No Pop: It’s a Preference not a Protest
What is it about popular music that drives a wedge between musicians? The angst against pop has been vaguely expressed among both artists and their audience for as long as I can remember. ‘Top Forty Bullshit’ is a phrase almost everyone has heard before but the conversation always seems to return to the somewhat infantile concept of money being a corrupting factor. But let’s be real, this goes beyond the phase most youth pass through where they rebel against a system they did not get to build. This distaste for pop spans generations, many of whom are not actually arguing for the abolition of money as a tool. So why has this distaste stuck around?
There’s a concept that floats around in the food industry you might have heard of called mouthfeel. People who do food research for companies who make chips focus on a lot of things but a significant portion of research is given to maximize mouthfeel. When you’re sitting back, watching a movie, bag of chips in hand, your hand reaches back into the bag almost as soon as you’ve put the last chip in your mouth. Researchers have engineered the mouthfeel of their product to feel incredibly gratifying and then disappear almost as quickly as it came. While betrayal is way too heavy of a word to describe chips, there comes a feeling of being used or manipulated knowing that your body is reacting in a way that these researchers have literally designed you to.
When a song comes on that immediately gratifies, that you can sing along with the very first time you hear it, that gets stuck in your head making you want to listen to it again and again there’s a similar problem. In the same way that I still like eating chips, I’m not arguing that pop music isn’t objectively good. It takes talented musicians with an extensive understanding of what makes people like music to produce these songs. But what the hell? Why are you treating us like objects to be manipulated?
No Pop is a movement of like-minded musicians and audiophiles who reject this manipulation. People who view art as something that can and should be subjective, that should stretch our understanding of the world by challenging its conception of what is enjoyable. Stretch your palette, take uncertainty as an invitation, find the band that gives a voice to your mindset. Take the initiative to make your own decisions about what is good and real and alive. Letting someone else do it for you is an apathy that atrophies, particularly if the personality of what you’re listening to has been so polished it is universally applicable. Recover the individuality that the advertising industry has attempted to take from you.
This isn’t a hot new trend. It’s not going to be a blog giving you all the latest underground hits. There’s no one on a digital soap box spilling inspirational aphorisms that help you feel better about your music choices. This is a movement asking musicians to stop asking how they can attract more listeners to their SoundCloud and start asking what it is they feel compelled to express in their music and build on that foundation. It’s asking listeners to support the artists who are taking the risk to do that. And if you’re making music without that desire for expression stop what you’re doing and listen to artists that do have something to say until it brushes up against something that you feel hasn’t been done before. This is how music helps us grow.
The feud between commercial and independent artists is practically ageless. What’s different about this movement, says Lonely Vagabond the designer of No Pop, is that “music genres are no longer the dividing line… it’s now commercially-driven and non-commercially-driven.” Most people are open to multiple genres. People who like punk music can and do listen to rap or house or folk music, too. The enmity of mods and rockers feels quaint in this David and Goliath scenario. But this movement has the potential to be more than just another stone in the sling.
This re-emphasis of music as art, of musicians as people with a need to express themselves, isn’t just another finger to the system. It’s a call for a return to why people create in the first place. If your goal is to make money, go ahead and jump in the devouring maw of the machine. If your goal is to bring something uniquely your own into the world, don’t worry about being drowned out by the mainstream sound. It’s loud but it’s not the only thing people are paying attention to. No Pop is here to prove it.
