THANK GOD I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO GO TO HIGH SCHOOL DURING THE BEST FOUR YEARS IN MUSIC HISTORY

This morning, I was conscripted to drive my son into school early, in order for him to get some extra help in a difficult class where note-taking and listening and thinking and so forth are required. This kind of class was always a bit of a bete noire for me, as well, so I chuckled indulgently before slapping him on the back and heading to the car. (This indulgent chuckling business is something I traffic in but rarely, as it usually results in the same kinds of questions people ask a boxer who's been knocked down.) 

  
  ALL EXISTING POP MUSIC IS PERFORMED BY DRAKE, AS FAR AS I CAN TELL

Due to a long and dull stretch of exposition, my car wasn't here, and we had to take Lisa's. To my son, who suffers from what might be termed middle school cynicism (meaning he has a sardonic and worldly response to literally everything except for the pop culture and products that target him), this is all to the good. Because of Radio. 

  My car doesn't have a working radio. Or, rather, it works, but I don't allow it to be turned on. I have a phone that has a quarter of a million tracks on it, and none of them are Drake. Drake has become my go-to modern pop artist, and in my mind, all modern pop music is written and performed by Drake. Sometimes when Drake wants to mix it up a bit, he invites a guest star or two to appear on a track, which means for me that occasionally a song has Drake with guest Drake. It all kind of runs together, and there's not more than a proton of difference between a Drake solo cut and a Drake and Drake duet. In fact, when I hear two Drakes in tandem, it's easy to picture a third Drake thumbing through a magazine in the waiting room, in case they need him to add a little more Drake to the thing. I imagine there are a couple more Drakes on standby, playing foosball and drinking whatever Drakes drink. 

    WARM, SOFT, AND SALTY

My colleague Matt Cook used to say that all fast food can be boiled down to three elements-- warm, soft, and salty. (He probably still says it, for all I know. I wouldn't put it past him.) Pop music and pop production in the All-Drake world can be summed up similarly: danceable and antiseptic. And since the All-Drake pop music system combines all the commercial elements, the three allowable song themes are all included in every song at the same time. 

1. I love you and we've certainly been through a lot. 

2. I'm a girl and I don't take any shit. 

3. If I go the club tonight, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be big asses there. 

I suppose psychologists could sort out the reasons these themes are considered desirable. I'm more of a sociologist, which means I can't prescribe medication or be paid in currency. 

  After many years of searching for an explainable and quantifiable aesthetic that includes all the good pop music (you know, the pop music that I like), I've concluded that 

it's a bootless job. Even the "best" pop music doesn't consistently grab me anymore. Some will posit that I've been finally and irreconcilably poisoned by the academic music world I snuck into years ago, and my response to this is that I believe in a world where people can posit what they want. Keep your positing to yourself, I say. 

  That being said, in those moments when I give a damn about pop music (usually I'm writing or recording some of the stuff at the time), I object the most to the antiseptic component. Must we tolerate the television aesthetic of homogenized smugness and sincerity encroaching upon the sacred art form? Naturally, we must, lest we be tarred as the aging cranks we've become. 

  
                I'M PRETTY SURE ALL POP MUSIC IS BAD, EVEN WHEN IT'S GOOD

Or have we? I submit to you that if you're going to the mat for the pop music of your youth, and bemoaning the current field, you are probably fooling yourself to some degree. To the youthful consumer of pop music, the pop artist represents some species of authenticity that will be eroded in the near future but now seems to be the One True Church. I'm old enough to have experienced many seasons of nostalgia for crap I couldn't stand when it was fresh. I even remember with jaundice the pop nostalgia of my own youth, whereby the hideous sockhop version of rock and roll that proliferated in the wake of Little Richard, Chuck Berry et al was recalled fondly by people who'd been walking the earth when uncoolness was first invented. 

  Unlike most humans of my acquaintance, I prefer to think of music in its most elemental terms. The popular response to this is that I'm robotically missing what's good about music. Maybe so, but after decades of studying pop music in all its makes, models, and paradigms, I don't trust the human part anymore. The human part seems to be the most real and authentic part, until you realize that fans of the crap you hate see it the same way. I guess Pearl Jam fans find Eddie Vedder comforting and even magnetic, but for me he's insufferable. Where I never get tired of Bob Dylan's mug (and muglike voice), others find him an inexplicably admired con artist. All pop music discussions pretend to be about substance, but they're really about Pavlovian response. Pop music you love feels like the artist is taking you on some sort of important expedition into life's possibilities, and the pop you hate seems like the ugly phenomenon of profitable rube-fleecing. 

  Most reading this will object to my premise, and they'll be childishly eager to trot out artists who they believe are giving us something more real and good. "I KNOW you're not trying to claim that Muddy Waters is no better than Katy Perry." I'm not saying that. What I am saying, though, is that I've lost the enthusiasm for pretending that the supremacy of an artist like Muddy is some sort of mathematical constant. I love his work, naturally, but is it really healthy for me to mythologize him and put him on a pedestal? I'm endlessly fascinated by the music of Bill Monroe, but must I worship him while denouncing Justin Bieber? 

   IN WHICH I ATTEMPT TO SPEAK GLOWINGLY OF CLASSICAL MUSIC WITHOUT BEING ACCUSED OF ELITISM

 I've come to see classical music's focus on the long-dead composer as refreshing. That framing of music has its pitfalls, too, but I love that I don't have to picture J.S. Bach when I listen to his audible architecture, with its endless spires, belfries, and catecombs. It's relaxing to me to not have to see some good-looking dancer/pitchman shaking his rump and grinning before we can enjoy rhythms, sound colors, and all the other aspects of music that are, in fact, music and not just charisma. I prefer my music to be unpolluted by charisma, the toxic pestilence that sweet-talks us into voting for the unqualified, reading the poorly written, paying for the worthless, and admiring the heinous.