It used to be the only way to advertise to the world that you were a person of refined taste, and therefore a suitable mating partner for other members of your highly-specific demographic with similar taste, was to alert people that you didn’t watch TV. Then, whoops, TV got too good for anyone to buy that lie anymore, and that whole thing sort of got pulled out from under our feet. Fortunately, pop music is still around for those of us jockeying for positioning in the crowded personal brand marketplace to exhibit disdain.
The inherent problem, as it has always been, is that to most effectively build a case against a given year’s pop music, you sort of have to, you know, listen to a lot of pop music in order to sell the conceit. That inevitably leads to an unintended earworm-irony conundrum — meaning, listen to a pop song enough times in order to figure out why you don’t like it, and before long, you actually sincerely like it. As much as you might want to profess otherwise, these things are just too immaculately engineered for anyone but the most persistent of contrarians to rail against in any meaningful way. Miley Cyrus? I’m sorry, but “Wrecking Ball” is inarguably awesome. You didn’t like “Get Lucky” or “Blurred Lines”? Suuuuure you didn’t, Professor.
But. But! There’s a workaround now, thanks to DJ Earworm, a mashup producer who’s just released his cheat sheet for the year in pop music as he did last year. It brings all of the top 25 songs from Billboard’s Hot 100 together into one horrifying Frankstein-like monstrosity that obviates the need to pay attention to pop the entire year. Your brand is saved!
Now all you have to do is spend five minutes, 32 seconds listening to Katy Perry layered over Rihanna over Avicii over OneRepublic, and everything you need to know to blow people’s minds with an anti-pop post is over with in one shot. Just try not to point out the obvious criticism for how seamlessly most of these songs blend together as some sort of argument against the interchangeability of modern pop, because that one has already been made a thousand times by now.
