Don't Let Me Get Me(Why does pop music hate itself?)

"L.A. told me/You'll be a pop star/All you have to change/is everything you are."

-Pink, "Don't Let Me Get Me"

Pop music has often been, as a concept, disliked and criticized for a perceived lack of authenticity, conformist nature, and derivative content. You'd think the pop musicians would want to defend their art, or else just laugh all the way to the bank, but in reality, pop musicians are among the most frequent critics of pop music. In addition to the line from Pink above, here are a couple more examples.

"I'm in my room it's a typical Tuesday night/I'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like . . . But she wears short skirts I wear T-shirts/She's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers"

-Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me"

Joe Jonas, in the Disney Channel movie, "Camp Rock," plays a pop singer who decries his own "cookie cutter pop music" in favor of . . . yet more pop music.

There is certainly something to be said for the content of the criticisms in general. A lot of pop music is very similar, and many of the stars do serve as fronts for songwriters and handlers who create the content and image. Still, it's not like derivative music or handling is a new thing. Stax Records, back in its glory days, was literally a factory that churned out hits and stars. Even Led Zeppelin, a band almost universally considered great today, debuted on an album that was famously(and in my opinion accurately) described in Rolling Stone Magazine as yet another generic blues rock LP.

The trend of pop criticizing itself seems to be fairly new though. Expression and individuality are old themes, but in the 60s, 70s, and 80s eras of pop music, I have not encountered many examples of these themes being expressed through the lens of pop music criticizing itself as a genre(though I am certainly not an expert). If anyone knows of some prominent instances, let me know in the comments.

So why do artists such as Taylor Swift and Pink feel a need to criticize the genre of music to which they belong? One possibility I am sure that someone must have suggested is the rise of the music video. Combining the music with visuals makes a marketable image more important, or so the argument goes. YouTube only makes music videos more accessible. The official video for Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" has over 11 million views.

Still, I am hesitant to buy into this theory too much. Fans in older eras of popular music still talk about how they identified with the music and used music tastes as a way of expressing themselves. Also, it's easy to find artists for whom image became an important aspect of their musical identity: Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, et. al. Even if image has become more important, I think it is still only tangentially related to the main question.

Another theory, and one I personally think gets more to the heart of the question, is the idea that anti-pop ideas were ushered into the mainstream by the rise of music that originally was not a part of pop. If you are going to compete with established mainstream bands who already have millions of entrenched listeners, you have to use every angle at your disposal. So, a natural choice is the powerful nonconformity angle combined with the idea of one's choice of music as an aspect of personal identity, which leads very quickly to using pop's status of popularity against it. "How can you be a nonconformist if you are listening to the same music as everyone else? Come listen to us and you'll really be different from everyone. Look how few fans we have."

Eventually, groups using these ideas found their way into the mainstream. More radio stations, cheaper recording technology, and very recently the internet, made it easier for lesser known bands to gain exposure. After all, how many top 40 stations does one city need? In order to compete, music offerings branched out. The ultimate result is that some of the anti-pop groups became pop, and their ideas became a part of the mainstream.

Today, the whole sentiment seems to have reached an absurd level. If you think about it, who really believes that Avril Lavigne isn't a pop artist? We're either in denial, or we have just accepted the whole anti-pop attitude of pop music as a quirk of the culture. To me, it's kind of like when politicians promise to fund every program, cut taxes, and balance the budget. Just not going to happen.

At some point the pendulum is going to swing back, and I think there is already some evidence that this is starting to happen. I'm hearing more of Lady Gaga's burlesque embrace of the star culture, and less of Avril Lavigne's teenage rebellion on the radio these days. The state of contemporary hip-hop/rap shows similar signs. This is a topic I plan to revisit once my personal listening journey through contemporary pop music gets started in earnest.

-Matt W