Whatever happened to mainstream pop?

(oh hang on, that should have read "Pope is dead")

Recent innocent/uncynical teen mainstream pop? hmmmm...

Mcfly - All About You
Kylie Minogue - Giving You Up
Basement Jaxx - Oh My Gosh

Dom is OTM about Don't Play Nice btw.

1 Steve Brookstein Against All Odds Jan 2005
1 Elvis Presley Jailhouse Rock (re-issue) Jan 2005
3 Iron Maiden The Number Of The Beast (re-issue) Jan 2005
1 Elvis Presley One Night / I Got Stung (re-issue) Jan 2005 Notes
2 Manic Street Preachers Empty Souls Jan 2005
3 Killers Somebody Told Me (re-issue) Jan 2005
1 Ciara featuring Petey Pablo Goodies Jan 2005
2 Elvis Presley A Fool Such As I / I Need Your Love Tonight Jan 2005
3 Chemical Brothers Galvanize Jan 2005
1 Elvis Presley It's Now Or Never (re-issue) Feb 2005
2 Ashanti Only You Feb 2005
1 Eminem Like Toy Soldiers Feb 2005
2 Elvis Presley Are You Lonesome Tonight? (re-issue) Feb 2005
3 Brian McFadden & Delta Goodrem Almost Here Feb 2005
1 U2 Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own Feb 2005
2 Elvis Presley Wooden Heart (re-issue) Feb 2005
1 Jennifer Lopez Get Right Feb 2005
2 Elvis Presley Surrender (Torna Surriento) (re-issue) Feb 2005
3 LL Cool J featuring 7 Aurelius Hush Feb 2005
1 Nelly featuring Tim McGraw Over And Over Mar 2005
3 Elvis Presley (Marie's The Name) His Latest Flame / Little Sister (re-issue) Mar 2005 Notes
1 Stereophonics Dakota Mar 2005
3 Elvis Presley Rock A Hula Baby / Can't Help Falling In Love (re-issue) Mar 2005 Notes
1 McFly All About You / You've Got A Friend Mar 2005 Notes
2 Elvis Presley Good Luck Charm (re-issue) Mar 2005 Notes
3 Sunset Strippers Falling Stars Mar 2005 Notes
1 Tony Christie featuring Peter Kay Is This The Way To Amarillo Mar 2005 Notes
3 Elvis Presley She's Not You (re-issue) Mar 2005
2 Mario Let Me Love You Apr 2005
2 Elvis Presley (You're The) Devil In Disguise (re-issue) Apr 2005
2 Elvis Presley Crying In The Chapel (re-issue) Apr 2005

No, they don't....BECAUSE THEY'RE SHIT!

xpost

i think Lovelace has hit on something interesting here - the lack of MASSIVE radio universal pop hit, whether it's something like 'Torn' or something like 'Wannabe' or even 'Take On Me' that's distanced enough from the contemporary American black influence (the mammoth success of which has blown so much else out of the water as is evident by looking at chart stats in the US, UK, Australia, Germany...). Ashlee Simpson just doesn't seem to have it in her. Kylie and Girls Aloud or indeed Britney, in incorporating enough sonic tricks in their pop (i'm quite happy to call this The X Factor in tribute to both Richard and Xenomania) to keep the likes of me interested have sort of sacrificed their 'innocence' really, by managing to be 'cool'.

So what now for trad. pop boy or girl bands? Or just lone crooners with a good solid mid-up tempo daytime radio hit?

Alfred it's because we're all inherently racist. OR just that there's clearly a mainstream pop template removed from the RnB/hip-hop based one that now dominates, tho 'Genie In A Bottle' itself had a foot in both camps.

I always think of this view when I think about the UK/US split on ILM. Does the US actually have "pop kids", a la PopJustice or whatever, or not?

x-p Maybe partly, but then again, had Bangalter and Falcon never have made/played out 'Call On Me', we could have avoided it (also, I'd be suprised if Mylo doesn't get reamed by both Sunset Strippers and the other one going top 10 recently).

not as much as our beloved Thomas Bangalter

I'm not saying that mainstream r&b isnt good! I actually prefer it over mainstream pop! But what I want is straight up POP. Cant I have both?

