That "Pop" You Heard Was Important
by Sean Carolan

Pop culture mills don't last very long, at least not in any one form. We're starting to see the end of the one built around boy bands, Lolita-influenced girls, and anything having to do with Orlando, Florida. The "grunge" one died in 1997, give-or-take. Eighties hair bands didn't quite make it out of the eighties (though they're starting to show up on VH-1's "Storytellers".)

The burst of this latest pop mill is different, in that it's possible it burst under the weight of understanding. More than any other glossy trend, this one was marketed with the knowledge of those being marketed to - and those being marketed to have started to say, "Knock it off."

One telling sign of the weakness in the boy band market is the tendency toward meta; pop music is never worse than when it tries to analyze itself, because by definition it can't cover the topic thoroughly. Witness the new N'Sync record, "Pop" (from the album "Celebrity"). Just how cynical are they going to get? As it turns out, not very - once you get over the convulsion-inducing video (Pikachu ain't got nothin' on them) it's probably best to seek out a copy of XTC's "This Is Pop" and get some analysis from outsiders who knew the score twenty years in advance. (The Beatles' attitudes toward that sort of manufactured idol, as seen in A Hard Day's Night, nailed it fifteen years before XTC, too.)

Granted, part of the latest bubble's demise has to do with American media finally catching up with its British counterparts - a trend can't last nine months in England without the press tearing it to shreds after having spent all that time building it up. And, from this latest Disney-trained crowd, we're not seeing any Madonna-like chameleons that skip from stone to stone in the pop-culture stream without flopping flat on their midriff.

So, will alternative rock have another shot at the limelight? The press is rooting in that direction, what with Radiohead and Gorillaz making interesting forays into the foreground (Gorillaz has an advantage - being animated, they can't age. It's a shame ABC didn't realize that sooner.) We might have more diva activity to contend with, though, so the jury's still fighting over who gets to collect the little slips of paper.

Just as long as the mantle of alt-rock vanguard doesn't get tagged on Matchbox Twenty. The industry might tag them as alternative, but if I have to hear Rob Thomas' yowling Cher impression one more time, I'll be careening toward the relative safety of a Teletubbies marathon. I mean it.

©2001 Sean Carolan