Idolator

I'm hardly alone in my feelings on the subject, but the pecuiliar British need to argue for "pop" as a semi-tangible aesthetic quality distinct from whatever is on the damn pop charts at the moment (and arguing incessantly about what that quality is, consensus being impossible) will never cease to confuse me as an American who's finally shaken most of the critical Anglophilia he picked up in the early part of this decade. But if most of these arguments at least follow a certain internal logic that may just be anathema to how I now understand the concept, this scatterbrained Guardian blog post on the subject is, to quote Idolator's Michaelangelo Matos, "not just some kind of bullshit, but every kind of bullshit," the rock critical equivalent of a flaming bridge collapse at rush hour, brought down by the weight of its indefensible arguments, unchecked rhetoric, and the kind of inscrutable aesthetic vision for a mass culture phenomenon like "pop music" that leads to statements like "I can't recall a single great pop single from the 90s": More »