What everyone else is listening to

I–just like most everyone else with a keyboard or a camera–have been doing a little looking back recently, given this is both the end of the year and the end of the ohs. In that vein, allow me to reflect on something that I find fascinating, even though it hasn’t affected my own iPod playlists.

When this decade opened, pop music was in a rut. It was dressed up (or down, depending) with sexy schoolgirl videos (when will that look ever die?) or with “edgy” videos, but it was still formulaic and uninspired. (I realize that literally millions of people disagree with this opinion. That, indeed, is why they call it pop music. Popularity, however, is not an indicator of quality–please refer to fast food, WalMart, reality TV, entertainment “news”, People magazine, and high fructose corn syrup.) The lesser elements of 80′s pop got sloughed off and dumped into an echo chamber. The beats were flaccid, the hooks dull, and whole songs were glazed with a plastic Auto-Tune perfection. It was Botox and silicone, sonically rendered.

But the big wheel of trends has come back around, and some terribly interesting things have been happening on your radio dial in the last coupla years. Much like the inexorable return of the neon high-top, leggings, and tiered miniskirts, New Wave and synth and glam are seeping back into music–and it’s enough to make me wish I still owned PVC and eyeliner. Because while Christina Aguilera never made me want to dance, Lady Gaga makes me want to revive the electrical tape and go-go boots look and move my body until I fall down…

This is utter pop genius. I think what I love about this is that it takes what was boring about pop music ten years ago and spit-shines it until it becomes what it wanted to be all along. It toys with notions of sex appeal and celebrity, thumbs its nose, licks its lips, and sticks a fork in the eye of the beholder. It brings a little of the grotesque back into pop. It’s performance art.

Like I said, I’m never gonna have this stuff on my iPod. I appreciate it, but won’t spend money on it. So why do I care enough to write about it? Because I find it heartening when I hear something interesting playing on Clear Channel. I know it makes me sound like a horrid snob, but I like to think that it’s just a little subversive to mix something like Lady Gaga in with the avalanche of banality that fills the airwaves. This isn’t a revolution–we’re still talking mass market stuff here. It’s like having the too-short-lived Firefly airing between Everybody Loves Raymond episodes… I don’t expect it to make a huge difference, and I’m sure most of the great unwashed finds it a little weird. But it’s there, a little spark among the generic, and it just might influence someone else to make their own art. Platinum-certified special is still special.

For another take on what made your stereo interesting this year, go check out Chez’s picks (currently in progress) of the best singles of 2009.