Article Response: The Death of Pop, Part 1

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.

Mark, don't be a jerk. In the first instance I was responding to a question about a specific set of groups ("ronettes, the crystals, the shangri-las, the monkees, dionne warwick, dusty springfield, leslie gore, the archies, etc."), none of which I happen to know that well. In the second I was talking about the existence of commercial not- written-by-the-artist pop through the ages, which I know well enough to hypothesize that it's been structurally similar at least as far back as the early 60s.

As for "thrilling futuristic music coupled with a sense of indestructible self-confidence and inevitability", how does this not describe, say, "Funkytown", "Crush on You" or "Gonna Make You Sweat"?

Well it's a different type of futurism, innit? "Funky Town" is disco, "Gonna Make You Sweat" is house - both of these are clearly pop, but they're pop as it manifests itself in separate styles of music (I have no idea which "Crush On You" you're referring to, hopefully not Aaron Carter's).

What I think defines the music we're talking about is that for the first time in a while a futurist musical approach was explicitly associated with pop in and of itself - not the pop end of another genre. By drawing disparate examples from all over the shop, you can quite rightly demonstrate that the ideas circulating were hardly new, but that doesn't disprove the novelty of this sort of thing as a movement. Otherwise by the same token we could say that Britpop is stylistically indistinguishable from any other dominant stage in British music, simply because other bands in a similar mould had existed for thirty years prior.

Diff. between Lipps Inc. and N'SYNC: branding, which isn't something I talked about enough. Branding means that there is a 'band' or 'artist' for the consumer to focus on, i.e. the possibility of autonomy has been raised, and is then removed.

Diff. between Bay City Rollers and N'SYNC: Rollers are in a slightly different tradition, along with the Monkees. They are presented as a 'rock band' with defined instrumental roles. So the do-they don't- they play their instruments / actually *do* anything becomes part of the presentation. This is a totally interesting pop model but it hardly surfaces today and when it does - BBMak, Dimestars - nobody seems to want it. It feels slightly out of date I suppose.

Difference between early 60s girl-group pop and N'SYNC: not much except I wonder in terms of presentation....was artistic autonomy even an issue in pop, pre-Beatles and Dylan? (Pre-criticism, in fact).

(Of course there are massive massive sonic differences between NSYNC and all of the above, which should not be discarded)

But sonics aside these are nuances rather than actual differences. Pop continues. As Josh has suggested, "dead" in the article is rhetorical exaggeration (and intentional too). So what I'm saying - so far - is that this particular machine pop moment is coming to an end. When did it start? (I'm not sure this is relevant, but it's been asked.) Musically I can't think of anything pre NKOTB which combines mechanised music with a singer-dancer focus. The rash of hits I mentioned at the start of the article weren't intended to mean 'the start of machine pop', but were flagged up as the point at which machine pop started to be aesthetically interesting to me, i.e. when I realised I liked it. The public seemed to agree, since those hits also helped start the recent period of complete commercial dominance for the style.

And yes, none of this is new. I mention this even, at the end. If you can find it, take a look at Nik Cohn's Awopbopaloobopawopbamboom for an early sixties perspective on what he calls 'Superpop'.

Tim: "Daft Punk isn't even pop by my tight definition anyway"

Surely not being pop is Daft Punk's only salvation: If their music sounds like that because it's just them talking to themselves in their private language, then fair enough, but if they're shovelling on the irony in an attempt to shift units, then they should be dragged from their cars and beaten. This doesn't apply to other artists: just Daft Punk.

Mitch: "There's nothing wrong with Radiohead making a record about their last record, while pop most certainly shouldn't."

This also has the problem that it fails the Backstreet's Back test.

Wow. Have none of you ever sat down and talked with people who don't "get" music, but still buy a lot? They do exist, (hence the success of Travis, hohoho) and they're very scary.

Also, my respect for Tom (already very high) goes up several notches due to the news that he also contributes to Barbelith. Also fascinating to see the difference in slant that they immediately pick up and run with.

"Contributes to Barbelith" = a bit of a misnomer. UK webscene lynchpin and future of electronic publishing T.Coates e-mailed me and said, can I reprint the death of pop article? I said sure. And so here we are. But it's on the list of things I'd love to write something for eventually.

