Rob Sheffield, a writer for Rolling Stone, recently released Love is a Mix Tape, a book about the role of music in his relationship with his late wife. It’s not a great book—Sheffield’s writing is chock-full of lame jokes, and he uses far too many short, declarative sentences for my taste—but the story it tells is a touching one, and Sheffield’s earnest love for his favorite music makes it a pleasant read. Sheffield praises quite a broad range of artists in his book, from indie acts like Pavement and Yo La Tengo to pop groups like En Vogue and Hanson, and makes no apologies for being a fan of pop:
“In some circles, admitting you love Top 40 radio is tantamount to bragging you gave your grandmother the clap, in church, in the front row at your aunt’s funeral, but those are the circles I avoid like the plague or, for that matter, the clap.”
(Note the slightly-above-sportswriter level of “humor” here; it’s on display throughout the book.) At first glance, this looks like a kind of pop-centric, anti-elitist, anti-hipster attitude; further inspection, however, reveals that Sheffield is an elitist in disguise, enjoying Top 40 ironically or as something of a musical “snack”:
“The beauty of Top 40 is you don’t have to be any kind of great artist to make a great record,…which is why moron-rock choo-choo hack Tom Cochrane sounds right at home here with his idiot anthem.”
I must confess that “moron-rock choo-choo hack” is wonderful, and makes me hope that Sheffield has coined similar terms for Maroon 5, John Mayer, and T-Pain and is going to one day release them.
Reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ New Yorker writings as well as his website reveals a critic who seems to take pop more seriously. Frere-Jones has written New Yorker profiles of, among others, Mariah Carey, Fall Out Boy, and Christina Aguilera, and he regularly includes bubblegum (or, perhaps, lip gloss) pop songs on his year-end best-of lists. Like Sheffield, Frere-Jones is not a fan of hipster elitism (the child of rockism), and has written some not-so-nice things about the man who preceded him as pop critic at the New Yorker, Nick Hornby:
“[I]f you’re looking for someone who can’t confront or discern the present moment, there is no greater spokesbaldy than Nick ‘Mojo Magazine Invented Me In a Diabolical Laboratory And Now They Can’t Kill Me’ Hornby.”
There’s a lot more of that if you follow the link. Frere-Jones really lets Hornby have it for a piece he wrote in the Times on a band called Marah. (Incidentally, if Frere-Jones wrote with the same kind of passion and humor in the New Yorker that he does in that excoriation of Hornby, I wouldn’t mind him at all. As it is, his New Yorker writing is always flat, humorless, and filled with an irritating passive-aggressiveness rather than the humorous aggressive-aggressiveness found in the above-linked blog entry.) Hornby, of course, fits the definition of a rockist to a “T”: he wrote a piece (a very funny one, in my opinion) for the New Yorker in 2001 entitled “Pop Quiz” in which he listened to the 10 albums sitting atop the Billboard charts and concluded that they were, for the most part, not really worth listening to. I have no way of knowing this for sure, but it’s a safe bet that Frere-Jones would attribute Hornby’s attitudes to his oldness, his whiteness, and perhaps even his Britishness, and, to a certain extent, he’d probably be right in doing so. But as valid as it often is to call into question the motives, prejudices, and assumptions that go into someone’s opinion, it’s usually a mistake not to also meet the opinions themselves head on. In other words: sure, Hornby’s an old white English dude whose dislike of current pop music is partly the result of his inability to relate to it, but what if “Break the Cycle” by Staind (to use the example of a record Hornby actually reviewed) really is an awful record? What if Fall Out Boy is a sort of annoying band for 17-year-olds? What if “Umbrella” isn’t a very good song?
I’m not trying to defend rockism or land a punch for the old fogeys of the world, but I am trying to point out that although it’s true that “just because it’s pop doesn’t mean it’s crap,” it’s also true that “just because it’s pop doesn’t mean it’s not crap.” In fact, there are good economic reasons why pop should be worse than indie music, on average: it’s intended to be consumed by a wider audience, and thus can’t necessarily deal with issues in as colorful a manner lyrically as indie music can; it’s intended for a younger audience, and thus can’t really deal with some “adult” issues; and, perhaps most importantly, there is no economic incentive for its creators to make it good—it just has to sell. (To be fair, there are a few things—access to great studios/producers, professional songwriters, top-notch singing talent—that pop has over indie.) People (critics included) seem to understand these facts when it comes to movies: we know when we see a trailer for Die Hard 4 or the newest Bourne movie that the film may be entertaining, well-made, etc., but we also know that, ultimately, it’s probably not going to be the same type of experience as Junebug or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are exceptions, of course, and the economics of the music business make exceptions even more likely than in the movie business, but a trend, a discernible, if slight, inverse relationship between quality of product and economic robustness, nonetheless exists.
None of this has stopped people from making wonderful pop music, of course—what were the Supremes, the Jackson 5, ABBA, even put-together folk groups like Peter, Paul, and Mary but great pop acts backed by ace producers and genius songwriters?—and there is surely no shortage of terrible indie music (or terrible classic rock, for that matter). Jody Rosen wrote a great piece in Slate last year in which she tried to stake out some middle ground between the rockists and the “popists,” and, near the end, she states that she “want[s] all kinds of music.” I do, too, but I’m not going to pretend that Fergie is Aimee Mann, and I’m also not going to assume that there’s every reason they should be the same. Perhaps Sheffield’s somewhat elitist take on pop music—he’ll listen to it and enjoy it and avoid those who would shun it completely, but ultimately it’s music to wash dishes by—is more reasonable than Frere-Jones’ omnivorousness.
It’s nice when we can all agree on something. Beyoncé is talented beyond reason, and her single “Irreplaceable”—a gem of a song in almost every way—topped the charts last year and was, for a time, so ubiquitous that my wife and I were able to hear it on the radio for approximately 20 minutes non-stop by simply scanning the FM dial in our car while in the Miami area. The melody in the verse is wonderfully “long” (i.e., it doesn’t contain much internal repetition), the chorus is deliciously vindictive, and the bridge is the best I’ve heard in a pop song in years (Joe Pernice, lead singer and songwriter for the Pernice Brothers, an indie group, regularly turns out bridges stunning in their originality and elegance). In the song, Beyoncé is ridding herself of an unfaithful lover and reminding him, on his way out the door, that he’s far from irreplaceable. The chorus is so unexpectedly cruel that it’s tempting to read the whole song as a giant self-delusion—she really will miss him and she’s just trying to make herself feel better, à la “Missing You” by John Waite—but there’s really nothing there to back that reading up. It’s a cruel song, plain and simple, and a great one.
This piece is the first of three I’m planning on writing on “current issues in rock/pop criticism.” There’s a fascinating discussion going on right now about Sasha Frere-Jones’ recent New Yorker piece on race and indie rock (and Carl Wilson’s remix of the idea in Slate to include class as a variable), and I have some thoughts on the matter that I’m still trying to collect; when I do, I will post them. I also want to write something about “Trapped in the Closet” and R. Kelly. Specifically, I want to argue that there are good reasons (i.e., not just because you’re subconsciously sort of racist) to believe that TITC is really a terrible, terrible piece of art, devoid of irony, and that R. Kelly songs like “Sex Planet” are not intended to “amuse [more] than to titillate,” as has been suggested in a recent Slate piece by Jody Rosen (the same Jody Rosen I previously praised!), but rather are awful songs filled with lame sexual jokes and hackneyed metaphors.
