Spin your radio's dial. Set it to 94.1. Listen to the stereo magically pull strands of music from the air.
Pop music is everywhere — we're a culture saturated in the stuff. But, contrary to its typical image, contemporary pop — KFRX, KQCH, Top 40 FM and the like — is fascinating in its complicated, sometimes uncomfortable relationship to us. Pop music often works as a mirror, reflecting our bizarre tensions, contradictions, dreams, insecurities. If you're like me, you usually don't take the time to notice. Like television, fast food, and advertising, pop is just another amenity in our modern, post-industrial society, with which we have a strange sort of shame/dependence relationship.
Admitting you love pop music is akin to admitting you love "16 and Pregnant." You enjoy it but are uncomfortably aware of the trashiness of your impulses. Declaring a love for pop music is not far from posting self-deprecatory Facebook statuses about how you spent all afternoon searching cat videos on YouTube.
Pop makes us smile, but isn't necessarily the music we want to be defined by. Why is that? Why are our smiles guilty ones? Until recently, I classified pop music as either worthless, or the aural equivalent of Pepsi and a bag of Skittles: pleasant, but a far call from a nourishing meal. I've since been reformed.
Pop music's initial appeal is that it represents one of the few intangible connections that still binds large swaths of discrete culture together — if you're pop-clueless, you can't join in finishing song lyrics on car rides nor accurately predict how to grind against your dance partner at sorority formals, etc. But this binding effect isn't enough to redeem pop music. The Top 40 reflects our consummately American need for up-to-date relevance. Thus, know pop music keeps you connected for about three months; the mix I was given last fall now sounds so very mid-2010.
What's redemptive in pop music is the same thing that makes it seem so banal: its transparency. Lyrically, pop music tends to gravitate toward the middle of a spectrum, to the most conventional, like a presidential platform in the general election. To be profitable enough to exist, Top 40 radio relates to people in their most fundamental, shared tastes. The result being that pop represents an uninhibited distillation of base cultural values. These values become almost difficult to detect, taking a subsidiary role to the music, blended into generalities, stock phrases and clichés. Yet at the same time, the message becomes candid and straightforward: Our bared impulses and desires, that, if paid attention to, are downright fascinating.
For example: Avril's "What The Hell" is a plea to moral relativism, resulting from a perceived offense: a "what the hell" to romantic investment in favor of "messing around."
Enrique Iglesias' "I Like It" celebrates romance, passion, dancing, but is set up as being between two people who are cheating on their significant others. The implication is that their euphoric passion is not only in spite of but enriched by the cheating, as though cheating itself enhances the quality, depth and eroticism of relationships.
Bruno Mars' "Grenade" illustrates the impulse toward self-destruction and giving oneself over completely to something, or someone, regardless of whether they are worthy or ultimately disappointing.
Ce-Lo's "F*** You" stresses aggression as the best response to the whims of the universe and injustice, promoting an intense feeling of entitlement.
These themes are fascinating not because their presence allows us to dissect the hypocrisy, arrogance, megalomania, envy and narcissism of these musicians or our culture generally (although they do), but rather because they allow us to locate these things in ourselves. We can locate submerged desires and tensions in our own character, shouted without inhibition from our stereos.
Avril's "What The Hell" is exhilarating because on some level we empathize. The lyrics of faux liberation thrill us; the promise of infinite amusement and pleasure outside the confines of a relationship — and moral structures, period — truly tempts us. In many ways, these songs are us, this is how we think, how I think.
There is something wholesome and thoroughly un-postmodern about this childlike freedom of expression. The pop song is lucid, allowing us to praise and admire some true-spirited part of ourselves when we deserve it. But it also forces us to look closely and laugh with embarrassment at the false assumptions, hubris and absurdity which on some level we've been complicit in, ideas to which we've shook our fists and rocked our bodies.
Like any art form, pop shouldn't be judged by the junk it produces (indeed, many of pop's greatest joys are its junk: mindless fun that doesn't take itself seriously), but rather, by the material it claims as significant. What does Rihanna elevate as truth? What does Nelly's "Just a Dream" say about fidelity, commitment, regret? Kanye's "All of the Lights" about fatherhood, masculinity, shame? What truth, what contradictions does Lady Gaga project?
Listen to these words — this music — and discriminate. Hear below the beats. It's something significant, to pay close attention to the details and grit of the commonplace, instead of being swept away, drifting through soft waves of pop music into an ocean of deep, unconsidered assumption. To not float mindlessly on the latest single, but instead, stand on a very real Edge of Glory, considering every texture, turning over every word.
Marc Koenig is a senior English major who sometimes writes columns too. Reach him at
Be the first to comment on this article!
Click here to leave a comment