- the generation of pop debutantes who emerged at the end of the 90s/early 00s are still young and exciting enough to hold pop consumers' attention. Britney, Xtina, Beyoncé, Usher, Avril et al all still going very strong, and there's not a huge amount left of the market to corner unless you're a novelty act like tATu. Isn't this longevity pretty strange for pop artists? Next year, Britney and Xtina's careers will be DOUBLE the length of the Spice Girls', and remember how massive they were.

- shift to hip-hop/R&B among younger consumers - most of the Big Pop Singles of the past few years have really been R&B eg 'Crazy In Love', 'Dip It Low'. And I suspect that a lot of people who'd consider themselves fans of hip-hop/R&B would define themselves in opposition to pure undistilled pop à la Spice Girls or Take That.

- (or kiddie-punk like Avril which is arguably what undistilled pop now is, except it doesn't throw up very many Great Singles - 'Sk8er Boi', um, and? - because it's not the kind of genre which lends itself very well to universalism

- an unappetising trend towards pop cultural conservatism among older consumers whereby bands like Keane, Franz Ferdinand and Coldplay are their 'pop' (also the Scissor Sisters even though they are good) - again there's this necessity of distancing oneself from pure pop for much the same reasons as the kids, I am not sure where this desire for authenticity has come from

- and thus the only Pop Artists who can really command respect are those who are perceived to have paid their dues (I often get the feeling that people talk about Kylie and Madonna's longevity as an odd sort of justifying-on-grounds-of-authenticity thing)

- um, irrelevance of singles chart a possible issue? dunno.

What the hell is straight up POP? R'n'b infected pop is no more an aberation from POP than soul infected pop or rock infected pop or jazz infected pop or even Italian light opera infected pop, which is pretty much all the pop we've ever known.

And if you like more traditional guitar-bass-drums, what about "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? Or "Take Me Out"?

Green Day'ss hit does smell, Ned, but we're not talking value judgments here.

Again, mainstream pop does exist, and it is very popular on the hitlists. Only, today, mainstream pop usually features a lot of guitars in the backing track, and the singer may often dress in a "punk light" sort of way. Again, Avril Lavigne and Pink are typical examples of this. There is no way you could possibly claim those two acts are rock, they are certainly straightforward, manufactured, and very, very, very mainstream pop and there's no denying that in any way.

So mainstream pop does exist, only less polished and "pretty" than the boy/girl bands and Max Martin songs of the late 90s used to be.

Then Pink and Justin Timberlake certainly qualify.

Pink, yes. Timberlake only back when Max Martin was writing for him, today he isn't melodic enough to be considered pop.

THEY'RE THE NEW AZTEC CAMERA

Alfred, do you concede that there's a difference in style (if not ethos) between 'Milkshake' and 'These Words'? Because I think what we were originally talking about here is the dearth of records like the latter in the charts recently.

These all have melody and harmony in spades. They are presumably all "pop" by your definition. If this is what we're really talking about then I have no argument.

I guess my real problem is with people who think some 80's style monstrosity composed of bad 70s rock and soul tropes is "real" pop as opposed to contemporary popular music composed of bad 90's dance and hip-hop tropes.

xpost

It wound up on Radio Disney!

I suspect we're just arguing semantics. Blame my vile hangover.

xpost

You still know what I'm talking about yet you choose to be anal. That's laughable.

Even so it has opened up the question of the downturn in boy / girlbands, teen soloists today and MOR pop, which is how I interpreted it in the first place.

Explain.

The idea the "Genie In A Bottle" owes nothing to mainstream R&B is so ridiculously laughable that this thread was an ill-defined non-starter from the get-go.

Then again, Pink and Avril Lavigne are today's answer to those.

No, we've all mentioned it.

Where? I skimmed a couple times and didn't see it mentioned once.

