The pop monster is hungry, and it's gobbling up genres, the rulebook and everything else in its path – and murdering techno and house on the dance floor, writes UNA MULLALLY
‘WHAT I’VE discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth – and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides among all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for – my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.”
That is Lady Gaga talking about her art and her music. The quote is especially important because it doesn’t really mean anything. And what better way to discuss where pop music is right now than to dissect the meaningless?
The idea that pop is eating itself is regularly proposed, that pop has somehow entered its Francis Fukuyama phase and, with nowhere else to go, coils around itself and gorges on the recent past, spewing out tribute acts and collages of influences bordering on parody. But pop is not a human centipede. Pop is not eating itself – it’s eating everything else.
In many ways we are living in a post-genre world. Genres have not so much fragmented as shattered. What genre is Animal Collective? What genre is The xx? What genre is Kanye West or Austra? How can we categorise into genre when musicians become magpies, taking bits of everything? Right now, pop music is in everything-and-the-kitchen-sink mode. Britney has a dubstep breakdown in her current single, Hold It Against Me. Chris Brown's Yeah 3x sounds like cheesy late-1990s techno.
Pop artists used to montage genres so they would evolve and diversify, changing from sound to sound with each album – for instance, Madonna’s pop phase, followed by her house phase, disco phase, country phase and so on. But now it happens all at once. Pop doesn’t montage, it collages. A modern pop song is like having three word docs, 20 browser tabs, Tweetdeck and iTunes open all at once. There’s so much going on, ensuring that there’s something for everyone, and a song can enter three or four different phases in a few minutes, which appeals to jumpy and addled attention spans.
Arctic Monkeys sang that "there's only music so that there's new ringtones" on 2006's A Certain Romance, predicting that music would be simplified to a point that a hit tune could be easily transferred to a Nokia handset. In fact, the opposite happened: pop has become busier, with much more going on than a tinny melody.
At the forefront of this shift are Black Eyed Peas and Will.I.Am, who have created hit after hit by making what's actually happening in their songs more complex. When Black Eyed Peas released the ridiculous (and monstrously successful) The Time (Dirty Bit), LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy tweeted, "Do they hate ears?" But Will.I.Am doesn't hate ears: he knows ears, which is why he recruited 43-year-old French house DJ David Guetta to work with him on one of the biggest songs of the decade, I Got a Feeling.
THE GUETTA-ISATION OF THE US
When David Guetta was told to conform to an American sound while working with the rapper Akon, he refused. The result was Sexy Bitch, a track with a four-to-the-floor beat that has become the template for most American chart music. In turn, pop, or at least Guetta’s brand of it, has completely devoured commercial American hip-hop. It was recently the case that hip-hop infiltrated pop music. Now the reverse is true.
Not only does everyone want to work with Guetta, but everything sounds like Guetta even if he’s not part of the track. Guetta’s brand of US pop has become a vacuum for other genres, sucking in everything around it and processing it until the manchego is transformed into cheese strings.
It could be said that the reason for this constant Dysoning of other genres is to do with diluting something cool for the masses, but it’s more to do with pop’s endless thirst for newness. In the indie blog world, people talk about “churnover” – the constant lust for new acts to be blogged about (and indeed to be the first to blog about them), creating what The Bravery were labelled with as a “firework career” – goes up quickly, looks pretty, disappears. The churnover in indie land is about individual new bands, but the churnover in pop music is about new genres: what sound can be gorged upon next. Pop is hungry, and its appetite for new sounds seems to be never-ending.
But Guetta is a house DJ first and foremost. So what happened to dance music?
POP GOES CLUBBING
The Kitchen nightclub reopened in the basement of the Clarence Hotel in Dublin recently. It should have been the biggest event in the capital’s nightlife in years, but very few people actually care about dance music in Ireland any more. In London, the hipster kids and the influencers are always looking for the most forward-thinking places. For them, the idea of going out to a club and listening to Katy Perry is face-meltingly alien. But in Dublin, that’s what Irish teenagers and students want to hear. Dance music – once the dominant sound of nightlife – is a niche activity. Pop has taken its place.
