What is pop?
Detail from a Maxell advertisement, 1989
In an interview with the Village Voice’s Sounds of the City blog, Karl Hagstrom Miller talks about how the subculture of record collecting can distort the perception of the social significance of music. Miller, who is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Texas, points out some specific examples of scholars or enthusiasts who have historically muddied things up — the classic example being white interest in the blues, which in its early days tended to fantasize about the music’s origins in a way that now seems ugly and primitivist. But as a rule, he is more interested in how the conditions of a society are revealed in its music, and how that is potentially obscured by selectivity in its scholarship. Since I tend to go the other way — I’m interested in the internal qualities of music, and how they’re affected by society — my response will itself be rather selective. The passage that caught my attention dealt with the difficulty he had with defining “popular music.”
Many scholars have made the distinction between two meanings of popular music. On the one hand, popular music can be defined as that which sells the best. Consumers vote with their dollars. Generations of scholars have attempted to move beyond this simple formula, because it equates people’s culture too closely to the products that are available in the marketplace. A second meaning of popular music is that is the music coming from the people, the populace. You have to look beyond the record racks to see what music people are making themselves. Folk music, indie music, early hip-hop: These, and many other styles, have accrued a measure of cachet because of the supposed distance from the pop charts. They have been celebrated as somehow more representative of people’s cultures than are the corporate widgets pushed by the majors.
It’s a problem that moves in two directions: there’s Miller’s “popular” which attempts to confront the matter of social impact, but, what I think he deliberately sidesteps here (in never shortening his phrase) is the confusion also with the idea of “pop” as a musical quality. But the difference between market popularity and lasting social significance has been well-documented in scholarship, whereas the quality of “poppiness” in music has, to this ear, no satisfactory equivalents elsewhere.1 Though its dictionary boundries still confine it to the specific product of commercialism, its use by musicians and critics is not purely economical in scope, but tends to mean something like the tune itself is “catchy,” or has an effective hook.
“Pop” in this sense wouldn’t seem to have “necessary and sufficient” conditions, but rather is, to lean on Wittgenstein, a concept identifiable by “family resemblances”: which I would hazard line up with simplicity, directness, an attempt to maximize simultaneously melody and concision. A band like Led Zeppelin, for example, with their ponderous and amorphous FM radio epics, is qualitatively less “pop” than one-man studio wiz Todd Rundgren (whose Something/Anything Robert Christgau said had “the feel of a pop masterpiece”), even though Zepp has zombie-like endurance in the marketplace, while only one of Rundgren’s records ever clawed its way to Gold certification.
Actually, Something/Anything was one of the numerous records in the seventies that seemed principally interested in subjecting the quality of “pop” to a kind of hermeneutic interrogation, approaching it with a kaleidoscopic arc of stylistic angles — R&B on one song, doo-wop on another, rockabilly on the next — that reached a point of saturation in Nick Lowe’s 1978 LP Jesus of Cool (which was released as Pure Pop For Now People in the US). And, despite that fascination with “pop,” Lowe never had the popularity of, say, Styx.
But the qualities I outlined above — catchiness and shortness, say — do seem to be informed by the needs of the market: so, a song getting “stuck in your head” tends to make it memorable, which helps sell records; and it being short makes it both more digestible as a whole while also fitting it into a tighter radio format. But as qualities specific to the music they’re not actually the commercial forces in themselves, but only its effects rendered into criteria; and I’m not sure that’s automatically damnable in itself.2
I think that more or less cleaves open this question to the degree I’d intended to. But it might be useful to document what ways its usage in each instance it seems to point, since “catchiness” and “hookiness” are already altogether abstract and threaten, if spoken of in general, to become completely circular. And its specific manifestations likely take different forms in different genres, as identical repetition for example is more amenable to dance music than psychedelic rock, and in one speaks to accessibility and the other to aridity. But such contradictory oppositions may help unearth some otherwise unknowable contour of the idea.
1. “Pulp fiction” is too closely tied to kitsch; “pop art” was always too conceptual and comprehensive an aesthetic to be really divisible in the same way.
2. I have mixed feelings about the way Adorno treats this relationship. In his 1941 essay, he exhibits a fine sensitivity to the particularity of the “pop” of the time, but seems in every instance to have made up his mind beforehand. And the “detail as an indivisible part of a whole” is a particularly vague, not to mention antique, argument to rely upon.