The Plastic thread is interesting and humbling because it shows up quite how much I've been writing for an audience - show the piece to a load of people who've likely never seen FT in their lives and you get comments like "Ewing has obviously been sitting on this column since 1999 waiting to plug names and titles in" and but-what-about- Timbaland defenses of pop. Sigh.

1. Tim F: what is BT? In my country it used to refer to the nationalized telephone industry - now privatized, I'm afraid, but still, come to think of it, called 'BT'. But there are lots of other tel. companies around now as well.

2. Where does all this stuff about 'futurism' come from? The only pop futurism (roughly speaking - ie. not in strict avant-garde terms) that I can think of = Bowie (Starman, Ziggy and what have you) and his New Romantic scions.

3. Seems disingenuous of Tom E to say, 'This Movement of mine has ended - but I don't care when it began'. If you want to persuade us that there has been a Movement, then offering some temporal parameters would help (perhaps you do do this. I'm not saying that you never do, or never would do).

4. Andrew F: don't know what you mean re. people who don't 'get' music. Most people on this forum probably think that I don't 'get' music. If people are buying lots of records, then - even though I almost certainly won't like most of them - I think that they can claim to 'get' that particular thing.

BT is, i think, a house music person leaning towards melodic side of things, arpeggioes etc, what i've heard i didn't like. maybe a bit william orbit? i'm sure tim f will provide a better description.

as for people not *getting* music, i have to agree with the pinefox. i would suggest that if someone buys a travis album and likes it, they *get it*. whether they buy a lot, or hardly any, they surely *get* it?

Is the artistic autonomy (or lack of same) of N'Sync really that big a deal with the people who buy their records ? I mean, sure, when Hanson was doing well, fans kept talking about how they-play-their-instruments-and-write-their-songs wow-isn't-that-impressive, but isn't that just some after-the-fact my-fave-band-is-better-than-yours talk from people who would have bought the records anyway even without any perception of artistic autonomy ? If Britney Spears had written all the songs that made her famous, I think she would have sold the exact same number of copies that she did, it's just the way that she's discussed that would be different.

I was talking about people who can't (or don't see the point of) explain why they like the music they like. If you ask them why, they'll tell you it's nice. If you ask them if they like, say, the way the bass drops out in that part, and then comes back, they'll say they guess so, or just they hadn't thought about it, or that it's just, y'know, nice. I misspoke when I said they bought a lot of music (almost certainly not compared to most of the people on this forum) but they collectively buy a lot of music. I'm not saying you have to analyse when you enjoy, but you should understand why you would want to. Now more than ever, but that's the anti-corporate paranoid in me coming to the fore again.

Since Britney audience is (a) extremely variegated, since so large, (b) changes over time (eg gets older), then yes — probably this factor DOES impinge, Patrick. Pop teaches you it's OK to want more: the bolshier of its disciples fret (and worse) when more fails to emerge. One major way it impinges: out the mouths of the starts themselves. It apparently bothers some of them greatly: they are as prey as anyone living under liberal capitalism (like the Unthinking Robots they surely are) to a (confused and dilute) version of what has after all been LC's dominant aesthetic ideology for c.150 years, and remains the Common Denominator to "serious art" talk from Q to the Sun to the New York Review of Books (as in point-source authoring + select audience = superior art) . Hence recent emergence of worry into interview, and a crackle of cross-star dissing re "who's keeping it real" (cf Betty Boo on Westlife; Myleene on whoever she was pissed off with). Since one of the (many) things which makes the current situation difft is the extreme SIZE of the pool from which this pop-sector is drawn (in Roller days, who elswe was there: Jackson Five, Osmonds, that's it... and of course the Jackson Five produced ONE world-historical pop talent of EXTREME STRANGENESS and ORIGINALITY). Hence we can plausibily gamble that SOMEONE in this pool is gonna be swift and cute enough (not to mention: ANGRY AND BETRAYED ENOUGH — cf Robbie Williams) to turn the worry into a THING, instead of (as Tom worries) just dissolving into lame/whiny me-so- put-upon Spicer solo-alb terrain...

