>...covers of godawful cheesy rock songs? Why do people respond to these
>more than they do to the, OK, I'm going to say it, "real" songs?
The obvious answer here is that people like to have fun (and
unfortunately sometimes people like to have fun much more than they
like to have anything else, which is why people talk during the
ballads). ... But it was interesting the way this came round to
various attempts to condemn particular pop songs, which others
defended, and then to the whole alterna-cool of cheeze these days.
I'm as bored by a lot of kitschomania as anyone (possibly more so),
but I think there's more to this - that in a genuinely *un*ironic way
the hip-music world has come round to an appreciation of pop as a Good
Thing in itself in the past few years. you can hear it in people
saying "we're not trying to be silly by playing these pop covers - we
*like* these songs." you can hear it in many of the best indie bands,
and I think (I know it is for me) a weariness with the pointless game
of keeping up with hip trends and cooler-than-thouness that began
especially with punk rock, and a new wariness against the kind of
disdainful ironic stance that was ubiquitous in post-punk circles
towards pop culture. The embrace of pop is also part of a new
eclecticism, in which everything from 60s soundtrack music to disco to
musique concrete to Tuvan throat-singing sits happily in the
alterna-bricolage. (Oh, and country should be on that list, too.)
I do however see a couple of problems with this: first, I think a lot
of people in the alterna-world have never developed good ears to be
able to tell a great pop song from a mediocre one, and tend just to
respond to whatever reminds them of being 12; second, the
just-wanna-have-fun impulse that's good for pop can lead to a shutout
of more genuinely experimental and innovative efforts, an
over-suspicion that anything not willfully bouncy is pretentious.
Still, I think pop revivals are always a good thing for the
music-creativity cycle in the long run. Music being music, you need to
feel it all over.
Carl W.
