Pop Culture Tuesdays X

(I'll put it out there right away, this is a long, wordy post; not your typical Tuesday post. No shiny eye candy, so if you don't like that kind of thing, I'll see you next week.)

Look at this, I’ve been doing Pop Posts for how many weeks now, and I haven’t defined Pop and given even the slightest reasoning behind what makes it in these posts.

Although, I do think the best way to teach something is to give examples, then define it, then give more examples. But teaching pedagogy aside, this should have been the first Pop Post. And so important do I think this post is that it is also getting a tab on the top of the page.

Let me start with this: ‘Pop’ as I use it is an aesthetic, and in its truest form, a way of life. So something or someone can be ‘Pop’. SuG is Pop. Lady Gaga is Pop. Hachiko Crossing at night is Pop. Gyaruo is Pop. A particular outfit, song, or hairstyle can be Pop. To be Pop is to be faddish, fast, and forgetful of the past. Pop is sex, beauty, money, and fame. It’s always about the next best thing, trying to be shinier, louder, and more exaggerated than whatever is currently the shiniest, loudest, and most exaggerated. Pop is about capturing attention and the imagination.

Yet, paradoxically, Pop must also be nostalgic. Maybe because of the incredible pace required to be Pop, there is a tinge of nostalgia and, if not longing for, then respect for the past (specifically the Pop Past). Pop Nostalgia usually takes the form of references to other Pop Cultural phenomenon. In terms of music, Pop Nostalgia is a little more difficult to define, but you know it immediately when you hear it. Pop Nostalgia in music makes you immediately feel warm and tingly and think of summer when you were a teenager. Although that description is disgusting (and it feels just as disgusting when you feel like that), part of us likes it, no matter how much we pretend to be jaded and not like it. This façade of jadedness is likely to try to make ourselves feel better and give us an excuse not to enjoy it, when we secretly know the real reason we can’t enjoy it is because society tells people of a certain age we are too old to enjoy, or be, Pop.

Which brings us to another vital characteristic of Pop: It is by the young, for the young, consumed by the young and perpetuated by the young. That’s just the sad fact of it. You can’t be Pop if you are over a certain age. A person can certainly be stylish, classy, or fashionable, but after a certain age the person can no longer be Pop. Don’t ask me to pick an arbitrary age. It would probably be most accurate to say that once a person begins a serious life-long career, that’s when Pop, as a lifestyle, must be given up.

Pop (despite what people may say) is about creativity and innovation. The most successful Pop People have done something unique or taken a previous Pop fad to its logical conclusion. Let us take Lady Gaga for example. There is really nothing especially innovative about her music, let’s be perfectly honest here. It is undeniably catchy and sexy, but not really innovative. What makes Lady Gaga an immortal Pop legend is, first, the irony in most of her songs. But much more important than that is the performance of the songs, and the way that she lives Pop. She is never ‘off’; she can’t be; Pop is her lifestyle. If you only listen to a Lady Gaga song you are missing more than half of it; you must both listen to and watch a Lady Gaga song. And this says a lot about what Pop is—you must watch music, not listen to it. To fully understand and appreciate the song you must see the costumes, the choreography, and the fashion, hear the music, and understand the references. In this way, Lady Gaga (and SuG) have brought all elements of Pop Culture into one medium, and brought Pop to its logical conclusion. There is no longer Pop Music, Pop Fashion, or Pop Art, it’s all one thing now: The Pop Aesthetic.

Another good example is the way Pop Music (or maybe this is just a Visual Kei thing) in Japan seems to work. Every time a band comes out with a new single they also change their appearances—as in haircuts and styles, costumes, makeup, the whole shebang. So intimately is music and fashion tied that a new song demands a new look, and often a new music video. Which can really border on the insane when some groups have three major singles come out in a year. But that’s Pop at its purest.

There is nothing simple about Pop, and people who dismiss it as such are so much more simplistic than the culture that they enjoy haughtily ridiculing. Pop done right takes an incredible amount of skill, thought, and creativity. Not to mention the marketing of Pop is quite possibly the most calculating, least simple thing the human mind has done since putting itself into space.

So, although that doesn’t quite explain how a particular thing makes it into the Pop Posts, it should make seeing a coherent theme among the posts much easier. For each post, after reading this, the reader should (hopefully) be able to look at whatever is being talked about and go, “Oh yeah, that’s Pop”. Maybe you can’t specifically articulate why, but you know it’s Pop.

And please, don’t be a Pop-Hater.

Don’t make me choose between you and Pop. You’re only asking for heartbreak.

Because I’ll choose Pop every time.