(2024-12-15) Valenti Herb Sundays 137 1010benja season 8 Finale

Sam Valenti IV: Herb Sundays 137: 1010Benja [season 8 finale]. In a recent blog post which maybe I just dreamed, Hit Em style, or that was deleted, Simon Reynolds (Herb 32) quietly admitted he thought he had coined the term poptimism, a fact I don’t intend to explore more, but wouldn’t be surprised by given his penchant for sublime tagging. Twenty years on from its creation, and ten from its mainstream acceptance, the term and the concept still makes waves, a concept then deemed a necessary move for journalism both to reconnect Pop to the discourse, and in service of Pop’s inherent contemporary quality. (pop culture) (roughly everything in this piece makes me barf)

But Pop isn’t just about the idea of songcraft or accessibility, it also is a proxy for the stakes of winning and losing.

In my internet circles, and probably yours, apart from Kendrick Lamar, Charli XCX is the “winner” of 2024, both critically and commercially, though she wasn’t the biggest seller of the year by a long shot

In professional wrestling parlance, the actual winner of the year financially across the board was the “face” (a good, virtuous person) Taylor Swift. Charli’s campaign as an insurgent but relatable villain or “heel” (Kendrick as David to Drake’s Goliath was similar) was the better story for media, with Charli presenting herself as someone too real or messy for the mainstream, though being on a major label for a clean decade

The truth is that the house always tends to win in Pop, especially since disruption is usually coming from inside.

It helps if the story is as appealing as Charli delivering a marketing powerpoint to outsmart her corporate bosses in an origin story that reads like a direct-to-video teen Disney plot: “in the spring of 2023, she presented her team with what has been described as the “Brat Manifesto,” a mood board and binder full of PDFs and notes for “Brat,” a full year before the album was released. Therein lay the master plan for the endless Brat Summer.”

In her Subway Takes appearance this year, Charli utters the kind of invincible truth that sent people like me into hysterics. Charli, keenly declares “music is not important” as shorthand for the breadth of her omnivorous aesthetic interests. For Charli and her Pop brethren, music is only part of the story, elemental to a brand package of micro gestures and sub-narratives, both lyrical and implied. I say this without derision, as they are correct in this assertion, the fans have demanded it. Indeed music is a relatively inexpensive brand asset to drop, build a world around (worldbuilding), pair a color or look to, indeed the ideal delivery vessel.

Charli cooly namechecks the Velvet Underground/Lou Reed as an apex of pop/non-pop, another great move, not a million years from the Lady Gaga and Jeff Koons collab for Artpop (2013), or Kanye and Murakami/Kaws, where Contemporary Art has been appropriated by Pop music, but clearly maintains the more valuable association.

How I perceived Charli’s comment, after my late Gen-X knee-jerk annoyance subsided, is not that music doesn’t matter, but that music simply isn’t enough on its own to penetrate mass culture, simply unable to pummel the world with alone. To do that, you need a mass media-backed narrative (“brat” as buzzword), celebrity association (Charli’s MCU level amalgamation of other industries, rolling up Chloë Sevigny, Rachel Sennott, Julia Fox, etc.), and a battery of well-made “assets” (to use music industry speak) with which to roll it all out. In short, a loot drop that almost no independent artist can wield. The game is not a fair fight, unsurprisingly.

the glamour of “indie” has moved from music to film/TV, with A24 wielding the kind of mass cultural reverence a legendary label like Sub Pop would have 30 years ago (and still warrants), and no independent music label or band carries a mainstream awareness even close, much like the dominance of Rockstar Games a decade back or cursed Miramax in the ‘90s. The culture game has simply moved to a different arena, music is an aspect of its offerings. Now a full roll-up of all of these touch points is necessary to hit mass adoption.

After the chaos of 2016 onwards, our dopamine needs and delivery receptors demand literal sex (hawk) and violence (luigi) to raise the needle to true pop levels, maybe similar to a post-Vietnam War ‘70s. Sincerity alone can’t deliver the payload necessary for mimesis and virality. Maybe this is ok, and maybe it’s time to reclaim music as something sacred and niche, something closer to jazz potentially. Wishful thinking.

But as we stare down perhaps the most damaging American administration to climate change, civil liberties, wealth inequality, public health, and more, its tempting to want to get back to the tribal campfire, to find some communal feeling that a Charli has provided us this year.

There’s a lot of articles abound blaming the culture system for its failure to excite. Writers like Kyle Chayka bemoan algorithms as the flattening of things, or a homogenization of culture, and there’s also the idea that culture has stalled wholesale. What I think critics are romantic for is the memory of a simpler time for consumers where music had ample cultural space and loads of marketing surface area (videos, glossy music mags, mindshare) via all media, a consensus

As T. M. Brown wrote for The Atlantic, calling out this false flag: Part of the fixation on cultural algorithms is a product of the insecure position in which cultural gatekeepers find themselves. Traditionally, critics have played the dual role of doorman and amplifier

with all the hand-wringing about the algo as a substandard method of discovery, I’d counter that we never should have expected it to be our cultural lodestar, because it seeks heat, not beauty

As music fans search for new stars, it may be more satisfying to eschew the campfire/water cooler, and find some local acts they can support. The blame is often placed not only on the DSPs but on artists themselves, chastised for posting too much music. The truth is that this number will only increase, with AI, UGC remixing, with everything else. Shaming it won’t fix the hole in our hearts for a monoculture of yore.

theres an inherent guilt attached to not keeping up, but we can accept that there’s no shared ground worth keeping up with most of the time.

No one’s coming to save your taste. Start a new account, delete your profile, assume a new identity. Only then can you be born anew.