OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

Unless you somehow go out of yr way to studiously avoid singers you've never heard of xpost

You can hear Lady Gaga on the radio in the supermarket and not go "Oh, is this Lady Gaga?"

I don't know, I was born in 1981, the first time I was aware of FM was "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" as early 90s Democrat boomer campaign pop.

Come on, I was born in 1979 and I've been hearing Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks on classic rock and AOR radio my whole life. "Rooms on Fire" was #1 on the US Mainstream Rock chart in 1989.

Otherwise I can't imagine any scenario where you're FORCED to reckon with pop music in 2014

xxxxxpost

all the grocery stores i go to dont play top 40, neither does the gym i used to go to

for one, so many ppl i know just plug their iphone right into the aux jack of their car stereo and avoid radio altogether...i don't think MTV proper really plays many videos anymore (of course ppl always said that but i think it's true now?)....radio listenership and rating in FM are downward trending...more people that aren't listening to their

phone in the car are listening to sports talk, talk radio in general is the moneymaker now....

i think that in general listening to top 40 radio was more prevalent that it was now....also simply the factors of what pre-recorded music is available to buy. i lived in a town where all i could buy was the tapes and CDs at Wal-Mart (i was enough of a dork to drive an hour to musicland but most weren't), so generally that was more top 40 stuff...now the same kid could go on Spotify and have literally limitless choices

i don't know how accurate this is, but my perception is that some of the notable vanguard trends in musical taste/fashion of the past decade+, like noise, or field recording, or wandelweiser-style 'quiet' minimalism, or minimal techno, or extreme metal, are attractive partly because they look as if they could thwart the wrong kind of uptake into the public/pop/capitalist empire realm. (which makes pitchfork's uptick in metal coverage, or the phenomenon of black metal release features on npr, seem symptomatic.)

― j., Wednesday, April 16, 2014 11:48 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

again this may be somewhat true but there's also the factor of it's easy to find things now, whereas in the late 80s or early 90s learning about black metal would have taken some serious tape trading or mail ordering....now if a kid is curious about noise or black metal or minimal techno, he can just listen to it, so it stands to reason that once obscure subgenres would grow in popularity

there is that. i was thinking that these are ones that would have a hard time ever becoming pop. (minimal techno sure, but what would it mean? the music leaves it a blank.) and part of the attraction to a kind of music can have something to do with social life. unless you think that the only reason genres become popular at all is their intrinsic soundyness.

guys... the beatles

just... the beatles

I somehow went a year without ever having heard Gotye and then heard it immediately upon stepping foot in a Subway

Wasn't there a long time where Sgt. Pepper was seen as too soft, to pop to take seriously?

20 years ago today iirc

you know if you leave the gotye cheese off your Subway, that's saves like 30 decibels

(also yeah lol The Monkees but the Sex Pistols were covering them less than a decade after they were A Thing, and not particularly ironically like with e.g. "My Way.")

(and no I don't want to go into the Pistols being as manufactured as the Monkees were)

I somehow went a year without ever having heard Gotye and then heard it immediately upon stepping foot in a Subway

― flamboyant goon tie included,

haha yes

I haven't seen Whiney in years so I need to step foot in a Subway.

xp
How did you know it was Gotye?

Or was that the first time you'd heard the song at all?

Funny that if you have no reference for the artist you could hear it repeatedly and still somehow tune it out.

presumably if you hear in passing that there's a popular song called "Somebody That I Used To Know" and then walk into a fast food chain and hear a guy singing "NOW YOU'RE JUST SOMEBODY THAT I USED TO KNOW" you can do the math

there was a gotye-alike on the radio a while ago, some kind of duet? with two dudes? i think? i never got to shazam the thing. i think 'on the radio' was a phrase in the refrain? my searching has surprisingly been fruitless. help me out here. asking for a friend.

Simon and Garfunkel?

gotye's albums are enjoyable listens imo, just the second one is overplayed is all

there was this really bad official press copy that showed up everywhere that said "Gotye (pronounced "go-ti-yay" or "Gauthier") is the alias of Australian electronic pop trickster Wally de Backer." That pops into my head and irritates me every time someone mentions Gotye.

