Without wishing to, erm, make sweeping statements, all music is basically pop music isn’t it? Even the most intricate classical piece basically has to get you humming along at some point, or doing that spastic twitch we do when something isn’t really danceable but still moves us in the same way, or we’re loving the music but we’re at our desks or doing something else. Sure, the bigger, more complex works can do an awful lot more, but they still have to please on a basic, uncomplicated level to function properly, don’t they?
I assume art theorists have had the answer to this one nailed down for years, and I don’t want to talk too much about stuff I clearly know nothing about but for all I can intellectually appreciate, and even hugely admire, the likes of James Joyce and Joseph Conrad, I have never particularly enjoyed reading their books. And that always struck me as a pretty fundamental failing.
The only reason I bring this up is because I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about music fashions and snobbery and so on, and said he reckons that for all people sneer at Coldplay, if they slathered their songs in distortion and reverb and buried the vocal halfway down in the mix then the likes of Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound would cream themselves over it.
As a lo-fi enthusiast I should probably include myself as a subject of that particular jibe, and actually, I would agree that he is probably right. Firstly, for all I despise Coldplay’s ubiquity, and to a degree their earnestness, as pop music their material is pretty solid. Particularly albums like Rush of Blood to the Head are full of songs which you can easily end up humming despite yourself, and his point is pretty much valid: they are famous not because they’re twats but because, whatever you say about them, they write good, infectious, memorable pop songs.
Now this friend of mine intended his statement as a criticism, but for all it kind of applies to me in a lot of cases, I still kind of agree with his accusation. In fact, I think I’d embrace it, because if you took Coldplay’s best pop songs and sanded off the pop gloss with a bit of deliberate lo-fi mess I think I would genuinely prefer them because I just find that production style to be aesthetically pleasing, but a good pop song should function well in almost any incarnation.
But it’s the other side of his argument which is properly unarguable, and it’s something which I sometimes feel I miss when I talk about all this nasty, noisy, growly stuff I’m into at the moment: it is actually in lo-fi guitar music that I think the pop imperative is at its most urgent.
I don’t think it’s especially controversial to say that punk was, from a purely musical point of view anyway, just simple blues rock played in an incredibly messy way. It was also part of the age-old artistic cycle: things get more and more intricate and complicated, and eventually there is a big rejection and suddenly everything is clean and simple again. Art Nouveau was a classic example of this, and I think punk music was as well – the over-embellished intricacies of prog blown out of our ears with a blast of simple pop music, albeit music which was as aggressive and messy as fuck.
I sometimes think that’s where we are now. A few years back lot of the hipster bands were getting more and more intricate – by which I mean the likes of Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective and so on – and eventually the intellectual aspects of such well-assembled music collapsed under its own weight (although I don’t intend to criticise those specific bands by saying so). I really see the lo-fi enthusiasm which exists at the moment as nothing more than a spot of spring cleaning. It all got too clever, so a lot of people reverted to something simple, visceral and loud to clean out the cobwebs.
The problem with this, as with any zeitgeist-friendly phenomenon, is that there inevitably ends up being an awful lot chaff to accompany the wheat, which is why I think that the pop imperative is so strong at the moment. If the lo-fi movement is about simplicity – simple pop melodies, simple song structures – which in many cases it is, then you have to be incredibly economical with your songwriting if you want to be any good.
Basically, in amongst all the people slathering distortion and reverb on absolutely everything, the only way to really make an impression is to write awesome, simple, enjoyable pop songs. More complex music can manipulate the emotions in other ways, take you on a journey, tease you with discomfort until the fleeting glimpses of prettiness appear, but when music is this simple it has to be pure pop.
So actually, for all I am really into my noise and my garage rock and so on at the moment, I actually think of this as my pop phase. There’s nothing intellectual about it, like there can be with other stuff, it’s pure and simple enjoyment of the most basic elements of pop: a good melody and a good riff.  And for me that’s all it is, no matter how much noise you slather over the top.
