"The trashiness of great pop"

My definition of trashy is any above-the-knee skirt with - and this is vital - a DIAGONAL HEMLINE. So, any music that suggests a diagonal hemline. Mostly I like trashy...

I think I've just answered this on the rock / pop thread. The trash aesthetic is just the flipside of the 'Rock is Real' thing. It's plain that a great pop thing doesn't suddenly become rock if it's still being listened to twenty years later. (Or the Abba thread wouldn't have been so heated.)

I think the longevity thing is because music writing (at least in the mainstream) has always presented itself as being about posterity: 'This is the record, of all those released which you *must* buy because it will last, because your children will think you're cool, whatever.' So both in music and music writing people have celebrated the opposite, as a reaction. (Whereas what they really want is long-lasting trash). Neither side has really thought through what's going on.

So why is this? One answer might be that the emphasis on longevity is an illusion serving to disguise the fact that the music industry needs you to buy another CD next week, and the week after, and the week after that too. And that by celebrating this side of things, the 'trash' kids play into the hands of the Man. Another might focus on the maintenance of traditional romantic aesthetic values in popular culture, centred around the artist as creator of permanent works of art. Perversely, given that a recording is by definition a copy already, some twist of logic makes the most reproduced, most copied, recording the most valuable.

But again wouldn't focusing on how we listen to music change the emphasis. Isn't every event of listening by definition transient, disposable, trashy? Whether it's Led Zeppelin or Shampoo. This transience is constitutive of the act of relating to a piece of music but threatens the nature of the work of art as conceived by the artist; to emphasise either durability or the instantaneous are attempts to master this passing away of the experience in advance, and both, ultimately, equally deluded.

I think it is a bit of a chestnut now, however it still has validity when criticising those who only like the odd Top 40 record because of its sounding "classic" (the sort of people who prefer "Born To Make You Happy" to "Baby One More Time"). I used it, or a very similar argument, in the Kylie thread to assert a preference for the of-the- moment SAW records (Mel and Kim, Reynolds Girls) over a song like "I Should Be So Lucky" which could have been written in 1969 or now as much as in 1988 (using that as a criticism where classicists would use it as a term of phrase), and I think that's where it still means something.

Apart from when denouncing the application of "classic pop" values to the chartpop of the moment, however, I would agree that it's a worn- out argument.

There's an out-of-print book I've never read by a guy whose name I can't remember — great help! sorry — whose title is (may be) RUBBISH THEORY (Ben Watson makes a fuss over it in ART, CLASS AND CLEAVAGE). Anyway, it's abt how what was jusat forgotten rubbish becomes good, for this very reason — but it's applied to e.g. items of interior decor, rather than PoniTails records.

One reason trashy pop is a weak formulation is that it tends only to get used of uptempo pop songs and not of ballads. I can't see any other kind of reasoning behind the bizarre formulation "people who like 'Born To Make You Happy' and not 'Baby One More Time'"

To be utterly simplistic, whenever I see the word "trashy", I mentally substitute the word "unsubtle". It really has nothing to do with posterity at all, or at least not in the way you've set things up. (In fact, I'd argue that the trashier a song is, the more permanent it's likely to become.)

The trash aesthetic is dead? Go on Jerry Springer and ask the audience what they listen to at home – that would give a good list of modern bands that the middle classes find hard to like. Trashiness in pop is an intrinsically snobbish term, but it quickly summarises a whole sensibility - white trash, trailer park etc. Stars in their Eyes is trashy, Blind Date is trashy (most of ITV is trashy) It’s about culture that isn’t self-improving, that’s bad for you like too many sweets, that offers an escape and a release. It’s sexually knowing, sentimental, tough and yet feminine, it’s rough trade, sometimes it feels like prostitution - Bros looked like they were selling themselves down the Piccadily between gigs. In "rock" Iggy Pop and David Bowie borrowed heavily from trash.

The trash aethetic is dead? I would be surprised… From Huysman to Eliot to John Waters to Leigh Bowery, from Roxy Music to The Fall to Jeffrey Hinton to Timbaland some of the most radical shifts in culture have come from the interface between high and low culture. That’s clearly what has re-energised British Art in the 1990s (Chapman brothers for example telling epic tales with airfix models). I agree that the sensibility is not as current as it was in pop – the divisions seem sterner between "pop" acts like Martine McCutcheon and the authentic "rock’ (for want of a better term) bands. Pop is the worse for these barriers being up.

BTW apologies if I sounded rahter confrontational in the previous posting - it was Robin's notion that this is a "worn- out argument" that got me going.

handy pop-writing tip: whenever you're making an argument by listing bands that conform to your point, just throw in timbaland at the end for no reason. hey, you don't listen to any important music in the 90s, and he pretty much fits in anything, so just do it, it's a good standard.

but seriously though, what sort of high and low culture is timbaland 'interfacing'? i mean, obviously the rap part is the low culture, but what's the high part? dance music? dub? booty bass?

I think when people use the words like "trash" or "junk" to describe pop they're actually talking about ideas they have of how people who consume the music in question approach it. (This is very awkwardly phrased, forgive me.) If one thinks about the imaginary audience of a certain kind of pop as thinking of the music as just another accesory, and not something more "meaningful," then they think of that pop as trashy.

