I will admit to you early on, dear reader, that I’m not too hot on pop music. I really don’t have a good excuse other than not liking the beat, auto-tune, or the look of the artist.
Of course, better critics would probably see this type of dislike as a condemnation of the vapid, or, in layman’s terms, me not wanting music to be shallow and stupid. But that would be a wrong assumption, since stupid music has an incredible place in pop culture.
You probably heard the new single from Mike Posner called “Cooler Than Me.” If the name doesn’t ring a bell, you’re hardly the first to notice. Posner’s not even remotely interesting as a pop entity, but his song is the most interesting piece of pop since Rehab’s “Bartender Song (Sittin’ At A Bar).”
It glorifies what could be described as the “primal class,” or those whose efforts seem calculated not on smarts but on actions. Posner opts to describe a woman’s makeup and appearance as a put down, the worst way possible to address a woman, but he hypocritically tries to adopt the same style (as noted by the video clip in which Posner wears a ridiculous black leather jacket and even blacker sunglasses indoors for no purpose other than coolness).
Posner is a bit of a misogynist. Actually, he’s a lot of a misogynist. He dissects the looks of his target as if he knows her. He is also revealing vulnerability in the way that men do things. And there is a sense of learning here. We learn more about men in the song than we learn in admittedly better music.
I love the baritone bristle of popular independent acts like The National, but I learn only in pieces what the male psyche is like, and then it’s broken into more macabre segments about zombies eating brains.
Rehab’s song, other than being a glorious chant-along, was really all about the idiotic behavior of men costing those same men. The only response for these men is to praise what they did and drink away whatever remorse they had. Most men are perceived as emotionless, and I’m not here to dispel or prove this theory, but this is still the perception. Culture comments on perception all the time.
If indie kids really behaved like the records they heard, they would be flat out caricatures. Hell, goth kids really embodied the macabre of Bauhaus’ 1979 classic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” to the extent of pure caricature, placing Bauhaus at the same level as Rehab in creating caricature as embodiment, even if Bauhaus is a better band.
“Cooler Than Me” currently sits within the top ten of the best selling songs on iTunes and is one of the most played songs across the country. I do not know why this particular song inspired such a liking in people, and I probably never will. But I will admit that I can see a lot out of it and can understand why others would love this more than my Arcade Fire records. Because they relate, and I don’t mean to say that the general public is vapid, but they like their music that way sometimes. And that’s quite all right if you listen the right way.
