Pop Music Club

Justin BieberThe Internet is a buzz with the name Justin Bieber, the hottest star of the moment, who is heating up the most wires and has the most teen age girls -- well -- over heating? Justin Bieber, a fifteen year old Pop R&B singer, who will turn sixteen in March, is the Valentines dream date of millions of teenage girls.

His top songs "Baby", " One Less Lonely Girl", "First Dance" are about lost love, seeking love and other teen age angst, with lyrics that won't frighten away parents. On the net, one young fan wrote that she couldn't wait until Justin turned eighteen so he could sing songs about sexing girls! Read more

I recently got a chance to sit down and watch Iain Softley's 1995 movie Hackers. It's been well over a decade since I last saw Hackers all the way through, so this was the first time a lot of the little details of the film struck me. What's really remarkable about this movie is that, despite growing more hilariously off-target with its prognostications about computers and the Internet with each passing year, it comes tantalizingly close to an accurate understanding of what would eventually become rave culture several years after its release. Peppered throughout Hackers are a series of directorial choices that indicate the hand of someone who has just recently lost touch with youth and fashion. That, in itself, is fascinating.

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A big part of the late 70's punk mythos is the music venue CBGB, itself an ironic twist considering what the name means. It was founded by club owner Hilly Kristal in 1973 as a performance space and record shop for Country, Bluegrass and Blues, later adding the cryptic OMFUG (Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers) when a bunch of decidedly different styles of music started drawing larger crowds. The idea that CBGB was the quintessential punk club is a classic example of retroactive continuity. CBGB only became a punk club in the 80's after it acquired that reputation in the pop culture consciousness of people who had never actually been there.

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With each passing year it becomes increasingly apparent that the idea of the punk rock musical revolution of the 1970's isn't so historically or even spiritually accurate. Really, it's more of an invention of the hopelessly nostalgic millennium's end Best Of lists that popped up a decade ago. Some combination of overgrown kids, irresponsible music journalists and various amateur revisionists created and then perpetuated the reductive understanding of new music in the mid-to-late 1970's, much to the delight of programming producers at VH1. Listening to the truly big, truly influential stuff that happened in major scenes around the world during that period, it's clear that supposed revolution of punk rock wasn't the first shot fired, but the popular revolt that followed.

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There's always something suspect about high-concept, long-projection pop music projects. When Sufjan Stevens announced that he would record an album for each of the fifty US states, starting with Michigan and followed by Illinois, it was pretty much just fodder for critical naysaying. In that case, the naysayers were right. Stevens eventually admitted that the 50 states project was little more than a promotional scheme. So, it's more than a little unusual when Stephin Merritt and The Magnetic Fields regularly deliver on their high-concept promises. 69 Love Songs was indeed a massive, three-disc collection of 69 entirely new songs about love and this week the band released the second album in their planned "no synth trilogy". Like Distortion before it, Realism eschews the lovably cheesy synthesizers that helped make the band famous. The result is 13 fun, beautiful and incredibly catchy songs.

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It's generally a bad idea to go into a fresh album with expectations, but when a band has already made an impression on you with their earlier work it's practically impossible to take their new stuff at face value. Still, it's as absurd to demand that each new record builds on those before it as it is to demand that each new book an author writes be a sequel to the last and not a stand-alone piece. So, when I first listened through In This Light And On This Evening, the most recent album by Editors, it took me a little while to understand just what I was hearing. Halfway through I was disappointed, but by the end I was swayed.

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People often talk about their favorite songs, but sometimes we love the music we listen to for particular moments instead of whole recordings. There may be ten excellent seconds in the middle of an otherwise okay five-minute song. Looking at a number of individual tracks in my library, I realize that I keep them around because of those brief, stellar solos, bridges and drops and not because I really find the entire song compelling. I don't think one approach is inherently better than the other. A few minutes of steady pleasantness is no better or worse than a handful of exhilarating seconds, but I do think the former variety gets a lot more attention when people start making favorites lists. Here are a few individual moments that justify the full length of the songs in which they appear.

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I consider myself lucky to have come of age just prior to the big indie music boom in the middle of the last decade. If I took pop culture as seriously as the average teenager or college student I'm sure I'd be up in arms about the hipsters and their scene as much as the average voice on the Internet. Thankfully, I prefer to apply a little more perspective to the matter of music. If it's pretty, I'm usually okay with it. Still, I can see how some listeners might have some issues with Vampire Weekend's recent release, Contra. It's at once the very picture of indie rock and yet a complete 180 from the sounds we're used to hearing on the latest collegiate pop album. For the most part, I think VW got away with the bait-and-switch.

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Art reflects life. The more I look at those unusual, experimental albums in the catalogs of famous bands, the more I see how that adage is true. When recording artists experience major changes in their personal and professional lives, it's almost guaranteed that their music will change with them. If a band tries to maintain a sound that came from a different frame of mind or even from a different collection of people, the result is usually pretty flat.

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The Internet has skewed some of our cultural perspectives, especially thanks to its tendency to foster irony and kitsch well into realms of absurdity. This includes exchanges of bizarre pop entities from foreign nations in such high volumes that they lose a lot of what makes them strange. Take, for instance, the recent development of American perceptions of Japanese culture. At its worst, ironic Japanophilia results in a series of blunt punchlines about anime, vending machines and the inability to differentiate R sounds from L sounds. Of course the whole of modern Japanese culture isn't as broad and simple as that, but the cacophony of the Internet makes us forget that sometimes. So, when an odd bit of pop detritus like "We Are Ninja", the novelty electronic dance hit produced by avant-pop group Frank Chickens in 1984, hits our screens we're quick to dismiss it as just another crazy video from the Far East. Given its time, place and creators, I'd like to argue that "We Are Ninja" is anything but.

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