The Ibiza-ification of pop
Guardian blog, 2011
by Simon Reynolds
The other
day we were driving in the car, listening to one of Los Angeles's Top 40 stations, and I turned to my wife and
asked, "How come everything on
the radio sounds like a peak-hour tune from Ibiza?"
All these
smash hits have the AutoTuned big-chorus tune bolted on top. But underneath,
the riffs and vamps, the pulses and pounding beats, the glistening synthetic
textures and the overall banging boshing feel: it's like it's been beamed
straight in from Gatecrasher or The Love Parade circa 1999.
This week
The Quietus published a piece that pinpoints a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop,
what writer Daniel Barrow calls "the Soar": the wooshing,
upwards-ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its
original context (Nineties underground dance-and-drug culture) and repurposed
as the trigger for a kind of release-without-release.
Barrow's
references to steroids ("the steroided architecture of these tracks",
etc) captures the unsettling "stacked" quality of these recordings.
Like the images you find in bodybuilding magazines, the now-pop can often be at
once grotesque and mesmerising.
Strangely
Barrow makes no mention of the tune that seems like the now-pop's defining
anthem and blueprint, a song that is still omnipresent many months after it
first hit big: "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz. His name, with its odd
unplaceable quality (it sounds like some kind of Asian-Hispanic hybrid) suits
the Esperanto-like qualities of the
now-pop. Although often described by
hostile critics as Eurohouse, it is simply and purely international,
post-geographical, panglobal.
I started out loathing "Dynamite". The "ay-o" bit in particular always made me think of "day-o" as in Harry Belafonte's "Banana-Boat Song."
Gradually
I succumbed--or perhaps I should say,
"submitted"--and started to think of "Dynamite" as
possessing a certain dumb genius. Especially the line that goes "I'm wearing all my favourite brands
brands brands brands".
But
looking from the vantage point of my forthcoming book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past, what's most striking and unsettling about the
now-pop is its not-so-now-ness: the fact that in the year 2011, mainstream pop sounds like the late Nineties.
Kids love this kind of stuff, of course. At the Nickelodeon TV channel's Kids' Choice Awards show in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, The Black Eyed Peas performed "The Time": what with the dazzling lights and deafening volume, it really was like a rave for children. We were there with our own kids: five-year-old Eli in particular is totally into the now-pop. Recently, driving in the car and flicking back and forth between pop stations and classic rock stations, he opined that Katy Perry was "rock'n'roll" but was quite adamant that The Stones's "It's Only Rock'n'Roll" was "not rock'n'roll". He wouldn't be budged.
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