Just wanted to let you know that beginning Monday, a certain Shady Dame and I will be off on a vacation to Bonnie Scotland; for 8 days we'll be based in Edinburgh, and making excursions both in an out of the city (Loch Ness or bust, baby!!!).
I'm gonna try to interrupt our busy pre-trip schedule of getting flu shots and packing our clothes to write a few normal posts for next week before we leave, but what success I'll have in that regard is an open question. In any case, I figure you'll have to endure at least a couple of entries devoted strictly to our Scottish tourism. I beg your indulgence for this in advance.
Okay, with that out of the way, on to our traditional weekend mishegass.
The short version: As you may or may not know, I am not a big fan of the pop music coverage in the otherwise estimable New Yorker magazine. I mean, I basically gave up on it when World's Most Irksome Rock Critic© Kelefa Sanneh migrated over there from the New York Times a couple of years ago, and new girl on the block Amanda Petrusich didn't strike me as much of an improvement when she showed up.
Anyway, Petrusich has a piece in the most recent issue about current chart-topping pop tart Sabrina Carpenter, which I read with a certain degree of skepticism. And, initially, it struck me as just the usual indefensible cutesie puff piece from Petrusich's patented "Everything's Great Including the Obvious Shit" school of cultural musings.
But she begins the essay with a longish exegesis of Carpenter's latest single ("Manchild") and in the interests of critical responsibility, I gave the video of same a look-see.
And to my considerable surprise...
...I kinda (emphasize: kinda) liked it. The song is moderately catchy, the lyrics are legitimately funny, and the production -- and this floored me -- is really pretty good; the thing rocks, and there's even an actual, if brief, guitar solo for heaven's sakes. Couldn't stand Carpenter's singing, which sounds auto-tuned even if it probably isn't, but hey, you can't have everything.
Which brings us, inexorably, to the subject of our latest group discussion. To wit:
Proposed: Most current commercial pop music -- i.e. the stuff that sells -- is by and large the worst crap we've had to endure since the pre-rock Fifties.
Discuss.
By which, of course, I mean weigh in yea or nay.
I'm leaning towards yea, in case you haven't guessed, but I do wonder if this isn't just me being a grumpy old man who's turned into his parents. And then I hear something like the Carpenter song above and I grudgingly think -- y'know, maybe these kids today are not so bad. 😎
Alrighty, then -- which side are YOU on?
And have a great weekend, everybody! See you in Scotland!!!
8 comments:
I don't hear enough pop music to have an opinion one way or another. Though it seems that every pop music story on NPR's Morning Edition has a song that is auto tuned to death (Molly Cyrus this morning, for example).
So, I'm going to go with No based on somebody's old rule "90% of everything is crap."
As I said, I tend to agree. Manufactured, assembly line crap is the same in any era, only today it's pretty much the only game in town.
The only place I hear modern pop music is at the gym but fortunately it isn’t loud. None of it sticks in my head which is the best possible outcome. I would say this is worse than the past because the songs are so disposable.
- Paul in DK
I am officially a grumpy old man. If Sabrina Carpenter would sing just a bit higher, my high-frequency hearing loss would spare me from her voice.
Heh. 😎
I'm a high school teacher who teaches a History of American Popular Music elective. With that, and I'm not trying to be that "get off my lawn!" guy but there's simply so much commercial pop music that it's like shopping for spaghetti. Who really cares? That said, I read the NYer article with the same take as Steve - the writer of pop music sucks. However, after reading the article then WATCHING the video, I wonder: in this social media age, would a song like this SOUND different without the video? I absorbed both experiences differently. Also, look at the cover of the album and ask, "Is THIS 'Smell the Glove'?" - Is she being deliberately ironic and iconoclastic?
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