There is no way to avoid pop music. It's your ringtone. It's on your iPod when you walk to class. It pumps into your bathroom while you shower. It plays constantly at Waddicks, Sbarro and in your earbuds while you study. It has become ubiquitous within the undergraduate lifestyle.
But pop songs, specifically those songs that are undeniably "popular" regardless of musical merit or your opinion, have a very detailed role within our collegiate society. Their purpose, far and wide, is to create a common touchstone of community that can be recognized and shared within any context, and the only way that happens is if the lyrics are good enough to be remembered.
Yesterday at my breakfast and coffee meeting with chums at Waddicks, one of my friends expressed deep consternation about the fact that Katy Perry's song "Last Friday Night" is not as popular as, say, "Firework." She was upset because, in her opinion, the lyrics of "Last Friday Night" are far more interesting.
"There's a stranger in my bed/There's a pounding my head/Glitter all over the room/Pink flamingos in the pool/I smell like a minibar/DJ's passed out in the yard" are just a smattering of the lyrics my friend so passionately defended as she read them in declamatory fashion from her Blackberry.
My other friend decided to step up to defend a song he felt was far superior, "Like a G6" by … do we even care? "Poppin bottles in the ice, like a blizzard/When we drink we do it right gettin slizzard/Sippin' sizzurp in my ride, like Three 6/Now I'm feelin' so fly like a G6."
His argument seemed to center on the fact that "G6" remains focused on a singular topic, whereas "Last Friday Night" is far too busy, lyrically.
I sat in not-so-silent awe, watching two of my friends share stalwart opinions as they debated the poetic merit of Perry vs. Far East Movement. The music major in me had passed incredulity and ended somewhere around mild mental engagement. This is pop music, I was thinking. Who on earth cares about the lyrics of pop music, as long as you can sing along?
This brings me to the tantrum of the day, specifically the purpose of pop music and its necessary position within our 18- to 22-year-old society. A pop song provides an isolated event that, at any given moment, can surround us with memory and community. We hear a song and think of where we first heard it, when we memorized the lyrics to it and who we were with when we were dancing to it last weekend. It causes immediate recall and emotional association, which in most cases brings up a positive correlation.
The second attribute of this banal beast is that popular music can play alongside our lives in literal soundtrack fashion. Apart from the moments we are in class, we can surround ourselves with music every second we are not asleep. When those waking moments happen in the public sphere, we are going to hear pop music and develop a relationship with it whether we want to or not.
So how does a pop song succeed in worming its way into our ears 24/7? I think all a pop song needs is a good musical hook and a dance beat. Au contraire, mes amis. As I found out, if you can't sing along to it — and enjoy singing along to it — it's going to fail.
I come from a camp that considers pop songs to contain the mindless dribble of half-annunciated hipster-pop slang. But apparently, I'm wrong. People listen to lyrics and care about them, no matter how bad they sound during a dry-run recitation. As displayed by the conversation I witnessed yesterday, lyrics matter.
The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.
Contact Stephanie DePrez at sdeprez@nd.edu
