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":

It goes without saying that you can make pop records that aren't remotely popular, and I'm not even sure that they must be made with pop intent - ie with the intention of selling them to as many people as possible. The Noughties releases by the obscure French groups Phoenix and Tahiti 80 are exquisite confections, and probably as 'pop' as any multi-million-selling music you care to mention, all surface dazzle and studio artifice. But all that artifice takes effort - pop isn't something that just happens - it costs money, involves console sorcery, is multi-layered, has textures, must be electronic...

And that's just a taste. A handful of Lester's points of pop include: "A lot of pop groups aren't actually pop"; that he thinks "pop isn't something that can be achieved with guitars-bass-drums; it's lusher, more synthetic"; that "pop should, but doesn't have to, be avant-garde" vis a vis Britney's "Toxic"; that "pop is about anguish and unrequited love." Oh, and that "the rule is, there are no rules." At least he also helpfully throws in the comfortable old chestnut that "pop doesn't give a fig for authenticity or adherence to notions of muscularity or rootsy maturity." (I understand anti-rockism. At least I thought I did.)

I briefly wondered, as one does when confronted with something this intellecutally unhinged, if it could be masterful parody of this brand of specious thinking, in which case I would bow to Mr. Paul Lester's pitch-perfect re-creation of an infuriating mindset taken to the point of condtradictory hysteria. (Since his other Guardian work seems to be mostly about wholemeal indie, it would fit.) But there's always the worry he might actually believe it.

What Is Pop? [The Guardian]