Long Days, Long Months: 15 August

Both the essay I've nearly finished, about Punk and the concept/fad of "Post-Punk," and numerous other discussions over the past few years, have made the way the word, "pop," has come to be used over the past decade or so troubling and annoying to me. Pop of course began as a shortened version of popular music; and as such means anything that's not European Classical music or folk music - except that with Jazz music's elevation to "art" status, it also came to mean most music that's not Jazz (until Fusion introduced some complications into the matter).

Yet, in recent years "pop" has become a sort of ideological construct, whose believers revel in the good times supposedly guaranteed by the wide-reaching popularity of certain kinds of music: the dance parties, the singing-along with friends, the warm sensation of joining millions of others in something, even if just a song often completely forgetten in a few months. But most of all, I say the term has become ideological because it indirectly gives central place to two kinds of music: (1) that which happens to be have enjoyed commercial success, often quite randomly; (2) genres and movements that generally don't get counted as "pop" belaboring to sound and act dumber and more cheerful, as in "Indie Pop." The defenders of the latter will ignore its origins and say it's just "pop" - as if rendering the music unsusceptible to any sort of critique. In other words, if you don't like it, you're just a sourpuss who wants to ruin other peoples' fun and denigrate the artistic pursuits of sweet young kids with good intentions.

As for the first category, an intellectual development more pernicious is at work. The music categorized as "pop," because of the implicit connection to the concept of popular music, displaces music we don't think of as "pop" from any consideration whatsoever. If it's not "pop," then maybe it's not popular music as well... But alas! Court musics and academic musics (that is, classical music) hardly have the same prominence they did before the 1960's. What most listeners would call "art music" - a notion which, to me, is redundant, as all music is art - is in fact created by individuals working in the realms of popular music. In other words, we've gotten to the point where the bifurcated world-view that lead to the concept of popular music in the first place (the classical-popular divide) has become irrelevant. Yet, oddly, all this talk about "pop," always referring to an incredibly-narrow range of music, suggests that the world of popular music has grown smaller!

In such a cultural milieu, are we surprised by the vogue for the word "noise"? After all, if that ornery fellow is not making "pop" music (the only important consideration, as far as some are concerned) surely it must be that he's just causing a scene, making a racket, engaging in a child-like maneuver to attract attention. Thus, he's just making some "noise."

Once upon a time (that is, the 1990's) I often found myself defending artists who were said to have "pop" influences, or a "pop" style (say, the Elephant Six artists here in Athens, or the "Brit Pop" bands) but in this decade I've come to find the word, "pop," anathema; hearing it being used, I sometimes get nauseous.

I understand that the twenty or so persons who might read this essay might demur, pointing to the massive amounts of experimental music being made, by and in a large swath of people and places that now includes South Korea, China, and Turkey, or - a particular example - to the surprising success of a band like Animal Collective here in the U S A. That said, I'm not sure if all those experimentalists escape the "noise" ghetto anymore so than so-called "noise" artists - or they do so financially not philosophically. Animal Collective, though certainly popular music, do not fit the confines of the "pop" countless journalists and bloggers speak of. And no, to counter their potential counter-argument, a group like Animal Collective does not force us to redefine what "pop" means by virtue of their success, and certainly doesn't prove the inherent inclusiveness of "pop." Instead, they embody a certain combination of varied traditions created by a particular combination of individuals that by chance reached a mass audience. Commercial success on the part of true artists usually arises from a complicated web of events; such was the case with Nirvana as much so as with Animal Collective (or, a lesser case, T V on the Radio). The "pop" model, in contrast, demands submission to its methods. Its ubiquity in current times suggests it's also demanding an utter de-aestheticization of popular music.