The idea the "Genie In A Bottle" owes nothing to mainstream R&B is so ridiculously laughable that this thread was an ill-defined non-starter from the get-go.

Personally I have more of a problem stomaching it as some sort of golden standard for modern pop.

yes we are! so isn't it queer that it's seemingly not so popular anymore?

I think they were a bit too complex in the way they were built up to be considered pop. Pop was heavily influenced by that tradition though.

Ouch.

Because too many sensitive people are afeared you're taking it too seriously instead of reflecting on the boundless depth and involving artisticness of Coldplay.

well not necessarily, but GA are more 'hip' and 'edgy' than the Spice Girls were so in any case i don't think they're the answer to Lovelace's question.

it's a big factor but I think it's equally about the song itself. What is the 'most pop' out of Hot Butter's 'Popcorn', Video Killed The Radio Star', 'Flat Beat', 'Common People', 'Britney's cover of 'I Love Rock n' Roll', 'Oh My God I Have A Headache You ILM Bastards' etc.

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Steve is right insofar as pop is not so much a set style as a way of approaching making music. You could call "pop" an impulse. But I wouldn't counterpose this to other styles of making music which would appear as some concrete list of attributes by contrast. Perhaps it's more the case that all styles of music are, at root, collections of impulses, which when glued together hegemonically in the form of a genre appear more as a field upon which other impulses are played out - we can't see the trees for the forest, as it were. So jazz with electronic beats is a dancey approach to jazz, but dance music with saxaphones and rhodes is a jazzy approach to dance music - at some point these two must converge, become indistinguishable, and yet we consider them as belonging to separate groups because we categorise them according to which set of impulses is the more hegemonic.

What makes pop such a commonly utilised and yet elusive and contested concept is that we have the charts, this artificial and arbitrary process which flings up for our public consideration music which, to a greater or lesser extent, contains pop impulses, allowing us to see that connection between all of these things. But that doesn't mean that all the music in the charts is hegemonically pop: "Flat Beat" is hegemonically techno, and it's against this field that we can see the impulses that have launched it into the charts (er, to the extent that an irresistible video clip can be called an "impulse").

Hegemenic pop is that pop where the pop impulses actually outnumber or at least outperform the other impulses present. Hegemonic pop (or, indeed hegemonic whatever) also to some extent instrumentalises and subordinates the impulses from other genres which it contains, simultaneously neutralising their contra-pop signifying power and enlisting them to heighten the pop effect. An example of this might be Max Martin's bass riffs, which draw from rock and r&b/hip hop but signify these influences only very weakly and only serve to heighten the pop impact of their host songs.

I should note that "pop impulses" aren't objective natural properties but are rather the product of social consensus, and if certain non-pop impulses dominate for long stretches they are likely to become "naturalised", part of hegemonic pop's effective set of tools. Likewise other impulses fall out of favour with the consensus and are no longer necessarily part of hegemonic pop's set of tools (eg. the impulse to sugarcoat or euphemise sex).This is why/how "hegemonic pop" changes its character over time; if the Spice Girls or Britney had appeared in another decade they may not have made sense as a pop phenomenon, or indeed have been as successful.

What appears now as a crisis of confidence in hegemonic pop's capacity to win people over is perhaps more a period of growing pains in which some pop "tools" are discarded and others taken up (eg. pop-as-youth gets replaced by pop-as-inner-world-of-the-celebrity). This entails lots of attempts to subordinate new genres, so you get something like "Since U Been Gone" which obviously and brilliantly draws upon The Strokes etc. "Since U Been Gone" is, I think, basically hegemonic pop, but the relative novelty of its subordinated impulses prevents it from becoming fully naturalised as such - it is the sound of hegemonic pop still coming to grips with a new set of tools.

One could see this too with the way in which hegemonic pop increasingly relied on R&B a few years back (and to some extent still does) - there was a sense in which "I'm A Slave 4 U" might be pop biting off more than it could chew, but by "Rock Your Body" those same non-pop impulses had been successfully digested. In the process though, hegemonic pop itself had been changed, R&Bified slightly. This in the same way that hegemonic pop was houseified during the early nineties.

