2008–the pop stops here
It was late August or early September when I began to feel as if the bottom had dropped out of pop music. It had been scraping bottom, both artistically and economically, for some time, but now it seemed to have cracked through the floor and plummeted into an even deeper abyss. This feeling was tinged with both hope and despair. Despair because, economically, things could still get much worse; hope, because, artistically, there seems to be nowhere to go but up, though that will most likely be preceded by a lot of scurrying around sideways and bumping into things.
This feeling wasn’t the result of a sudden surge of terrible records, or even the slow, endless ooze of the mediocre–as someone once said of the poor, the mediocre will always be with us. Instead, it was the result of the surprise appearance in the top ten of three great records: “A Milli”, “Paper Planes”, and “Love Lockdown”.
Normally, the appearance of such quality product in such a short space of time would be cause for celebration, suggesting a revitalization of the top ten after what had been a particularly moribund year. Instead, for two important reasons, they felt like the final nails in the coffin of the previous era of pop music.
First of all, they weren’t pop records, at least by any previously recognized standard (or any future standard, for that matter, as I’ll explain in a moment). Each one contained pop elements, but deconstructed, twisted, or downplayed in such a way as to be almost unrecognizable. “Love Lockdown” and “A Milli” were driven by classic pop and hip-hop themes–thwarted passion and rap braggadocio–but presented in such a stripped to the bone fashion as to both defy and redefine those sentimental mainstays. “Paper Planes”, meanwhile, though the most pop sounding of the three (which is ironic enough, for a start), is so deep and broad in meaning and suggestion that it blows apart the usual pop song framework. Almost every interpretation of the song I’ve read comes to a different conclusion as to what it’s ultimately about, but every one of those interpretations sounds right–the record is so deep it may be impossible to come up with a definitive explanation of its meaning.
Second, and in terms of pop as a whole this is much more important, these records are impossible to follow. Great as they are, they don’t point or lead to anyplace that anyone else would be able to go (if Beyonce’s “Diva”, a ridiculous attempt to create a female version of “A Milli”, is any example, no one should even try). These songs don’t create a new standard for pop to build on, they destroy the old one. After this, everything constructed around the old patterns is going to sound tired and cliched. We need something completely new, but I suspect it will be a few years before we get it.
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