Paperjam

Pop music is good again, hooray

Music // Steve // 9th October 2003

I'm 26 now, so I turned 11 in 1987, and I got my first (ah, Boots) Walkman for my birthday that year. Before I converted it into a distortion pedal through the wonder of soldering, which I'd had to learn to fix the bloody thing when my left headphone started cutting out, I listened to it around the house constantly; through the radio discovering Inner City, Joyce Sims (jesus! - "Come into my life"!), Alexander O'Neal, Sabrina, Spagna (how I loved "Call me"), and wearing out tapes of "Actually" and "Now 11". I thought pop music was great.

However, my love for pop started to slide after this. Since then I've been through a few things, re-discovering electro-pop through the Pet Shop Boys, getting into indie-pop (Blur, Suede, Pulp), going out to pubs and clubs and meeting a bunch of daft blokes who were into industrial-dance (Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, Meat Beat Manifesto), and then because of that, hiphop, electro-funk, big beat (ahem... at university, I may have been drunk). More recently, the duff speakers in my car have been shaking to deep funk and late-eighties loud drums hiphop.

The serious looking (but ace! and noisy!) Meat Beat Manifesto

And all through that, until recently, I've hated most of the "shit" in the charts. Well, I thought it was. And maybe you did too, if you're the same age as me, and thought of yourself as somehow "alternative" or an indie-type, some sort of non-conformist, even though maybe all you're really doing is conforming to something else - for me I'm thinking of the Britpop years here. Working at Woolworths behind the Record Bar when fucking "Saturday Night" by Whigfield came out may have had something to do with my attitude. Indie/alternative-types seemed to be in the minority at that point, so it at least seemed like a bit of non-conformism.

But right now, to me, for all the talk of the music business being in trouble, with file sharing, and the seemingly desperate moves to try and generate some interest with reality pop shows (Pop Idol, Fame Academy) there's loads of fucking ace pop music about. Maybe it's something to do with electro being back - with Richard X (the album is surprisingly great, although the track with Jarvis is terrible), Kylie (new single "Slow"), and Holly Valance all making synthetic tracks that wear tinfoil and eyeliner to the disco(theque).

Ms Valance, actually trying to get piles.

I'd like to think that maybe people are being a bit more adventurous (see the Neptunes, Timbaland) with music these days, both from the producer end and the consumer end, and that the market rewards innovation and that large record companies know this, although given that fucking Westlife are still going, I wonder. Any "innovation" is likely to be mined until it runs dry : for example the Diwali rhythm, started in reggae, transferred to pop records by Lumidee, Sean Paul, and Wayne Wonder. Now with Missy jumping on the bandwagon with "Pass the Dutch", it's arguably starting to look a little tired. Time for the new thing. Not you, Gates.

Maybe I've ignored some great pop music in the last few years, and that's my loss. But now I'm going to pay attention again - I think that maybe people are trying a bit harder. I will expect somebody from Edinburgh University to have done a study, measured it, drawn a graph and found that yes, pop music was a bit shit in the Nineties, but now it's back, and it's ok to like it again.

Links

Richard X

Official site, with tracks from the album

Holly Valance

Official site, see video for 'State of Mind' (which sounds a bit like Siouxsie and the Banshees, in the guitars at least)

SayHey

The fans are split over the new Kylie single - it's no big club stomper, which could put some off...

I Love Music

Entertaining bulletin board, where people love music. Some of them even like pop music.

"Is new music today really lame? Or is it me?"

Article from The Rake magazine by a geezer called Dylan Hicks, who I can symphathise with. (But the answer is No. It's still great, if not better. Chin up, et cetera.)