The Political Economy of Pop
by
Ross M. Miller
Miller Risk Advisors
www.millerrisk.com
August 8, 2005
When I was in high school in New Jersey, anything
"underground" was in. I got my start in journalism writing for
my high school's underground newspaper and I listened almost exclusively
to underground radio. The only radio that I listened to that was not
underground was about as aboveground as you get—WOR 710 on the AM dial.
I did not listen to "Rambling with Grambling; instead with a
transistor radio under my pillow, I absorbed Jean
Shepherd, whose lack of discernable format was a pioneering effort in
what was to become known as freeform radio.
The Jersey 'burbs were, and still are, home to many
small colleges with small radio stations. One of those stations was WFMU,
and while it is no longer affiliated with a college and it is in no sense
small, it has not lost its edge. It is arguably the best freeform radio
station in the world and it acknowledges its debt to Jean Shepherd with occasional
rebroadcasts of his classic radio shows. While many of WFMU's shows
sound like the sort of thing that me and my friends would have hacked
together on an open-reel tape deck back in the Sixties, that makes sense
considering that one of us, another Shep fan, served two stints as WFMU's
station manager.
WFMU is one of a small group of radio stations that
merits a slot in my Winamp radio station playlist. My adult reintroduction
to the stations began a few years while I was driving down the Garden
State Parkway and came across their Antique
Phonograph Music Program, which plays truly acoustic recordings on wax
cylinders and such like including novelty tunes that my father used to
sing to me.
Then, several Fridays ago, it happened. I actually
managed to get all my work for the week done by Friday evening and so I
fired up Winamp for entertainment. This time WFMU wasn't playing music
from my parent's youth, it was playing music from my own youth. And it
wasn't playing the usual exotic public radio stuff, it was playing bright
music, pop music, music with a hook that would lodge inside one's brain
for days. I had discovered "Pseu's
Thing With a Hook." Life has not been the same since.
"Pop music" was starting out as being short
for "popular music," but it seems to have mutated into something
else entirely, not that anyone agrees about what is or isn't pop. In fact,
catchy music of the popular style, some call it the "pop idiom,"
seems much less popular than it used to be.
Like any other art form, pop music has numerous
subgenres. At the high end is "power pop," much of which gets
lumped in with alternative rock music, making it almost socially
acceptable. At the low end is bubblegum—catchy, but mindless, pop music.
And there is lots in between, like synthpop, which made it big in the
Eighties when Roland and related synthesizers first became affordable and
people thought drum machines sounded cool.
Catchy music itself, regardless of genre, is not a new
thing. The typical Bach fugue is certainly catchy. The rise of opera was a
key event in the popularization of music and Mozart was right there in the
thick of things as popmeister prodigy. And you don't get much catchier
than that immortal ringtone, the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth.
Respectability in the critical pop world comes from
influencing others. The most influential pop band is The Beatles, a group
that could be said to have transcended pop. (On the other hand, Paul
McCartney, alone or with Wings, is very much pop, while Yoko Ono is not.)
On the other extreme, the artist known as the "King of Pop"
appears to have influenced virtually no one in the music world, though his
main producer, Quincy Jones, has.
Cole Porter, The Everly Brothers, The Beach Boys (Brian
Wilson), The Velvet Underground (Lou Reed), Big Star (Alex Chilton), and
The Byrds are recognized as being among the biggest pop influences. (I am
sure I left someone really important out here, so please forgive me,
though I do consider any group from The Ramones to the present to be too
new to rate as a serious influence quite yet.)
The biggest problem that pop faces is that it is
perceived as uncool. Indeed, uncool in the extreme. WFMU seems outright
apologetic about airing Pseu's show and assures listeners that it is only
a summer thing. (It is now in its second summer.) Pseu's most venial sin
is that some of her playlist actually overlaps with the stuff they play on
mainstream Clear Channel and Viacom radio. That is the sort of thing that
can get you fired at an underground radio station. She played
"Sentimental Lady" by Fleetwood Mac as an obvious ipecac
substitute for anyone under thirty years old foolish enough to tune into
her show. Only she knows why she plays John Mayer and Keane now that
they've hit the big time. If she wants to go contemporary,
"Popular" from Wicked (The Broadway Musical) works much
better on so many levels.
The big thing that happened to pop is that somewhere
along the way it discovered irony, which is particularly effective in love
songs. I do not remember The Beatles singing any ironic love songs—they
didn't have to. The Raspberries, Eric Carmen's group that has recently
been resurrected by pop aficionados, made their name by creating blatantly
racy pop love songs. Although The Raspberries were ahead of their time, a
few years later Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," would
become the ultimate narcissistic pop love song. (Cheap Trick holds a
special place in the pop world because it sang musically sophisticated and
subversive songs and yet became extraordinarily popular as a top arena
rock band of the late Seventies. Their way-clever hit
"Surrender" is widely considered the best power-pop song of all
time.) The present-day kings of subversive power pop, Fountains of Wayne,
hit it big with "Stacy's Mom," a song that I am not about to
explain here.
