/karen/

Pop! goes the music

Sunday, 27 August, 2006

This is so true:

... that's what happens now: pop music is everywhere. If you like a song, then so , almost certainly, will someone just like you who works on TV advertisements, or in movies, or who edits sports-highlights packages, or puts together compilations for hotels, or chain-stores, or airlines, or coffee shops. (A couple of months before the Röyksopp débâcle, I'd discovered an album by a good and, I thought, impeccably obscure singer-songwriter called Matthew Ryan; I promptly heard the album's best track during my next three straight visits to Starbucks. So he was dead in the water too, or at least drowned in the latte.) How is it possible to love or connect to music that is as omnipresent as carbon monoxide?

This may partly explain the teenage fondness for the profanities and antisocial attitudes of hip-hop: neither Starbucks nor The Body Shop nor the Hotel Minimalist wishes to assault their valued customers with obscene raps about Uzis and pussy set to beats that attempt to remove part of your skull, thus allowing contemporary youth to bond with their favourite artists in private. I was able to do that with Led Zeppelin because no one else was interested: you never heard ‘Dazed and Confused’ on TV, or in departments stores, or in pubs, or even on the radio very often; there was only on TV programme dedicated to the music I liked in Britain. (Now there's probably a ‘Dazed and Confused’ cable channel somewhere that plays the song twenty-four hours a day.) I was therefore able to foster the notion that Zeppelin was something special, a secret between me and my friends. Such is pop music's current tyranny that it must be almost impossible for kids to think that major artists are speaking directly and intimately to them—how is that possible, when those same artists are speaking to everyone who buys peppermint foot-lotion, or eats at Pizza Hut? The simplest retort to this ubiquity is to listen and learn to like music that is essentially dislikeable, stuff that would bring the Starbucks compilation people to their knees begging for mercy. You can't sell peppermint foot lotion with death metal or obscene gangsta rap; you can't use electronic hardcore to entertain passengers waiting for a plane to take off.

Nick Hornby, 31 Songs, Penguin, London, 2003, pp. 164-66.

I wonder if the same sort of thing applies to SingStar.

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