I’m (more slowly than I’d want) working my way through Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, with my progress slowed down by a tendency to add songs mentioned to playlists and really try to sit with some of the threads and sounds he’s writing about. (I have a newfound appreciation of Wanda Jackson as a result, if nothing else.)
I’m still stuck on a line from the very start of the book, however, when Stanley makes a stab at defining what makes a pop song — or pop anything, for that matter: “Pop needs an audience that doesn’t know the artist personally,” he argues. “It needs to be transferable.” I read that, and I thought, that’s it.
I love pop, as a concept; I don’t know if that’s something that comes from being British — I always think of “pop” as a concept that’s far more popular for British people than Americans, for some reason — or because I grew up in the 1990s with Britpop and Trip-Hop being all the rage, or even because I went to art school and had that background to deal with. Whatever the reason, I’ve always enjoyed the idea of art created for the masses and the potential it has to shape people’s opinions and change people’s minds; I’ve always been curious about things that shouldn’t have gone mainstream but did, and also things that were purpose-built to sell out and utterly failed as a result. One of the finest joys of pop culture as a whole is the surprise of it all: when the audience en masse doesn’t do what’s expected and what happens afterwards.
Throughout all of this, though, I’ve found myself caught up in how to define “pop” to people who ask for a definition of what, to me, has traditionally been indefinable; “pop” has been something I’ve felt or instinctively understood on a level I struggled to explain. Stanley’s definition comes the closest to something that works for me, even if I think he’s more broad in his thinking than I might be. (I’m a snob in certain ways, I admit.)
It nonetheless touches on the idea that many things can be pop that aren’t immediately obvious; visual artwork or graphic design, for one. Graffiti, for another. Anything that’s a message in a bottle to a world where someone wants to reach a stranger and see what happens.
We’re all pop, deep down, perhaps.