And of course there are extra twists in the loop. Sex awareness is one: any star with minor nous (and a thick skin?) can DIRECTLY access fan-fantasies abt him/her from safe lurker distance. We already KNOW this feedback loop has nourished and smartened a signif level of cult TV (Buffy/Xena/Star Trek blah blah): some of the core guys in THAT highly author-blurred collective ARE surfing their equivs of ILM. Popstars caused a power-tremor: the conventional routes of power shaken by K.Marsh's brilliant all- in-one-throw gamble, over the heads of studio-programmers, to the the SYMPATHIES of the MASS AUDIENCE...: then factor in Lara Croftism/hentai-idoru/porn-as-the-new-goth tendencies, where's the Madonna of this major car-smash of zeitgeist shifts? (Structurally this just = the 70s: yes, if you construct yrself a critical position which allows you to overlook-ignore-dismiss alkl the big things that are actually happening)

Finally: and this (I believe) is at the heart, what I (v.obscurely) have been calling PROG. This combines the sense of a need for progression (a highly stimulated, media-savvy-yet-unformed-naive audience growing up and demanding more; demanding what they THINK they've been promise) with the sheer density of (as yet unanchored) NOISE now packed into the ordinary signal. Competitive differentiation required a remarkable compactness of features w/o direct translateability: they seem like surface tweaks, but they soon become the core of the identity (what you reach for when the top-level message begins somewhat to alienate you). A ENORMOUS amount of unpoliced techy mind and cleverness (and reaction to intra-corporate boredom re the top- level message, also) is poured into these: it's there ready to explode, just as prog did in the 70s out of the mass of psych-pop (which was also noise and gimmick-rich, and starved of clear signal: disco and 80s masspop were — in different ways — far cleaner and smoother). One of the things that happens to records is that they are PLAYED AND REPLAYED VERY OFTEN, very far from the source: in which repetition, the readymades they all share lose force, while the tics swarm and mass and dissipate and reform and ATTACK! (Attack = this silly jerks' melodramatic presentation of a "mindless" generation suddenly pouring their expressive intent — a complex conflicted collusion between audiences and audience-focus-lightning rods = stars — into everything in the music which isn't already tied down.)

[To reduce it to a simplistic kremlinology of corporations: 60s/70s, corps in turmoil, central control-strategy-clarity lost; 80s/90s, corps in new-tech heavy-ass consolidation; 2000+ corps again in turmoil, central csc lost again...]

Or maybe we'll be really lucky and the new Joni Mitchell will emerge...

nothing to add here at the moment, except, GREAT post, mark.

The slide upwards to angry-Robbie defiant-Madonna independent stardom, or the slide downwards into oh-poor-popstar irrelevance, are still both steps out of pop, though. The tone of the article is one of observation not 'worry'.

Your prog idea I need re-readings to get (or clarifications, heh heh heh) - but would a problem here not be the sheer expense of producing the packed-signal pop artefacts, which kind of limits their use outside the corporate control structure...? Or have I not understood?

Yes - very (characteristically) intelligent, (characteristically) brimming and bubbling with ideas as far as I can see. BUT I can't really follow it. I don't suppose you want to explain what that last big paragraph was saying?

Robbie Williams and Madonna = no longer pop ?!? Tom, dude, you're turning into the Joe Carducci of pop. Whatever definition of pop that excludes them would also exclude half the artists in the top 40, and that makes no sense, unless to you pop is only about intention and process and not about result.

Joe Carducci's analysis is actually quite useful cos it forces you to get back to essentials. If we're going to use words like 'rock' and 'pop' we ought either to admit that they have no actual meaning at all beyond 'music' or we ought to consider what a tighter definition might be. I think in the end we might have to end up in the former position but it makes for interesting discussion (like this thread) to flirt with the latter.

Also "steps out of pop" != "no longer pop". It would seem equally wrongheaded to me to deny that Madonna now is a different kind of thing than Madonna in 1984, as to say that what she is is not "pop". Maybe she's moved from being Pop in the tight sense of my article to "pop" in the broad shorthand sense.

Or maybe I should call my-definition 'pop' something like Absolute Pop to acknowledge the existence of a fuzzier and more nebulous category which exists in the grey zone between it and, say, Cat Power ;)

Brane sleeps once more, the soft doze of the justified ancients. Soon — this they knew — they would be on the move again, further down and further in. Where Saknusem's scratched glyph remained to be read, they could follow. But to light and knowledge, or just further heat and murk and monsters?

Many tumble in, but few return to the sunlit lands...