"POP 101" 101 and Some Thoughts On Irony

           
   I heard the end of this song on the radio and despite me being very uncomfortable about it, it has been stuck on my head constantly. I feel a vague amount of shame about this, but also a burning need to write.

If you don’t feel like watching a youtube video (the song is ok, the video is pretty obnoxious) or listening to a song by Marianas Trench (both are very reasonable ways to be), I’ll give you a basic wrap-up. It is a song about pop music and its tropes, (sort of since 2008) that actually manages to be a pretty (good? catchy?) pop song only by explicitly stating these tropes.  “don’t you bore us, hurry up and get to the chorus”.

Rather than make my first non-introductory post about postmodernism per se, I’m just going to get it off my chest.

POSTMODERNISM ~pOsTmOdErN~ ~welcome to the postmodern people~

In my thoughts on it up to this point I got about this far

https://twitter.com/kleixa/status/606218263601758208

Anyways. What I find interesting about this song (and its music video in particular) is the way that it reflects the case of irony in culture in general.

A course I took last semester (80s Cinema) talked about the notion of pastiche vs parody. Essentially, this boiled down to the idea that what is done in a lot of modern cinema is less a parody of styles where it is actually making a point and more just a series of ways for a viewer to pat themselves on the back for being very clever: “Oh I get that reference”. (Jameson’s “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” has a good bit on this, as does Schatz’ “The New Hollywood”

Someone on a facebook group I am in – (cool freaks groovy jamz) - had an opinion in that vein.

So is that all this is? Is it just a really dumb “hey pop music is formulaic” thing? Somehow I’m not convinced. There is a decent amount of skill involved in making pop music, and not everybody could have done this. The basic amount of research I did also informed me that Joshua Ramsaywrote call me maybe, which is a REALLY good pop song. See (hyperlinked owen pallet article). So at the very least, I’d say this is like an update of “The Evolution of Dance” for another 10 or so years.

Still, there are a decent amount of things about this that make it fit into all of the pop politics that it seems to target. Like, even though he is “making fun of” girls in music videos, he’s… not really doing that. It’s kind of like how “ironic racism” is often just “racism”. And also, Blink 182 (and many others) have kind of been doing this shit for a really long time.

If I had more time and wasn’t writing this at 11pm I would go into David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibas Pluram” and try to figure the politics out a bit better, but this will suffice for now.

As always, comment, tweet @kleixa, or email ian.rodgers@mail