Pop music’s unknown multifacetedness

Last December, Spotify offered me the chance to review my “Year in Music,” or the songs, artists and genres that I’d listened to most frequently during the past year. I was surprised to find that my most listened-to genre of 2017 was one I’d never heard of before: “indie poptimism.” Intrigued, I googled “poptimism” and found a good dozen or so thinkpieces about a music journalist’s school of thought surrounding the belief that pop music is just as worthy of in-depth dissection and cultural appreciation as any other genre.

Many of these pieces derided any kind of uplifting of the pop music genre. A poptimist would have you believe that Taylor Swift’s assertion that the players are gonna play, play, play (“Shake It Off”) deserves to be analyzed alongside any of Rolling Stone magazine’s greatest rock songs of all time. But as I read more about “poptimism,” I started to realize how much I could identify with it.

I think a lot of pop music is undervalued; there’s almost no better genre for the universal and often overlapping feelings of heartbreak, nostalgia and coming-of-age.

Pop music is usually conceptualized as vapid, meaningless empty noise that is hastily written and overproduced. That generalization obscures a lot of the truly great (and meaningful) pop music that has come out over the last few years.

Grimes’ 2015 album “Art Angels” managed to be unabashedly pop all while speaking on issues ranging from sexism in the music industry (“California”) to dealing with a best friend’s mental illness (“Pin”). No matter how you may feel about Taylor Swift, “1989,” released in 2014, still stands up as an ambitious exercise in re-engineering late-80’s synthpop for a modern audience. Charli XCX’s mixtape “Pop 2,” released Dec. 15 of last year, is one of the most creative full-length releases of any genre in recent memory, its title rightfully referring to Charli XCX’s place as an innovator of what pop music is, and what it can be.

Music critics’ dismissal of a genre as diverse as pop music seems to be rooted in a kind of sexism that devalues art produced by women by dismissing their methods of expression. It seems more than coincidental that a genre dominated by women has historically been the genre most derided by critics and fans alike as self-indulgent, distracting and meaningless.

In an op-ed entitled “The Pernicious Rise of Poptimism,” Saul Austerlitz of The New York Times charged that pop music is merely a distraction from more complicated, sophisticated content: “If we are all talking about Miley Cyrus, then we do not need to wrestle with knottier music that might require some effort to appreciate.”

The dismissal of pop music as inherently meaningless, without taking into consideration the diverse range of content that has been released under the “pop” categorization (especially within the last few years), seems to lie in a dismissal of the genre as too outwardly emotional to be considered complex. The dismissal of women, and their art, as “too emotional” is one of the most recognizable forms of sexism.

Pop music as a whole is too expansive to be written off as unworthy of cultural appreciation and criticism. Top 40 pop is one aspect of the genre; baroque pop (Florence and the Machine), dream pop (M83), experimental pop (Charli XCX), and art pop (Grimes) contribute something entirely different to our traditional understanding of what “pop” is. That isn’t to say, though, that Top 40 pop has no redeeming qualities.

In an interview with New York Times Magazine last year, Lorde may have unintentionally distilled the effect of great pop music while describing the Katy Perry song “Teenage Dream”: “There’s this sadness about it, where you feel young listening to it, but you feel impermanence at the same time…when I put that song on, I’m as moved as I am by anything by David Bowie, by Fleetwood Mac, by Neil Young…there’s something holy about it.”