A Celebration of Pop

In some music circles nobody really admits that they like pop music, there's a stigma there that pop equals premanufactured crap and that popular music is suck while indie music is golden. But from a musical perspective almost all indie-music is shameless pop, most punk is pop played with power chords, and even metal and hardcore bands use basic pop structures and melodies as a jumping off point. The point is I listen to pop, you listen to pop and everybody you know listens to pop so you might as well start enjoying it openly. If you don't want to listen to pop you're gonna need to listen to jazz, classical, baroque, some types of folk, or pretty much any non-western form of music. But if you're okay with your love of pop music perhaps you'd like to join me for a celebration of pop post.

When I Realized There Was Nothing Wrong With Pop

One rainy autumn day a year or two ago I realized I was getting depressed and needed something to pick me up a bit and remembered getting into a Kelly Clarkson song on the radio, and being too ashamed to buy such a 'pop' album at my regular indie record store I headed to my local $uper-Target where I wouldn't have to make up an excuse at the register, "uh, its for my little sister, she's in the hospital OK? Leave me alone I don't want to talk about it." Safely back in my car with my windshield wipers on I unwrapped the CD and played it through my CD-to-tapedeck adapter because I'm high-tech like that and you know what, I loved it. I didn't admit this to anybody for some time because I was embarassed but since then I have found out that that same album is highly regarded by a lot of people I know who have really high music standards. The album is called 'Breakaway' and even if you haven't bought the album you could probably recognize four tracks off of it. You know you sing along when you hear it on the radio. Its okay, you're in a safe place here, nobody's gonna make fun of your love of pop music.

I've even been known to make anybody in or near my car listen to 'Can't Escape My Love' by Enrique Iglesias. Unfortunately I just can't bring myself to put the video on this page, but if I ever do a "where did they spend the ten million dollar video budget" post it'll be there. That song was way better than Hero. And yes it is okay to listen to premanufactured pop as long as you know what you are doing(which apparently is selling out and being a total lame-o).

But don't stop there, there are other kinds of pop, too...and I'm here to be your guide to one or two of them today...

Indie-Pop
Okay, we'll start off easy with indie-pop because you know why? Its fucking awesome. Thats why. This is where we enter the realm of pop that you can admit liking without seeming lame to all the cool kids.

Asobi Seksu - Thursday
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What can I say about Asobi Seksu....I've known of this band for three or four days now, and I'll give you the main ingredients: 1.New York indie-rock and that big indie-rock drum beat 2.Japanese lead singer 3.a giant wall of fuzzed out noise 4.songs in both english and Japanese 5. dynamite 6.hang gliding 7. COME ON! This album is the musical still shot of that romantic feeling you can only get in the middle of the city surrounded by all the lights and concrete when even if for just one moment anything seems possible and life is just one big adventure. I can see this being a big album for me this summer. Its called Citrus. I'm liking it. Yeah. I'm really liking it. Here's some links to get you a little more of the band:

Asobi Seksu's Homepage which is very nice
and their myspace

Gutter-Pop
The motherfucking DeathSet. First off, go to their myspace page and listen to 'Intermission'. It'll bring you up to speed. Seriously, you have to hear it to understand it. When you feel the need for the DeathSet no other set will do. I don't know a whole lot about this band other than this hell-yeah feeling I get for what they are doing. Its rare that a band will sound like nobody else and be interesting at the same time. The fact that bands like this exist makes me feel good about music's future. I'm not totally sure why..... And its just nuts. Pure nuts. Yeah, and I don't know if 'gutter-pop' is a widely accepted term. Yet?

Electro-Dance-Pop-Stuff
The Knife. OK, the Knife was 'that band' last summer. The first time I heard them was standing below the second story window of a friends place downtown where we would all meet on friday nights. I was standing on the sidewalk looking up at them and feeling like, what the? But it grew on me as I got used to the new sound. Here's the video for the song I heard:

The Knife - Heartbeats
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You can't really hear it here but the synth sound is HUGE in this song, its really something when its blasting. So I ended up liking the song. Alot.

Sooooo, The Knife are from Sweden, and there's a really talented acoustic guitar player from Sweden named Jose Gonzalez and Jose decided to cover that same song in a real bare-bones format. And then Sony picked it up for a ad-campaign they were doing. Putting the two together, here's this video which looks to be a live recording(the vocals on the album are double tracked and all super-polished and what not) of the song with snippets from the commercial added in:

Jose Gonzalez - Heartbeats
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OK, now for the links:

Jose Gonzalez Homepage:you can stream a lot of songs on the front page here
Jose Gonzalez's Myspace Page
The Knife's Homepage
The Knife's Myspace Page

So maybe I got off track a little, and maybe its harder to write a 'celebration of pop' post than I thought it would be. Oh well. Eff it. I'm gonna try to cover slightly narrower subjects in the future. Yep.