Some Opinions are Best Kept to Oneself

I am a sick man. I am not at work today, due to an unfortunate accident involving £3.50, a chicken place and my stomach. Suffice to say I have had pains in all sorts of squashy internal areas today, and experienced the full joyous onslaught of badly cooked spicy chicken wings, although just short of actually keeling over from e-coli. But that's not what I am talking about here. I am talking about pop music, in fact.

The good thing about being ill in one's own house is that these days you can be bored in so many different ways. The internet is a wonderful thing, when it's not being poxy (I have expressed both opinions), and allows me to sit about listening to records and then pump out my opinions between visits to the lavatory to pump out other things. And I have been formulating some definate ideas about what constitues a good pop song.

I have always thought that the pop song is the basic unit of musical currency here in what we laughably call The West. Even before Bill Hayley rocked his kiss curl around the clock in 1955, the music of the people (what a terrible, 1990's type phrase that is) has gone verse, verse, chorus, verse, chorus and massive bass solo to fade. Think of 'White Cliffs of Dover' by Vera Lynn, or Deutschland Uber Alles. Well, maybe not that one. Of course, the Frostie's-style secret formula was finally set out in America by the 1950's, ready for us Brits to absorb.

And absorb we did. Time passed, as it will often do, and as if by magic, there were The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and all manner of smaller bands. Modern pop was born. Great. Now the likes of me have something to do. We all sat down with guitars and learned the chords to Please Please Me, 19th Nervous Breakdown and Victoria. On this was the entire British music industry based.

But what of now? We are, certainly, starting to recycle stuff. Britpop took all the records of the 1960s, then some cocaine, and lo a movement was born. Indie ate the world, in fact. Once, the likes of Coldplay and Echobelly would only sell six records a year, all of them to friends. Echobelly still do, actually. But my point remains. And why is that?

Because you can play the songs on an acoustic guitar. This is why we still listen to The Beatles and Bowie so long after, not because they were particularly any better than the music of today. But it is the reason why there is a direct line from Negative Creep off of In Utero, and Room on the 3rd Floor by McFly, and why Toxic by Britney Spears will last many, many years, but Slave 4 U will not. You can bang the first one out at a party, possibly translating it into German for the amusement of polylingual friends. The second one is just embarrassing, frankly.

After that, there are more technical elements of structure. Everything comes in sections of four (bars in an intro, lines in a verse) and if it's any longer than three and a half minutes, you can lose some of it. For an example of a pop song which does absolutely everything right, see Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken by Camera Obscura. In that band, everyone knows exactly what the song needs. The drum fills are exactly right, in exactly the right place, and it's all part of the structure. I absolutely love it, and can tell anyone that asks exactly why. Because it's right, that's why. I can't read music but love and play it, and so it's all shapes and colours to me. Camera Obscura looks like Magritte. Rhianna looks like Jean Michel Basquiat.

My God, that's quite a long ramble, some of it very badly written. I hope I get my point across. It can be very hard to explain why Nirvana and McFly do basically the same thing without sounding odd and possibly upsetting people. And not all of it is unadulterated goodness. My Chemical Romance spring to mind, although I do quite like I'm Not OK.

And with that self-contradiction, I'm off. If I say any more, I can only make it worse. So I'll head back to my sickbed instead. I still hurt in unpleasant places, and that stack of chocolate digestives has not hepled at all.

Good Night, and Good Luck
Dougal