The Decade in Pop

Taylor Swift released a new track to radio a couple of months back-- the "Pop Mix" of "You Belong With Me". Her original mix doesn't sound not-pop to my ears: it's punchy, twangy, airbrushed country, a sweet sound backing up a sharp song about playing the long game, waiting in the background while the person you love wastes their time on a loser. What does the "Pop Mix" do to it? It adds an alt-rock bassline, compressed buzzsaw guitars on the chorus, and a power-pop solo in the middle eight. "Pop" in this context means "sounds as much as possible like 'Since U Been Gone'".

All that ballast crushes the song's sweetness. But what I, or any other writer, think hardly matters-- pop is a troublesome genre for the critic or obsessive fan because they don't get much say in what counts. It's not like club music where every new twist and trick gets its own name soon enough. It's not like metal where the truth or falsity of the music forges and animates fandoms. It's not like hip-hop where debates over realness are encoded into the tracks themselves. Pop is defined by success in the marketplace-- meaning some changeable combination of the labels, the radio, the gossip blogs, the folks who buy music for ads and TV shows, and the people they are trying to please: you and me.

It's not a free marketplace, or a fair one; it's not rational, and it often ignores or destroys quality. But as soon as you step aside from it, as soon as you start to say, "OK, this stuff is proper pop and this stuff isn't," you're defining something else.

Not that I'd blame you. The fierce sense that the market is failing-- that pop has gone wrong and that its spirit lives only in exile-- sits somewhere behind every independent movement that lays claim to the p-word, and every hopeful revivalist. Pop wears many skins and sheds them constantly and inconveniently. The husks can be beautiful, what wriggles free of them often awkward and ugly-- naturally it's tempting to settle on a discard, pay it cult, study and describe it.

Like indie pop, for instance. One reason I like that Taylor Swift single is that in sentiment it reminds me of music I heard on John Peel in the 80s-- the mousy righteousness of Taylor's unspoken infatuation is pure Sarah Records. But there the similarity ends. As music, indie pop held, and holds still, that a messy sketch of an ideal form is worth more than a glossy grab at whatever works.

You might say ideals should beat pragmatism-- but all the ideals of "perfect pop" we have started out as hopes and hustles. The 60s girl groups and janglers that indie pop drew on were going for effectiveness, and it happened that beauty worked. The appeal of pop, for me, is that its definition of effective keeps changing-- yes, conservatism brings return, but so does novelty. The constant dance of "what's great" and "what works" is what keeps me a pop fan: It's as close as art comes to sport.

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But there are times when pop is so consistently grand that you truly want it to stop where it is forever. One such period was the early 00s. For a time-- let's say some point after "...Baby One More Time" and before "Toxic"-- it seemed that every week brought some R&B or teen-pop or commercial hip-hop single with a new angle on pleasure. And most of them hit big.

Look at Billboard's top songs of the year for 2001. Forget about Lifehouse at the very top-- you can't win them all-- and recall Destiny's Child's imperious "Independent Women Part 1", Blu Cantrell's neo-flapper "Hit 'Em Up Style", Daft Punk's joyous "One More Time". Remember the steel coils of "Survivor", the skittery teen vulnerability of Dream and Craig David, the grit of "Family Affair". Madonna's haughtiness on "Don't Tell Me" sits next to Missy's goofball earthiness on "Get Ur Freak On". Over in Britain Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head" brought motorik bliss; Daniel Bedingfield's "Gotta Get Thru This" let 2-step garage collapse into nervous tics. Meanwhile genres seemed to be on spin cycle: rappers, R&B divas, and teenpop stars swapping looks, producers, audiences, and sounds.

Some of these records made our end-of-decade list; others are half-forgotten. All, at the time, felt vital. Meaning alive, not important-- importance was for tomorrow to worry about. And today there was suddenly a huge open space online to argue and rave about these hits in what felt like public.

In Let's Talk About Love, his fascinating book-length wrestle with Celine Dion fandom and the idea of taste, Carl Wilson talks about an upsurge in pro-pop sentiment among critics at around this same time. "A new generation moved into positions of critical influence," he writes. "They mounted a wholesale critique against the syndrome of measuring all popular music by the norms of rock culture." If there's any truth in this, the wave really broke in 1997, when America's massed rock critics voted Hanson's sugary "MMMBop" top single in the Village Voice's annual Pazz and Jop poll. In his essay that year, Robert Christgau said of Hanson's fellow pop crossovers the Spice Girls: "They got a free ride... by making no attempt to conceal their inauthenticity, thus rendering it moot".

By the 1999 poll, Christgau was pointing out that writers had always dug pop tracks, and writing this: "Critic after resentful critic complained that unnamed colleagues were shilling for teen shit.... Some people are so threatened by the state of the pop marketplace that any informed response to same is dismissed as a pseudointellectual betrayal just for accepting-- provisionally, mind you-- the marketplace's terms."

The arguments will be familiar to anyone who dipped a toe into Internet pop debate this decade. The weariness as well, which more than anything tells me the critical embrace of it isn't the big pop story of the decade. Such turns are always happening-- if anything, rock criticism's become less populist over the last decade, as the spiraling decline of album sales makes it tougher to frame successful records as public events and easier to make niche sensations seem like they matter. And as we'll see, there were definite limits to the types of pop that could win over wider audiences.

