Ragstock, my local Hipsters R Us, seems to have pretty stringent hiring criteria. Aside from the obligatory piercings and tats, skin tight attire, indoor sunglasses and the occasional feather boa, all personnel seem to be required to have an aloof personality, the too-cool-for-you of the high school in-crowd. Since friendly customer service is so mainstream, here you get the refreshing feeling that you're wasting the time of a hipster near you.
Or maybe it's me. Perhaps the self-indulgent, self-righteous self-image I have as a sort of pre-beard Abbie Hoffman, trusted by neither side, shows in public. Or, perhaps I'm given the cold shoulder because, as Phillip Seymour Hoffman's character so bluntly put it in Almost Famous, speaking directly to Patrick Fugit and myself, "Hey, I met you. You are not cool."
Seriously, that line always stuck out for me. Like it was written for me.
So, I'm in Ragstock for a good half hour, pawing through plaid which I think might be in right now, and the whole time Brittney Spears is piping in over the speakers. Now, I hate Brittney Spears as any good little h-word should, but I'm not quite content to hate her just because it's in among my subculture to hate her. (And obviously, there are people who are a lot better at the hipster game than I am who are happy to play her music publicly... maybe it's meant to be ironic, which seems to still be in style). I need to qualify in pseudoscientific terms why I hate the Spears, the Gaga, the majority of Top 40 drivel.
I haven't been able to do that to my own satisfaction. But:
Even others who hate a lot of pop music will concede that, "Hey, it's catchy." I can't actually define what "catchy" is, but I'm familiar enough with the phenomenon. And meditating on that, I didn't exactly come up with a formula for why so much pop music is bad, why so much lesser known indie music is better, but I hit upon a phenomenon that some of my favorite bands have in common, and that very few pop stars can claim.
Most pop songs, when they get to a catchy riff or chorus, plaster the song with that bit as much as possible and fill in the rest of the song with boring downtime. It's like the obligatory "plot" of a porn film while you're waiting to see the dick go in. Strip "Poker Face" of its chorus and what you have left is empty filler. Auditory sawdust. Even the bit at the end that sends teenage girls bouncing (the po-po-po-po-po-poker face) is really just riding on the momentum of having had the chorus shoved in the listener's ear repeatedly.
Compare that with a song by one of my new favorite groups, a relatively unknown and (in my opinion -of course, this is a fucking blog) severely underappreciated band. There is no chorus that one could even strip away, and if you can identify the catchiest bit of the song and take it out, there's still plenty of original, interesting material to grab your aural fancy.
Now, granted, I'm comparing two completely different musical styles. I'm also aware that few people listen as closely to and dissect their musical collections. But I thought this was worth note. Radical Face, along with several other bands (The National, The Decemberists, Iron & Wine to name a few) tend to, as often as not, stray away from the chorus-verse format and to surprise us, musically and lyrically, with subtle key changes or vocal antics that show some talent and forethought rather than a cheap formula built on a prefabricated "catchy" nothing.
So maybe I didn't prove a damn thing. But I feel better. Don't you?
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