Two Bad Ways of Liking Pop Music

Numero Uno: The easy academic way. The interest in pop music needs to contextualized by making your interest and listening pleasure part of a project of aesthetical investigation: What makes a pop song “listenable”? What is the semantics of “catchy”? What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a track to be “pop”? I realize these are the kinds of questions only an analytically trained philosopher would ask; so we could also, as an alternative, think about framing questions like: What values does pop music seek to inculcate in us? Where did they come from? What is its history? Is pop music just ideology? What power relations does pop music preserve and enable?

Numero Dos: The plebeian, quasi-religious way: Describe your interest and pleasure in pop music as a “guilty pleasure”; this instantaneously grants oneself the virtue of modesty and self-effacement, acknowledges the “sin” involved in listening to pop music (thus rendering oneself distant from the ranks of the unrepetant). So, yes, I have partaken of the pop music temptation, but my heart is in the right place, because I know well enough to feel guilt when I listen to it. Of course, there is little talk of penance (perhaps by listening to all of Chopin’s Nocturnes), so it is unclear how much guilt the guilty really are feeling. The “confession” of this listening pleasure is supposed to indicate the presence of a guilt that cannot be repressed any longer; but I’m inclined to think that the reason the offender confesses is that the pleasure cannot be.