On a personal level, of course, the idea of a pro-pop revolution feels right because it validates the many hours I spent arguing about it on the net. Making niche events feel somehow important is something the Internet is horribly good at: it turns arguments fractal, lets your bunch of digital friends and foes feel like the world when it no way is. But the Internet also reinstated the single track as the standard unit of musical currency-- which was good news for genres like pop that thrived on singles.

If there was a turn to pop online, it didn't happen on a critical level so much as at a network level-- hard drive by hard drive, blog by blog. There was an awful lot of tactical squabbling about music-- individuals trying to convince each other that a record was worth your time. It's so easy to feel that all those arguments must be adding up to something wider, but looking back, what's interesting about them is how the tactics we used reflected pressures and shifts within the music itself.

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Often, the pleasure of pop is surrender: when a record overrides your reflexes or emotions for a few minutes, when you let it possess you. That feeling isn't easy to write about, let alone argue over. So the primary tactic of the new pop critic was to bypass that and twitch back the showbiz curtain to locate these records in a production system. What made the tracks important wasn't how they made you feel, but the innovative tricks creators used to get those effects. Intricate drum patterns, Bollywood samples, fake-harpsichord frills, or brutal minimalism-- anything with an angle got love. Throw in an acid-house bassline or some early-90s ravey keyboard stabs, and a track's future-pop cred would be immaculate.

There wasn't always much room for the performer in all this praise-- instead more and more attention went to the production teams. In R&B, the likes of Rodney Jerkins and Shek'spere had won solid late-90s reps as inventive console men: They'd enjoyed a degree of pop crossover, with the Spice Girls roping Jerkins in for their flop then-final record. But the fuss around Timbaland and the Neptunes was on an absolutely different level-- even if they'd never made records of their own, these men would be critical heroes of the 00s.

So when they started working with the breaking wave of new pop stars, it cemented the idea that pop music was in an exciting place right now. Britney Spears' early hits, like several Backstreet Boys tunes, were the work of Max Martin, and many who bothered noticing the name saw him as an identikit Europop cheesemonger-- end-of-'99 round-ups tend to make sniffy reference to his Ace of Base connection. By 2001, the big news story about Britney's third album was her choice of producers-- she'd be using the Neptunes on several tracks. Or they'd be using her.

Sideways collaborations-- reaching out across genres and audiences-- were the way these young rulers of pop tried to stay on top. Shifts in pop currents, though, make reputations in this area fascinatingly unstable. When Justin Timberlake and the Black Eyed Peas called out the CIA as terrorists on 2003's smash "Where Is the Love?", the combination seemed a whimsical surprise-- a new-minted solo star lending a hand to a mostly forgotten group. If they'd collaborated in 2000, though, it would have been a baffling sell-out by a worthy, boho rap troupe. And if they'd started working together in 2009 it would have been a backwards move for one of music's more enigmatic and respected stars, ill-advisedly teaming up with the world's biggest and goofiest pop group.

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It wouldn't have been a shock, though-- by now, very little would. Christina Aguilera announces plans to work with Le Tigre on her new record, and much of the comment isn't expressing astonishment or outrage but simply concern that the styles won't mesh well, or that Aguilera's choice of independent partners might be a little out of touch. The 00s have been a decade of collaboration. As the importance of a steady stream of fresh tracks grew-- to drive iTunes sales, lubricate the blogs, populate the MySpace-- so team-ups, remixes, and covers proliferated. Many existed in semi-official limbo, others-- like the forced collaborations of mash-up artists-- were unapproved, though also unmolested.

Any successful act or even song would now generate huge dataclouds of music and video way beyond the official catalogue. And for less successful artists, it became apparent to pop fans what a treacherous creature that "official catalogue" could be. In a shrinking industry, the pop almost-star's position is a treacherous one. You get the feeling many people at record labels don't particularly like commercial pop as music, and if your initial tracks failed to get radio play or a solid chart placing, your album might vanish unchampioned from the schedules. You'd either be dropped or in re-development limbo, and when a full-length did emerge it would often bear no relation to its original leaks or teasers.

Like the endless collaborations, the extended unofficial catalogue is something pop learned from hip-hop, and towards the end of the 00s this limbo effect became a particular hazard for R&B acts. The release this year of Ciara's Fantasy Ride, for instance, was a bittersweet one for the fans who'd followed the breadcrumb trail of leaks and promotional false-dawns. They ended up with a fine album which couldn't live up to the highlight CD-Rs they'd spent two or three years compiling.

A huge amount of music designed for mass popularity simply never saw the light of day, which led to a slightly feverish, cratedigging mentality among bloggers who enjoyed it. Combine the punishing schedule of an MP3 blog on the make with the fact that pop's sound enjoyed global appeal where its local stars didn't, and pop sites in mid-decade became treasure-houses of gaudy obscurity. Unreleased demos by the fifth member in a minor girlgroup would rub ID3 tags with B-Sides from "Australian Idol" losers, all presented with rote enthusiasm.

Some of this stuff felt worth unearthing-- I spent a good part of 2003 wrongly convinced the world would soon bow the knee to Lene Nystrom's Play With Me, a saucy, sparky solo album from Aqua's lead vocalist. But mostly the emergent pop fandom reminded me of those old 80s indie-poppers-- small cults celebrating a version of pop in exile. Their unwavering belief was the same, too-- these songs would be hits if only people could just get to hear them (or, in a slight twist, if a bigger name would just cover them).