Notting Hill Diary

Suzi Quatro’s Can the Can, one of the greatest pop records ever made, if you happen to be about my or John Robb’s age

John Robb, whom Wifey and I recently had the immense pleasure of meeting, posted an article today on his blog postulating that Pop is Dead. I agree with him, but for completely different reasons.

Why is John wrong?
John theorises that great pop was based on the concept of the 7″ single and that as such the format peeked in the 70s with punk. According to him, pretty much for this reason (and the greater involvement of Big Business from the 80s onwards), pop music has been on the decline since the end of the golden decade of the 70s.

And I agree with him! Why? Because John and I are roughly the same age. The best music in the world, ever, was made whenever the listener was between the ages of around 10 to 17 or so, which is why John and I think that the 70s was the golden age of pop music.

I know people 10 years older than me who swear blind that no good songs were written beyond 1969. And wait, what’s this? Wifey is 10 years younger than me and guess what? She’s convinced that no decade before or since has produced pop music as fine as was created during the 80s.

Both of us felt very old a couple of years ago when we watched some up and coming band tell an interviewer that they were “brought up on Oasis”. Yep, to them, there’s never been a decade like the 90s as far as pop music is concerned.

The greatest period of pop music is completely relative to the age of the listener.

Why is John right?
And yet, yes, John is completely correct in his assertion that pop music has been dying since the 70s, but for a different reason to the one he states.

When I was growing up, half the point about listening to “our” music was that our parents didn’t like it. We are the last generation whose parents hated the music we blasted out of our bedrooms and we loved it all the more because of that. Nothing pleased us more than to hear “grown ups” telling us that “There’s no tune, and you can’t hear the words” when we subjected them to what to us was just “obviously good”.

Sometime around mid 80s our contemporaries became parents themselves and because we’d grown up on modern popular music our kids¹ could no longer shock us. I feel quite sorry for them I suppose, robbed as they are of their main raison d’être, but that’s the way it is. From the 50s to the mid 80s, being a teenager was about loving the music your parents hated and that’s what made pop music great.

¹Just for the record, Wifey and I don’t yet have kids, but we are actively working on it.