On Pop And The Need For It To Be Good
From a recent Damon Albarn interview:
I think pop music is a great place to get new ideas across … The only danger is knowing when you are doing good work, how many people might be affected by it … and you try not to become too knowing, which is really hard to avoid. When I did the first Gorillaz records I allowed my original guide vocals to stay, to say, “Hey, it don’t mean much, they don’t say much,” but this time I thought, “Fuck it, I might not say things totally successfully, but I’ve got to get clear again.”
I love pop. Not just pop music, but pop in general. Mass-market media, art that’s made to entertain as many people as possible, to win us over; there’s a bit in Bill Dummond and Jimmy Cauty’s The Manual that really sums up my feeling about pop:
Taking the angst-ridden, ‘I’m above all this!’ outsider stance only gets you so far and even then takes sodding years and ends up with you alienating vast chunks of the Great British public who don’t want to be confronted with Jim Reid’s skin problem on a Thursday evening.
I love it when people want to engage with the mainstream. Not sell out, not talk down to them, but to try and appeal to as many people as possible while still trying something different or challenging or new or just good. There’s an art to good pop that’s often ignored and/or forgotten, snidely passed over in the rush to proclaim Radiohead or Chris Ware the best a medium can be at any given moment, and it’s frustrating that so many audiences and artists would rather be niche and comfortable than stepping outside themselves into the sunshine for a bit.
That said, Ultimates still wasn’t as good as everyone says it was.
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