The idea is that most people who like Ricky Martin don't build a life around identifying with his music, they just consume it and enjoy it the same way they would a bag of chips. (And then when someone does start to identify with his music too much, we say they have problems, bigger problems than if the same person liked Pearl Jam.) So his music becomes "trashy pop" because of how writers think most people receive and consume it, not because of anything intrinsic in the music itself. And these kinds of designations just build into a consensus in the media over time, I suppose.

"obviously the rap part is the low culture"

Obvious to whom?

Not necessarily *that* bizarre a notion. There are people for whom an "oh my love" interjection raises the level of a pop song above their fixed idea of "trash".

I hear "trashy" and I think bordering on the fringes of social acceptability. Self-consciously consumable. I only tend to see it used as a distancing word -- i.e. "this is trashy, but I like it because it is" -- as a way to remove yourself from simply liking the song. I tend to think this goes with overt emotionality and a bubblegum melodic sensibility. Pop is indeed different from rock -- largely in therms of self-consciousness -- nobody asks pop to break social barriers, only musical ones. As for the "high-cult, low-cult" distinction being bad for pop -- well, it pretty much defines pop. Without that distinction we'd have interesting music certainly, perhaps even better music, but it certainly wouldn't be able to be called Pop, by definition.

See Rock vs. Pop thread for my full comments on Rock = Drama and Pop = Comedy. It's an analogy holds up in the context of this thread as well. A cheap/disposable/novelty based laugh is always easier to come by than a durable wit/truth based one that will always be funny. Pop is the same. When it comes to pop and comedy the masses *do* seem to prefer the cheap disposable variety (to a lesser degree than with drama or rock) hence both the pop and comedy genre will 'suffer' from such generalizations even though they are by no means a rule.

And I don't think ABBA is trash either - it's the equivalent of the witty joke because it's not just a solid beat littered with briefly engaging hooks - the music and vocals are both well constructed and ludicrously complex. It keeps on giving.

"Born To Make You Happy": its brilliance is co-dependent with the brilliance of "Baby One More Time"; introduce here more outlandish and verging on silly ideas of Britney as modern embodiment of the Madonna/whore syndrome.

Transcending trash: this is good, because it implies (quite rightly) that what you're dealing with is base level trash. If there really was an ideological/mythological motivation behind this sort of song or the reception of it, they would have used a non-trash template to begin with, eg. Britney sings Elton John (or Dido, for that matter).

Timbaland - the low-culture aspect is the pop-centric nature of the music. Rap is occasionally but not always low culture, and you could draw a line separating the low from the high, with Timbaland, Neptunes and Swizz facing off Jay Dee and A Touch Of Jazz (excluding their stunning production on Lil' Kim's "No Matter What They Say"). What makes Timbaland low culture is that he's ultimately, inherently populist. "Try Again", "Are You That Somebody", "Get Ur Freak On", "Pony", "Sock It 2 Me", "Up Jumps Da Boogie", "

Timbaland's high-culture aspect is partially his influences - drum & bass, techno, garage, dancehall, dub (though this is a faulty argument - how many of these are actually "high culture"? Dub, techno and (to a small extent) drum & bass have been gentrified, but only partially); more important though is his synthesis of those elements. There's a deliberate eclecticism/adventurousness to Timbaland's work that most people mis-identify as a high culture approach (bullshit - see early jungle, garage and current non-Timbaland hip hop). When it boils down to it Timbaland's high-culture aspect is his critical acceptance above and beyond his competitors (Swizz, Neptunes, She'kspere, Rodney Jerkins, Mannie Fresh).

I think that's a funny way of using the term 'high culture'. Its normal use is to refer to the trappings of the western art tradition. Which means that most any music talked about here is considered 'low culture.'

er, for anyone who didn't quite get it, me saying that 'the rap part is obviously the low culture' was, you know, sarcasm. ditto for saying dance or booty bass or dub are 'high culture'. i mean, come on.

Dub could be said quite literally to be high culture.

Similarly, low-end culture seems a better name for the rest.

wow. that was really corny.

I don't think that I feel that great pop is trashy. I don't think that I like things that I think are trashy (and which other people, of course, might not think are trashy). In that respect I'm inclined to agree with Tom E's initial claim that we should discard this formula. Some people probably think that my suspicion that I don't like things that I think are trashy is equivalent to me not liking pop. I would disagree with them, if it was worth disagreeing with anyone.

Ethan:

I wasn't sure if you were being serious or not. Sarcasm doesn't always scan for me without tone of voice and body language.

dan, i'm disappointed that you don't know me well enough to immediately recognise that as sarcasm. i'm going to go sulk in the corner now. no irony intended.

I'm with Josh that high culture = "the trappings of the western art tradition. Which means that most any music talked about here is considered 'low culture.' "

What I meant with Timbaland and Ferry et al was that the sensibility is high culture, and it is seeing that sophisticated, high cultural approach at work with low culture materials and producing "low culture" that is so exciting. Paul Morley’s publicity for ZTT is another example.

I am assuming that everyone here likes low culture