polemic time

I've been feeling crappy for a whole day so now it's time to take it out on the internet.

This is something I've been getting for awhile. You see, I'm a bit of a guitarist, and I try to play jazz, and I like to think I can play the blues with some measure of ability. And I listen to this stuff, and I love it dearly - you know, Stevie Ray and Miles Davis and John Coltrane and the Marsalis Brothers and whatnot. It's the great music of our century. So when I tell people, usually musicians, that I kind of like Lady Gaga they usually give me a look of disbelief. Naturally most of my musician friends don't like that all her songs sound the same and have silly lyrics and they pretty much assume I'm rationalising some kind of primitive connection to the music that's beneath my intellectual heritage. I mean, having listened to the Coltrane, how can you - to take a line from Christgau - continue to push that second-rate shit?

And there goes pretty much all of the great pop music that's being released today, at this very moment. The Black Eyed Peas. Lady Gaga. Outkast (good god, Outkast. I love them). Make no mistake - I do not rationalise the irrational. My attraction to pop music is not a guilty pleasure. Sure it's not a Love Supreme - but why need it be? Pop has sociological complexity which comes of the form rather than of the music. It's like how Yoko Ono's room full of sawn furniture pretty much lacked any classical beauty, but still managed to say something. Good pop today transcends phoniness the same way the experimentalism of the no wave and noise movements transcended ugliness. We miss that, us Serious Musicians with our 20th-century theory and our heads full of Schoenberg and African music.

And them come the accusations that I'm over-analysing. Bullshit! My material comes from the artists themselves. Elton John : The best pop is disposable. Andy Warhol. Madonna. Michael Jackson. Sure nobody can accuse Britney or Hilary Duff (neither of which I really like) of having an intellectual justification, but the beauty of it is that (as Yizhe rightly pointed out) modern pop is a collaborative effort more than any music in the past. It's producer, artist, song-writer, marketing team, record label. They sell an image. Phony, yeah - but definitely self-aware. And we who spend all our time listening to so much great music have made the mistake of only hearing music. That's the prejudice John Cage talked about when he said we discriminate against non-musical sounds - only now our concept of 'musical' is loftier. But we've missed the forest for the trees. Art is the overarching aim, not music. Music exists in the service of art. Pop is a sociological construct and I think it qualifies for any definition of Art anybody cares to challenge me with. We listen to Poker Face's 4 chords and silly lyric and we think 'oh, that can't be good. it has no musical value'. And that's a damn shame.

EDIT: Here's a great one. 'Fire Burnin' on the Dance Floor' - Sean Kingston. Haven't been able to get it out of my head since last year.