Yes, Pop Music is Bad.

2024-10-19

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point, the "poptimism" movement went into a direction I could no longer comprehend. In the past, there was a distain for anything resembling pop music amongst the music press and music nerds in general. At some point, this attitude, perhaps snobbery, was replaced with "poptimism". There actually is good pop music. And this I agree with. I like ABBA, I love motown classics, and I've even enjoyed some more modern pop hits which I can't be bother to list off. Part of the poptimism movement was the discussion regarding the link between pop music and the LGBTQ community. It is 100% correct to say that part of the older rejection of pop music was based on homophobia due to its association with the gay community. The same can be said about the infamous hatred of disco.

I'm not here to make a super long and detailed well researched post on this subject with a bibliography and some grand philosophical point. I'm sure someone could write a PhD on the subject, I'm sure people already have. This is just my personal, uninformed take. The thrust of this post is just this:

It was weird to see everyone freak out over that album "brat"

Like, it wasn't good right? It wasn't a very good album? Am I crazy? It was kind of poorly produced, fairly generic pop music without anything particularly special going on as far as I could tell. I mean sure there were some gestures towards 2000s nostalgia and PC music. Is that all it takes? PC music were doing this sort of post-modern take on overproduced pop music way back almost a decade ago now. And when they did it, it was satirical and anti-capitalist. No? Was I reading too much into it?

I remember hearing a song, I believe it's called Seven Rings by Ariana Grande. What shocked me about it was the lyrical content. It's a song in which she pretty much brags about how much money she has and not much else. Now this sort of idea was started from the hip hop world, but there's a really clear distinction between a working class black person celebrating their escape from poverty through music, vs a presumably multi millionair pop star who is seemingly just rubbing her wealth in our faces. When I heard that song it really shocked me. Why would anyone listen to this. Pop stars are entirely unrelatable people. They are members of an elite ruling class, and that's an explicit aspect of their music. The oppulance and the "glamour". Perhaps it's just me who grew up in my local punk scene as a teenager, but it is pretty much unfathomable why or how someone could relate to that. It's bizarre, it feels twisted to me, it feels ghoulish I dont know how to describe it accurately it's just absolutely alien.

To quote Ellie Voyyd on this subject, we're talking about "media that, authentically or not, at least tried to reflect the lives of everyday people, as opposed to being all about the egos of unimaginably wealthy celebrity pop stars." https://elucidatedvoyyd.neocities.org/notnostalgia

On the subject of pop music's relation to the LGBTQ community, all I have to say is this: I know a whole bunch of LGBTQ people, including myself, who don't give a shit about pop music. Maybe it's a generational thing I don't know. But it almost feels strange to lump everyone together and say "ah yes the gays, you guys must like disco and lady gaga and the village people" or whatever. Not to mention that these pop stars who end up associated with the LGBTQ community are often straight themseves. So I'm just assuming that this is a somewhate exadurated or outdated stereotype.

To really clarify, because this is the internet and people always want to take the worst possible reading of whatever you say, there's nothing wrong with fun music, there's nothing wrong with meaningless stupid music. There's not even anything wrong with "bad" music. And there's nothing wrong with popular music. Pop music != popular music. Popular working class music, from folk to punk to hip hop, will always exist, even though they're under threat right now from the music industry. What I can't fuck with is comodified corpo bullshit. No I'm not going to give you a strict definition, you know what I'm talking about.

In conclusion: listen to better music man, you don't have to live like this.