Today's lesson in pop aesthetics. I had a different post in mind for today, but it's going to have to wait, now that I've discovered that Michael Bérubé has nominated Nick Lowe's "Cruel to Be Kind" as "the most perfect pop song ever written." This is wrong, a result of incorrect theory, and must be combatted.

Though Prof. B. claims to eschew "rockism" in his critique, his definition of "pop" does seem largely based on a series of anti-rock negatives:

This blog does not recognize any firm distinction between “rock” and “pop.” We do not think that the former category is inhabited by edgy artists and assorted Culture Heroes whereas the latter is inhabited by Tommy James and the Shondells. ... Still, it remains true that if a song has too much fire and/or grit and/or passion in it, it exceeds the “Cruel to Be Kind” standard in obvious ways. “Cruel to Be Kind” is airtight: there are no hidden emotional depths, no sudden bursts of instrumental virtuosity, no startling production quirks, no compositional seams.

But what kind of lover of pop music is it who takes an "airtight," not to say soulless, machine like "Cruel to Be Kind" as a standard of judgement for "pop perfection"? How is that a perfection worth celebrating? Where, for God's sake, is the love a pop song ought to make you feel? Later in the post, Bérubé elaborates a pop aesthetic that refuses elaboration or intensity:

The surface of the perfect pop song is clear and untroubled; and below the surface . . . there is no below the surface. See “no emotional depths,” above.

And I think I see the problem here: it's not that Bérubé's heart is two sizes too small, it's that he's unwittingly accepted a Modernist—not to say positively Greenbergian—reductivism in accounting for the function of the pop "surface."

In one sense, yes, a work of pop art is all surface: but that doesn't mean there's no dialectic playing over that surface. For my money, the greatest pop music effortlessly manages the incommensurate work of being simultaneously surprising and inevitable: the sort of work no one has ever done better (over the course of a career) than the Beatles, who were forever somehow discovering the logic of the forms they imitated (while ratifying that logic), and whose most radical innovations somehow sounded as if they had always already existed in Pop Heaven. "Surface," in this kind of art, is always threatening to "hole through" (to use a Greenberg phrase) into depth, and any depth apparently disclosed is always immediately reassimilated to surface.

There is yet another side to surface in the modern era. Surface, with its emphasis on materiality, superficiality, and immediacy, rings of capitalistic commodification and the newly industrialized modern world. Siegfried Kracauer noted a strange elision of distance and depth in his account of the "mass ornament," in 1927, which he described as "a pattern of unimaginable dimension." Using the dances of the Tiller Girls as an example of modern "simple surface manifestations," Kracauer described the impossibility of navigating or gaining dominance over the visual display that confronts the modern viewer--depth is condensed and everything is reduced to the same plane, an "aesthetic reflex," says Kracauer, "of the rationality aspired to by the prevailing economic system."

Part of the unique capacity of pop art—pop music in particular—to provoke a sense of liberation in its audience (from which perspective it will be clear how wrong a choice "Cruel to Be Kind" is) is in the paradoxical way it celebrates its commodity status in order to (at least appear to) negate or recuperate it.

All of which should make it obvious, without my having to draw the lines of the proof, that the perfect pop song is Big Star's "September Gurls." QED.

posted by michael  3:20:43 PM  
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