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 Auto-Tuned big-chorus bolted on top. But underneath, there are riffs and vamps, pulses and pounding beats, glistening synthetic textures and an overall banging boshing feel; it's like these tracks have been beamed straight from Gatecrasher or Love Parade circa 1999.
This week the Quietus ran a piece on a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop, what writer Daniel Barrow calls "the soar": the wooshing, ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its original context (90s 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") capture the unsettling "stacked" quality of these recordings. Like the images you find in bodybuilding magazines, the now-pop can 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 still omnipresent almost a year 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. Though often described by hostile critics as Euro house, it is simply international, post-geographical, pan-global.
(How apt that the video for Dynamite is preceded here by a commercial for Las Vegas tourism, since that city is both Mecca and model for a certain idea of "a really good time" celebrated by so many in-the-club anthems).
I started out loathing Dynamite. The "ay-o" bit in particular always made me think of "day-o" as in Harry Belafonte's The Banana Boat Song. Gradually I succumbed – or perhaps I should say, "submitted" – and started to think of Dynamite as possessing a dumb genius. Especially the line, "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-90s.
The Black Eyed Peas pioneered all this of course, creating a sort of 21st-century update of European "hip-house" from even earlier in the 90s (Snap, Technotronic) and working in some 80s-retro flavours. The Time (Dirty Bit) also qualifies, abundantly, for the category of "dumb genius". And as with Dynamite, there's a forced insistence that everyone is "having the time of their lives". So much of the now-pop has this vaguely coercive undercurrent. As Barrow notes, producers know how to work your reflexes, they've got pop pleasure down to a science, they target those euphoria-centres of the brain as ruthlessly as soft drinks full of high-fructose corn syrup.
Kids love this, of course. At the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice awards 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 kids: five-year-old Tasmin is totally into the now-pop. Recently, driving in the car and flicking back and forth between pop stations and classic-rock stations, she opined that Katy Perry was "rock'n'roll" but was quite adamant that the Stones' It's Only Rock'n'Roll was "not rock'n'roll". She wouldn't be budged.
Perhaps Tasmin is correct, in spirit. The substance of the now-pop has absolutely nothing in common with rock'n'roll or indeed any form of live-band music. But perhaps its blaring bombast is the true modern sound of teenage (and pre-teenage) rampage. Maybe all this steroid-maxed über-pop is just as artfully mindless and cunningly vacant as records made by the Sweet with Chinn & Chapman, the production team who were the 70s equivalents to Dr Luke and Will.i.am: expert programmers of artificial excitement, architects of crescendo and explosion. Tasmin's a big Sweet fan too.
@'The Guardian'
All these smash hits have the Auto-Tuned big-chorus bolted on top. But underneath, there are riffs and vamps, pulses and pounding beats, glistening synthetic textures and an overall banging boshing feel; it's like these tracks have been beamed straight from Gatecrasher or Love Parade circa 1999.
This week the Quietus ran a piece on a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop, what writer Daniel Barrow calls "the soar": the wooshing, ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its original context (90s 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") capture the unsettling "stacked" quality of these recordings. Like the images you find in bodybuilding magazines, the now-pop can 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 still omnipresent almost a year 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. Though often described by hostile critics as Euro house, it is simply international, post-geographical, pan-global.
(How apt that the video for Dynamite is preceded here by a commercial for Las Vegas tourism, since that city is both Mecca and model for a certain idea of "a really good time" celebrated by so many in-the-club anthems).
I started out loathing Dynamite. The "ay-o" bit in particular always made me think of "day-o" as in Harry Belafonte's The Banana Boat Song. Gradually I succumbed – or perhaps I should say, "submitted" – and started to think of Dynamite as possessing a dumb genius. Especially the line, "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-90s.
The Black Eyed Peas pioneered all this of course, creating a sort of 21st-century update of European "hip-house" from even earlier in the 90s (Snap, Technotronic) and working in some 80s-retro flavours. The Time (Dirty Bit) also qualifies, abundantly, for the category of "dumb genius". And as with Dynamite, there's a forced insistence that everyone is "having the time of their lives". So much of the now-pop has this vaguely coercive undercurrent. As Barrow notes, producers know how to work your reflexes, they've got pop pleasure down to a science, they target those euphoria-centres of the brain as ruthlessly as soft drinks full of high-fructose corn syrup.
Kids love this, of course. At the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice awards 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 kids: five-year-old Tasmin is totally into the now-pop. Recently, driving in the car and flicking back and forth between pop stations and classic-rock stations, she opined that Katy Perry was "rock'n'roll" but was quite adamant that the Stones' It's Only Rock'n'Roll was "not rock'n'roll". She wouldn't be budged.
Perhaps Tasmin is correct, in spirit. The substance of the now-pop has absolutely nothing in common with rock'n'roll or indeed any form of live-band music. But perhaps its blaring bombast is the true modern sound of teenage (and pre-teenage) rampage. Maybe all this steroid-maxed über-pop is just as artfully mindless and cunningly vacant as records made by the Sweet with Chinn & Chapman, the production team who were the 70s equivalents to Dr Luke and Will.i.am: expert programmers of artificial excitement, architects of crescendo and explosion. Tasmin's a big Sweet fan too.
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