“Very popular things are inherently safe and uninteresting” is a very funny argument to make to someone who has written books about Doctor Who, The Beatles and The Monkees
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i think even when they are safe they aren't necessarily uninteresting cos they tell us something about what connects with masses of people. so many of these arguments lack a basic curiosity about the world they live in, which reflects quite badly on them i would suggest!
I feel like, if and when Popular reaches the Suffolk bunny warren, this will be an important angle to explore there - just how *did* Sheeran get that big, chart-rule-change-inducing big?
sheeran is someone where i quite often hear him on the radio and think "oh that's ok" but it makes no further impression on me and i think that's a core thing about going that big, he's really good at being perfectly pleasant (a trojan horse for truly revolutionary work like galway girl)
this is it, i heard shivers today, which i have absolutely heard a number of times before and at first i was still "oh what's that, don't know this but it's ok, i have no need to hear this again", the only one i ever remember properly is bad habits
Yeah exactly - and I think what’s interesting about Taylor is pretty easy to pick up on if hard to articulate sometimes - but it’s funny that even the absolute mildest of poptimist arguments (it’s a good idea to know about what’s very popular!) still gets small but vocal pushback
Someone should write a positive Oasis as poptimisim book. The 33 1/4 is part way there but someone needs to talk about how their latter number one singles and albums where you’ve really got to do the hard yards.
I'd love to read something that starts after Be Here Now, when they had a new line-up, new logo, new label, multiple credited songwriters and co-lead singers (rather than Noel just taking one song per album).
Like Coldplay doing the Eno album, they'd had a v. hyped, huge selling album that people quickly took to charity shops & then did some troubleshooting to update themselves. What's cool? The Beta Band. Who makes hits? Mark Stent. Everyone's doing gospel, let's do that.
Post-1997, they're often talked about as if they existed in isolation, but Standing on the Shoulder of Giants shows at least an awareness of what other people were doing at the time.
I ended up feeling that the later Oasis No 1s aren’t any more or less explicable than the later Westlife No 1s - you’ve got an audience that want you to do the kind of thing you do, so you do it
With declining popularity there’s a lot of inertia - when I was working in web audience metrics Yahoo were still always in the top 10 sites visited and their traffic was clearly in a long, slow, unstoppable decline. They were in the top 10 purely because they used to be in the Top 1
Fair enough - a reasonable perspective - but it still feels a bit like playing them on easy mode. The hard core poptimist explaining how Heathen Chemistry fits the paradigm is probably the equivalent of the permadeath modes you get on some modern video games.
I would like to read a stout fannish defence of late Oasis (some of the popular commenters come close!) but imo a poptimist approach to them is simply one that takes them seriously as a mass cultural phenom and those have never been in short supply! (Coldplay OTOH…)
There’s nothing wrong with things being safe or unchallenging, and most things are somewhat interesting. I guess ultimately there’s still people who think if it’s not interesting to them, then it’s not interesting and of no value.
I loved finding out that while the Monkees had all been musicians before being thrown together, none of them were for the instruments they played in the band.
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