I call him Goi-tah

it's the "trickster" part that gets me the most. I see his stupid face and I think "electronic pop trickster." What the fuck is that supposed to mean?

makes him sound like he's popping out of corners wherever you go wearing a goofy hat and making elaborate hand shapes like Mystery or Criss Angel or Jamiroquai

and saying "got ye!"

http://evil-inc.com/images/blogart/trickster.jpg

and saying "got ye!"
― christmas candy bar (al leong)

^^^^^^^^^^^^

really? I assumed that was what his name was supposed to be a play on.

wikisez: The name "Gotye" is a pronunciation respelling of "Gauthier", the French cognate of Gotye's given Flemish name "Wouter".

lol

xp considering how much I'd read about it I think I actually guessed based on the Peter Gabriel-y production before it got to the chorus. True story though, Aug 2012, and def thought of Whiney while munching

def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching
def thought of Whiney while munching

yeah I zeroed in on that as well

Whiney was at a munch?

Yeah he was looking for a sub obv

is that Steve Rude in Skot's post?

gotye's albums are enjoyable listens imo, just the second one is overplayed is all

third one is the one with the international hit on it (first one is mostly sampladelic bricolage, second one is too but has some more song-y songs like Hearts A Mess)

To me, it feels like pop music is inescapable to more or less the same extent that it always has been in my lifetime: you hear it in grocery stores, in malls, at the gym, at the office, at fast food places; songs turn up in movies and TV shows; pop stars are on the covers of magazines at the checkout stand; friends and co-workers talk about it.

Grocery stores don't play pop music. Malls don't play pop music. The gym plays fairly terrible mersh dance usually, or silence, but I listen to podcasts or DJ mixes. The office doesn't play pop music. From walking past fast food places I don't think they play pop music? There's a bubble tea shop near work that does have a music video channel playing on TV though, I discovered a terrible will./Britney/Wayne collab there a month or so ago. If songs turn up in movies and TV shows presumably they're months or years past their moment of currency? Pop stars aren't on the cover of magazines at the checkout, it's soap stars and Kardashians and royals. Friends who write on Singles Jukebox sometimes talk about pop music at the pub, but not all that much. Co-workers don't, there's one who talks about pub rock bands from the '80s though.

Yep, I don't hear much pop music in my day-to-day life. I've pretty-much managed to avoid 'Happy' so far, maybe in a TV ident or something.

I'm still assuming that "Happy" is a Patrice Wilson cover.

Yes, i still haven't heard Happy and actively had to seek out Blurred Lines last year, weeks after it charted. It's not like i live in a cave. The pop i listen to is the pop i choose to listen to.

This wouldn't hold for anyone who had to listen to the radio at work, though.

Yeah I work on the phones, so no music allowed in the office. I guess that's a blessing really, much as I'd love to have a job where I got to listen to tunes all day.

Man, "Happy" and "Blurred Lines" are/were both pretty near inescapable. And if you tried, someone would slowly drive by your house blasting it, like an ice cream truck playing "Turkey in the Straw." You could hear it coming blocks away.

It's easy to avoid pop music in 2014 if you want to avoid it. There's people here who don't listen to the radio.

I'm more familiar with 'Happy' because arseholes in my office go round singing it and it makes me want to strangle them.

They play "Happy" on that Diddy-in-the-desert commercial that I see all the time on Hulu

which to me makes it inescapable

Would that "I don't even listen to pop music" were greeted with the same cultural suspicion as "I don't even own a TV" ...

(I can't even be accused of dropping a stink bomb in this thread with that, considering this thread is consistently pretty much nothing but one long stink-bomb-dropping)

I think it's more like "I don't hear popular music in my day-to-day life unless I seek it out".

(I do hear popular music all the time - my daughter insists on listening to Capital FM in the car so I'm always up on whatever the latest Jason Derulo is)

which to me makes it inescapable
--I got the glares, the mutterings, the snarls (President Keyes)

If only there was some way to mute or fast-forward commercials oh well