often suggested).

But I don't know whether to think that there has been a 'recent run' distinct from anything else, or not. On the one hand, I would like to say, Yes - there are all those records that I hate, all conveniently bundled up in that recent run. On the other hand, I am not sure that I could draw a convincing line between that run and earlier records that I hate.

"My knowledge of that kind of 60s teen-pop is limited to a few survey compilations and a Shangri-Las best-of, and I like them, but a) I don't pretend to know much about the cultural role that music played at the time, and b) it's not playing it now"

"Seems to me pop's been just like this for at least 40 years."

This is what I'm hearing from Mr. TE's article -

1. Many songs on the charts share a hyper-fussy production style and meticulously-planned hype/image positioning. At first I thought Tom was going to go into parallels here and wind up with the conclusion that pop is dead because music-by-corporate-committee sucks. But he says the opposite - "Pop is music where artistic autonomy is irrelevant to the impact of the finished product." I think I very much disagree with this - would "Whip It" have sounded the same after passing thru 20 Max Martin rewrites? "500 Miles"?

2. Said style of chartpop has got some great songs in it. Agree. At least for the 3 minutes they're on, which is all that matters for this discussion right?

3. This type of pop/hype nexus with interchangeable parts is a recent phenomenon yet already dying/dead because of ill-advised attempt at legitness -- noooo. Whattabout NKOTB? En Vogue? Is Justin T's 2-step move any different from Dawn going and making "worthy" songs in Lucy Pearl? It may be their own particular career suicide, but the parts are interchangeable, remember?

For me all these observations = death of bolt-from-blue chart shocker from Bloomington whose parents throw party on Sunday for the Top 40 countdown. But I don't even think THAT's true. In an era where everything accelerates, corporations aren't ultimately nimble enough to stay on top of all trends, or imaginative enough to come up with new ones. Tho it does take at least 1M dollars to even be at the table in U.S. radio (for all the payoffs) which ought to be illegal and hopefully will be soon.

It's really hard for me to think straight about any of this, the hatred I've got for major media outlets raging as hotly as it does thru my skinny little body.

My (small) point is that this "run" really started in the early 90s. Destiny's Child has got a different sound than En Vogue, more mechanized. But so has De La Soul these days (i.e. it's just the fashion, prob. impact of rave finally being felt on U.S. shores, not just some stupid vocal sample but kneading its way organically into the entire sonic strategy - too dull a reason but true I think). Anyhow: N*sync, etc. is an extension, the logical conclusion. An overdriven Pentium IV version of the supergloss Image of the Mecha-Pop Star in an Age of Media Control (NKOTB, Take That, En Vogue, etc.).

Re: self-obsession: Of COURSE these guys make meta-riffs, they're giving you "access" so you're not crushed with the overwhelming weight of their sanctionedness. They're puncturing holes in their own media balloon, crucially before you can (a la Beavis and Butthead). Overseriousness = DEATH in the pop market (except for v. specific moments like metal, onyx, etc.).

Count me in among those who wonder when Tom thinks this current run of pop got started and what makes it different from previous pop. I can see a few new things - the Bay City Rollers and Leif Garrett never sold 10 million copies of an album, and never dominated the industry in the way that teen-pop does now - but I'm not sure that the music itself is produced and marketed in a much different way than it was before (or that it is more entertaining, which seems part of Tom's point).

Not sure about Tom, but my own definition of the "recent run" is a cross-section of teenpop and R&B from the US that first germinated in about '96 - the year of Backstreet Boys' "Backstreet's Back (Everybody)" Ginuwine's "Pony" and Blackstreet's "No Diggity" - all in their own way defining the new musical paradigm of sonically thrilling futuristic music coupled with (although more defined in the Backstreet Boys) a sense of indestructible self-confidence and inevitability. The rise of this music subsequently can be summarised by plotting the amount of work done by Max Martin and Timbaland, though obviously there were heaps of other people involved (artists including Ginuwine, Britney, Aaliyah, N'Sync, TLC, Christina Aguilera, Destiny's Child, Mandy Moore, Kelis, Jessica Simpson, Pink etc. etc.).

Some - possibly Tom - might argue that the British version of pop these last few years (Spice Girls, Steps, S Club 7, Hear'say etc.) should also be included, for monolithic coverage alone, but I've always allocated it a different place in my brain.

As for "second-guessing" - I meant pop second-guessing itself for the purpose of critical validation. N'Sync (and now Britney, apparently) drafting in BT to make their music more appealling to the non-pop masses was almost a foregone conclusion the moment people started to (for the umpteenth time) realise that there was something in pop music for people other than teenage girls. Second guessing for the purpose of mass commercial success I have no problem with - it's pop's job.