HATING POP MUSIC DOESN’T MAKE YOU DEEP
It seems sometimes snobbery goes hand in hand with music. A few weeks ago I was in a vinyl store. While going through overstuffed boxes, I was listening to a conversation between a male seller and a customer about the discography of some jazz musicians and the quality of vinyl sound. When I came to pay for my Thom Yorke vinyl I asked if they will have a new Taylor Swift record on Friday. He looked at me with a slightly disgusted face and answered curtly “I don’t know” without leaving space for me to ask him anything more. After that, I stormed out. One of the first quotes that came to me was Hans Zimmer’s in an interview for The Talks: “I will put on the White Stripes followed by ABBA followed by Kraftwerk and then every once in a while I have to get a really good dose of Bach.”
There is always a certain amount of shame connected to listening to co-called pop music. Listening some songs and artists is called a guilty pleasure meaning that music choice is not the proudest or representative of “real” music taste. Before any further discussion, it should be helpful to define what popular music is. Professor Motti Regev points out term popular music “refers to the socio-cultural setting in which music is produced and received” rather than genre or style. Britannica says in the past popular music was any non-folk form that acquired mass popularity - both Yorke and Swift fit within this definition.
Going back 157 years into history, it is not wrong to write Richard Wagner’s music can be seen as popular music while he was alive. Wagner was so popular that even had an extremely devoted fan base which resembles today’s stan culture. His followers/fans called and still call themselves Wagnerians or Wagnerites. What is that different from fans of Lady Gaga calling themselves Little Monsters? He founded a festival in Germany’s Bayreuth and built a theatre where only his work was shown. During the festival in 1867, stores in town were sellingbeer glasses with his face, and newspapers were full of behind-the-scenes anecdotes. Royals, intellectuals, Wagnerians and composers travelled to Bayreuth just to witness Wagner’s festival. He was the first composer who truly knew how to create a personal brand. Wagner literally had his own merch in the 19th century.
The next term worth combing through is genre. What is it and does it actually exist? It is an inherent part of us to divide music into different genres. In a way, we are more or less forced to, so in a lack of a better word, word genre is used. Record stores are divided into genre sections, and streaming platforms do the same labelling albums, artists, and creating playlists. Genre is a social construct made to create stereotypes, musical pastiches and even division between social groups who identify with certain genres. That leads to the specific way of dressing, worldview and even talking.
However, it is important to note there is not one genre of music which has been completely ignorant of all music that came before. To set a basic example, without jazz, blues and country, rockabilly would not exist and so rock’n’roll from the 60s and 70s. It is pretty obvious that every genre has its signatures but they were not formed in the vacuum. Everything connects to each other. Genres often create disagreements because one is referred to as more socially valuable. For example, jazz is always associated with people who are more tasteful than others who listen to pop music. One genre is more superior than the other. That connects to the story from the beginning that the so-called pop genre is altogether just low-quality music.
Pop music is perceived as shallow which communicates a lack of complexity and seriousness. It lacks in compositional complexity because it is made up of just a few simple cords. Also, it usually deals with either heartbreak or it is a “silly upbeat” song made to be a commercial success. Just to gain perspective, early The Beatles songs were also simple pop songs topping all charts and making enormous amounts of money for that time when the music business wasn’t a money machine like today – Beatlemania gave it foundations. On the other side, the positive connotation is that it can connect many people which leads us to wide appeal. That can be also seen as a disadvantage due to the mindset that translates as if many people like it, then it can be taken as artistically significant. Then, that means that all songs on Top 40 lists are not to be taken seriously for the reason of wide appeal? Some of the most celebrated songs were at the top of the music charts like “Blue Monday” from New Order and Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall”. One could say music was better before but that is a tale as old as time.
John Clarke wrote how popular arts, in general, is gender oriented meaning they are associated with female audiences. He wrote that this ‘gendering of cultural forms underpinned a disparaging view of popular cultural forms as “only entertainment” which is deeply rooted in sexism. To label popular cultural forms as “only entertainment” is present thanks to the need to put them against ones that are viewed as tasteful. Regev mentioned how popular music is usually compared to folk and art music just to diminish it. Alex Ross in his book “Listen to This” compared Verdi’s opera to a Hollywood action movie putting emphasis on the bigger-the-better extreme manner of building the plot. Ross sets Troubadour as an example writing that Verdi did not intend the plot’s drama to be completely convincing but extreme because it required it to be this way - the same goes with Tom Cruise jumping off the cliff in “Top Gun” or Taylor Swift performing “Who Is Afraid of Little Old Me?” The difference is that today we are used to Top Gun’s over-the-top approach while some people who visit opera will argue over the superficiality of action film and pop concert.
But what happens if someone like Zimmer does not have any problem with listening to White Stripes, ABBA, Kraftwerk and Bach back to back? Even more importantly, he doesn’t have a problem admitting it. Each of these four musicians offers an entirely different sound palette, approach to music, and feeling. With that in mind, it feels like music is in many situations more discussed and overthought than actually listened. Music is here to be felt.
Literature used for research:
Clarke, John (2017) ‘Popular’ in Ouellette, Laurie, Gray, Jonathan (ed.) Keywords for Media Studies New York: New York University Press, pp. 143-144
Regev, Motti (2013) Pop-Rock Music. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ross, Alex (2023) Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. Zagreb: Školska knjiga.
