Talk About Pop Music

So I was riding in a cab tonight, as I do when I too far from my home to sprint.  The cabbie was in his early 20s, approximately middle African.  He was listening to a popular music radio station, which is only slightly better than NPR.  I don't listen to the radio anymore -- not because I don't want to, but because I ride the L to work and there is surprisingly horrible reception in buildings in Chicago's Loop.  And because I have enough music on my iPod to last me a couple months.  Why listen to Britney when you can listen to W.A.S.P.?


I generally despise new popular music because I find it manufactured.  "Artists" have replaced voices with autotune, no one writes their own songs, songs sound the same, there is no popular rock music, and I feel like we've reverted to that horrible period of music between the February 3, 1959 and February 9, 1964.  We need another Beatles, Sex Pistols, or Nirvana.  But that's a subject for another post.  The point of this post, or at least one of the points, is that I grew up in the '80s, which was the heyday of pop music.  When I started listening to music, not only did the radio stations play any kind of popular music, from mall pop to rap to singer-songwriters to R&B to hard rock and metal, but there were nothing but hooks, no matter the genre.  Frankly, it was a glorious time to be learning about music and soaking everything in because popular music wasn't as fractured as it is now, so you got to listen to everything on one station.  Anyone who listened to Z-95 knows what I'm talking about.


In my cab, the first two songs that came on were "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye and "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen.  They are apparently both very popular, the latter more so than the former.  I want to hate both of them, which is probably my old man reflex kicking in.  But I also like to think I'm open minded, and I hate people who dismiss things just because they think they should dismiss things.  Also, I like hooks.  So, I rode home listening to these songs without judgment.  It turns out, they aren't bad.  As I flew down Lake Shore at about 80 miles per hour with the windows open, I realized that these songs are no different than much of the music that I grew up listening to every night on the radio while I did my homework. They may as well have been by Terence Trent D'Arby and Taylor Dayne.  I felt like I needed to say something about the songs, which is probably why I've wasted the last half-hour cycling between both songs while writing this post.

I don't know my point.  I'm not going to go out and buy the Gotye or Carly Rae Jepsen albums -- probably because no one calls them "albums" anymore, and even if they did, no one "goes out" to buy anything anymore, so I can't recreate the experience of thumbing through the tapes at Phar-Mor to pick out Appetite for Destruction.  And I'm obviously not going to see them live.  After all, in the next seven days, I will be seeing The Scorpions, Tesla, The Hives, Alice Cooper, and Iron Maiden, and I guarantee Gotye and Jepsen could fuck on stage for eight hours while shooting Roman candles from every other orifice and it wouldn't be as good as any of those bands.  But I'm also not going to hate these songs just because I think I should.  Shit man, they're catchy, and that's what makes a good pop song, from "Earth Angel" to "Hey Ya."  There's value in these songs, just like there was value in "Uptown Girl" or "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."  Just kidding.  Fuck all of you.