Do the fun and pop ever actually need to be put back into (pick a genre)?

These sort of statements only work when the band/style in question has an impact or potential impact on the way that music is discussed. The success of The Darkness on a critical and commercial level forces the usual critical gatekeepers to search for alternate criteria by which to assess this music, because by all their usual criteria this band should be an abject failure critically *and* commercially. When, say, the NME has used "fun and pop" as positive criteria, it has been in limited and circumscribed ways; at the very least the NME getting behind The Darkness forces a temporary modification and expansion of the different types of "fun and pop" they are prepared to sanction.

For this reason the statement wouldn't work if you were to say "my local live cover band have put the fun/pop back into rock!" because your local live cover band don't have a measurable impact on rock's understanding of itself. Likewise it wouldn't work to say "Chingy has put the fun and pop back into hip hop!" because fun and pop are values which the predominant critical discourse surrounding (non-indie) hip hop is already comfortable with.

Of course, with the exception of the Strokes, the above bands are about as credible as my arse, and there are many MANY snide pops at The Darkness already emerging especially in the NME, pretty much all arising from the poppiness of the music.* Just today the Metro described ver Darkness as a "joke rock band" (although I accept that the falsetto and leotard may play a role in this).

The NME review said something along the lines of "they'll probably be little more than an amusing footnote in musical history", which is fine by me. But rock music isn't SUPPOSED, in rockcrit discourse, to be plastic and disposable in the way that dance or pop or hip-hop are allowed to be, and many critics are uncomfortable when it is.

*Alright there's the fact that Justin won't give em an interview as well.

Imagine saying 'Fatboy Slim and Bentley Rhythm Ace bought the fun back into dance music and clubbing'... you'd be laughed at. Like going to drum and bass nights is a fucking academic pursuit or something.

(I like it when good jokes (The Darkness, Dizzee) are beating bad jokes ("Hail To The Thief") or no jokes (Coldplay) in the charts though.)

When I was in middle school, classical music was something dry and joyless that the school forced on us in the name of culture. I suspect a lot of people still hold a similar attitude. Since then I've been able to find fun in classical music, although the Official Guardians of Culture don't make that easy.

I hate Wynton Marsalis because I believe he is trying to turn traditional jazz into something similarly sterile, canonized, and joyless.

I was thinking the other day about how the Bad Plus and the Dave Holland Quintet are two of the best jazz groups today, but the Bad Plus is way more accessible to non-jazz heads. The DH5 is great for, you know, musicians interacting at a ridiculously high level and all, but the Bad Plus has a lot more going on in terms of humor, awareness of the cultural landscape and making an effort to interface with people's ideas of what jazz is. It's so easy for jazz musicians to try to include ideas of pop in their music in a pretty trite way (see John Scofield, every jazz musicians 'groove' record, etc.), I wish more would make it interesting.

http://www.gehennah.com/king_of_the_sidewalk_big.jpg

They differ from Sum 41 b/c The Darkness's fanbase obliges NME to cover them seriously. They differ from The Strokes because they are sillier than The Strokes. Anytime someone turns up with a (subjectively perceived) higher dose of a certain quality (in this case silliness), critics championing that act pretend that hitherto we'd been suffering from a critical shortage of that quality.

Fun humorous GOOD SICK death metal = Pungent Stench "Been caught Buttering". Nobody else ever wrote a song like "Happy Re-Birthday", about carving up your own mom and crawling through the cavity. Then there's "Splatterday Night Fever", "Shrunken and Mummified Bitch", and SICK BIZARRE DEFACED CREATION!

Actually, there's a point. I want the fun and pop injected back into GOTH. Go for it, goth-popkids!

The Gothsicles