Have not and probably will not ever get tired of "Life in a Northern Town". I say that because the track showed up on shuffle about ten minutes ago - somewhere between "Night Crawler" by Judas Priest and "Late Freight" by Dave Hamilton. Strange, I know. Anyway, it sort of got me thinking. A lot of ironic, hip, and very cool people have directed their hip, cool, ire at pop music. I've been at shows/places where scarf-and-square-frame-glasses clad people have elaborated on their dislike of pop (more notably hip hop, though) because "Itz dumb and corporate", perhaps not realizing that their favorite acts (or acts these acts looked up to - yes the goal is to be redundant and messy here) took influence from well-established bands like The Beatles and Pet Sounds era Beach Boys. In fact, having the latter invoked in your Pitchfork review seems to be GOLDEN. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not pop's defender coming to save the day, nor am I jumping out of the woodwork telling people to leave it alone, and least of all am I laboring under the delusion that the behemoth of corporate recording needs any real protection. I'm just saying that it seems kind of ignorant to opine on music in such a way that discounts just about everything that ever charted and that typically applauds Motown while forgetting it was a major label. Yes, the corporations are evil, the masses are easily manipulated, and hit singles come from a hit single factory. Also, the lyricism is often inane...and I'm putting myself in quite a Rogerian hole. However, as reality would have it, many of the people responsible for these songs wind up with relatively average jobs and relatively average incomes after their involvement - yeah, a lot don't, and you can ultimately file this section under "stuff that no one cares about", but it's worth noting that not everybody that releases a major label single or even charts reaches Bon Jovi proportions. I also feel it's a bit small minded to think that nothing good can come from a process that gave us Johnny Cash, Simon and Garfunkle, and "All Along the Watchtower". To think that the industry has become more evil over time seems to be a bit naive as well, considering how little artists were once paid and how heavily they were whored out, and to think that everyone involved in the process is some soulless machine seems wholly incorrect (speaking of, please contrast with "self-absorbed-pretentious-art-douche"). I guess what I'm getting at here is that maybe, just maybe, some genuinely good, human things come out of the machine that are totally worth listening to between bouts of scene-hopping. Perhaps people should be less conscious of how well their "guilty pleasures" will be recieved or how interesting the artists listed on their facebook will make them seem. A totally unoriginal conclusion, I know, but for someone whose tastes span a spectrum as broad as mine, not at all unexpected. In my opinion the point is to relax and enjoy, not clique off and judge, but that's just me. Anyway, this long, dramatic post was basically meant to preface a mix I just made of some of my favorite lesser-known pop tracks.
Pop is Actually Good:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9US29QNXDescription: Eleven tracks of good pop music. All from the 80's because I think that production values from that era are among the most offensive to any person that dislikes the "genre". These almost all come from the UK, as well. No real purpose for that other than it's what I'd heard the LEAST of at the time of putting this together, and hopefully they'll have some of that "new-song novelty" for others.
Recommended For: People who are afraid, but not too afraid, to take baby steps into something they've spent a long time writing off.
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