A handy indicator perhaps: no-one would say that Beyonce's "Crazy In Love" is not R&B, but many people would say that "Say You'll Be There" isn't (even though it basically is), and likewise many people would say that "Since U Been Gone" isn't rock (even though it basically is) and Madonna's "Vogue" isn't house (even though it basically is) etc etc etc

Hegemonic, though, it's an interesting choice of term because it's not permanent as such -- forgive me for bringing something random perhaps into it, but in reading a history of apartheid-era South Africa this week as I have, I'm struck by the examples of language used to project and convey as much as describe something, ie the various renaming of security organizations in the white-ruled state. Nothing new, of course, it's just Orwell put into unintentional practice, but the scope of the word 'hegemonic' and its implications makes for an interesting turn in discussing pop in these terms. The suggestion of a pop mastermind that ISN'T Lou Pearlman or Simon Cowell or any of that but a nameless unconscious that reacts and changes...intrigues. Is it social control that the individual in fact controls?

This I think is key:

But that doesn't mean that all the music in the charts is hegemonically pop

...because there's something here that almost undermines, not the conception of pop, but the conception of the chart as cultural impact, as opposed to economic marker. I'll have to think about that a bit to make it clearer in my head, though.

The choice of "hegemonic" was deliberate for the very reason you point out, Ned. In terms of your question about the importance of the charts... I guess if there is a role for the charts it's in that it provides a sort of limiting/shaping horizon for what hegemonic pop is - if hegemonic pop departs from what is actually in the charts (or vice versa) for too long, hegemonic pop will have to change to suit it. Britney can have a non-charting single that is still hegemonic pop, but if she is making non-charting music in ten years time that still sounds "Britney"-ish but does not sound remotely like what is in the charts at that point then it may no longer be hegemonic pop.

Yep, OTM. Reputations are difficult to overhaul. Once you're "labeled" "pop", then by and large you're stuck there, it's like joining the mafia.

The style of the song itself does little to define what is pop and what isn't ... for instance, "Say You'll Be There" is pop in the eyes of most (even though it's R&B), and *despite* the fact that R&B was all over the charts at the time. The Spice Girls were thought of as a pop group, and that was that.

How about "Vogue"? House was scarce in the charts at the time (the US success of the likes of Black Box now appears to be anomolous). "Vogue" brought a style of music that most people hadn't yet heard into the top charts, but it is (and was) still considered pop. The same argument could be made for Shaggy + dancehall.

Since the RnB+hip-hop template compromised (for better and worse) and absorbed previous pop templates, the likes of Jojo, Kelly Clarkson and Ashlee Simpson (whose work surely comprises of Rnb+hip-hop influences on occasion) look somewhat weaker overall and certainly don't carry the clout of Xtina post Dirrty, Beyonce or maybe even Christina Milian and Amerie (commisserations to Stacey Orocco btw!).

Hm...there's something here that has to be teased out more fully to acknowledge the exact depth of the relationship between creators, content suppliers and broadcasters, I think. At this level the idea of hegemonic pop now shifts into a myriad of intertwinings -- not so much microresistance as micropersistence, an attempt to stay in the loop (with loops, and sometimes without 'em).

xpost

this applies to all three acts mentioned, and practically every American teenage solo POP vocalist right now.

(I suspect I might be talking past your points rather than directly addressing them, though!)

Yeah, but is there such a thing as "hegemonic pop"?

As Tim noted, though, it's a case where hegemony exists less to control, I'd say, than to define -- to provide a focus and say, "See, here it is, we've got IT," whatever 'it' might be.

Please explain why "R&B songs" don't count.

Oh, they do, but it's just that I for one am SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF R&B. "Like I Love You"? How the fuck did THAT song ever become a monster hit???

Why are we scared to use the word "bubblegum" nowadays, anyway?

Because it sounds stupid.

Believing "pop" means "popular" is rockist.

So?