The most popular, energetic and arguably coolest club night in Dublin, if not the country, is WAR, which started two years ago at Spy on South William Street in Dublin before moving around the corner to Andrews Lane Theatre last year. It’s a polysexual young hipster sweatbath, laden with the latest haircuts and fashions. If it were in any other city in Europe, you’d expect forward-thinking beats to be booming from the sound system. But WAR is a pop night. Gaga, Britney and ironically played 1990s dance hits create the soundtrack for the night. Its formula – hundreds of pretty people wrecking the gaff daubed in face paint and lit up by photographers clutching their Canons over their heads – has been replicated around the city. These kids don’t get dance music. The clubs their peers are going to in London and Paris and Berlin are weird. They just want to dance to music they know. It’s remarkable: the trendiest places are playing the most mainstream sounds.
There’s also an overriding environmental factor that is making pop music popular in clubs. People want fun. All day, everyday, we’re bombarded with depressing economic messages, and come the weekend what’s mainly on the minds of those who are heading out is to get trashed. Pop music is the soundtrack to this. It’s fun, it’s frivolous, it’s the opposite to what many people are dealing with in their day-to-day lives.
THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY
You can’t examine a genre’s dominance without assessing how it is consumed. The internet has irreversibly changed the music industry in terms of distribution and the value of music, but its impact is far bigger than that. In an era where there is no more underground, it’s the overground that rules. And that overground is pop. The space between something happening, someone hearing about it and everyone else hearing about it is closing.
That goes for news cycles and trends as much as music. There can never be a Big Bang moment in music again, because nothing is kept secret or underground. You can never walk into a club again like you could at the dawn of techno or dubstep and think “what the hell is this I’m hearing?” because tracks have already been heard on Soundcloud, videos have already been shared on Facebook walls, artists have already trended on Twitter. In the same way that status updates, tweets and live blogging have redefined breaking news, the internet has determined that everything is known almost as soon as it happens. Discovery and assimilation into the mainstream are beginning to happen almost simultaneously. The viral is becoming a virus.
It’s this internet-fuelled velocity that has squeezed attention spans into a mould that’s perfect for the consumption of pop music. Pop is a quick hit, a sugar rush that’s as disposable as it is easy to consume.
Much of the attraction of dance music was about things outside of the sounds themselves: searching for a record, waiting in line for a club, meeting people, parties, the drugs that went hand in hand with house and techno. Trawling record shops has been replaced with trawling YouTube.
Kids don’t seem to have the time or desire to listen to a seven-minute track and see if they like it. There’s a giddy yearning for instantaneousness. If it catches the ear after 20 seconds, the job is done. And pop music is the genre most friendly to that.
HANG ON – POP IS GOOD
Pop wouldn’t be consuming everything if the content and the people making it weren’t flourishing. The artists getting the most attention and crossing out of their spheres into all kinds of media are all pop ones: Lily Allen, La Roux, Florence The Machine, Nicki Minaj, Marina and the Diamonds, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Rihanna.
They are predominantly female. While male solo artists continue to make MOR tracks, it’s the women in pop who are pushing things forward the most, and in turn flooding the charts. Icons are rising again, and where pop music once lacked respected critical forums for its discussion, outlets such as Pop Justice allow for the intelligent discussion of a genre previously dismissed as dumb.
When Girls Aloud started churning out brilliant tracks by the British songwriting and production team Xenomania, it became okay to like pop music, principally because it was so good.
It’s perhaps a little disingenuous to say that the Lady Gaga quote in the opening paragraph is meaningless. There is a hint of insight. Gaga lives quite honestly for the lie. And the lie is what pop music is all about right now. The value of authenticity, like privacy, is an alien concept to a new generation. Keeping it real used to be everyone’s raison d’être, now faking it is held in much higher esteem. The pop monster – to use Gaga’s vocabulary – will continue to devour much of the music consumer’s life, from clubs to festival line-ups to genres themselves. But we’re living in a golden age of pop, so maybe we should just dance.