The revelation that comes from listening to Pseu's show
is the enormous amount of high-quality pop music that the record industry
has completely ignored. For each Fountains of Wayne that gets a major
contract and becomes popular enough to subsist, there are hundreds of
more-than-adequate pop bands toiling away at indie labels or worse. This
is where political economy comes in. At the same time that the major
labels and radio networks have homogenized and dulled-out mainstream
music, the costs of recording, producing, and distributing music have
plunged. If you've got $3,000 (less than the price of a high-end Mac) and
work fast enough to do an album in two days, you can even get the
legendary Steve Albini and his Chicago
studio to record and mix your album. (Steve claims not to be a
producer, so that part is up to you.) A less professional product that
still sound acceptable can be produced for a lot less. As for
distribution, that's why they have the Internet.
The problem with the Internet, of course, is that there
is a lot of stuff out there and most of it is bad. Record labels and
commercial radio stations are supposedly there to sort things out, but
they seem to have forget how to. (There actually is software that you can
feed digitized music to and it will give a salability rating like the one
that Dick Clark had teenagers give to records back on American Bandstand.)
College radio served this function for pop music in the Eighties, that's
where groups like R.E.M., The Replacements, and many others started out,
but at some point in the Nineties, pop seems have fallen out of favor with
college stations.
The strange thing is the pop music could still be quite
commercially viable because of the enormous numbers of baby boomers out
there. I know that many of us, like my fellow New York Staters Bill and
Hillary, are content to listen to old Fleetwood Mac tunes, but others
would like to hear something new from time to time (and not just
remastered Beatles records). There are even some Gen-Xers who like this
stuff.
Pseu's WFMU show is a great introduction to what's
coming out today as well as some welcome or unwelcome blasts from the
past. (Archives and playlists for all of Pseu's past shows are available
at http://wfmu.org/playlists/HK.
While the older shows are only available in lo-fi mono, they still sound
better than the best AM station did in the Sixties.) I was unaware, for
example, that back in 1979 Queen had a song "Don't Stop Me Now,"
(from the August 6, 2004 show) which some quick research shows bombed when
it was released. Apparently, a cult has formed around this song and it is
even competes for play with their "We Will Rock You" at some
(unspecified) sporting events. The hook from that song—the title words—have
been stuck in my head for the past two days, so you are warned.
Two particularly good pop songs that I have discovered
courtesy of Pseu are "Amazing Glow" by the Pernice Brothers and
Dan Bryk's "She Doesn't Mean a Thing to Me Tonight." Both of
these songs are from indie labels and although I don't listen to
mainstream FM stations much, I listen enough to know that these are not
being played. "Amazing Glow" (from the June 24, 2005 show) is a
great, mellow summer pop song traditional-style love song that was
recently released. "She Doesn't Mean a Thing to Me Tonight"
(from the August 6, 2004 show) came out in 1995 and sounds like Jonathan
Richman in a parallel universe where girls would go out with him.
(Jonathan Richman was omitted for my influences list because he is
arguably a bad influence who must share the blame for Ween and other whiny
pop groups.)
What really makes Pseu's show work is that at least a
semblance of thought and effort is put into selecting the songs and
compiling them into playlists. If there is any downside to the show, it is
Pseu's self-admitted babbling between sets, which I do not particularly
mind because I grew up knowing people like Pseu. Still, she's a major
improvement over the standard radio droid announcer or our local public
radio omnipresent guru Alan Chartock, whose vocal stylings owe a lot to
Jonathan Richman.
To wrap things up, it is worth noting that WFMU remains
one of a handful of truly public and noncommercial radio stations. Unlike
the typical NPR affiliate, it does not make promotional announcements,
most of which sound like commercials to me. And, with the notable
exception of "This American Life" (whose Ira Glass also
acknowledges his debt to Jean Shepherd), there is little on NPR that one
could call freeform. Pseu claims not to get any money for her show and I
suspect that is standard practice at the station. WFMU may face challenges
from every direction, including geosynchronous orbit, but it is a proven
survivor that does what others cannot or will not do.
Next up: While certain documentary makers may do
anything to be popular, Errol Morris, whose First Person series
just came out on a 3-DVD set, has more than popularity on his mind.
Copyright 2005 by Miller Risk Advisors. Permission
granted to forward by electronic means and to excerpt or broadcast 250
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