Once You Pop You Can't Stop

Pop music: Currently popular music, esp the type characterised by a strong rhythmic element and the use of electrical amplification , according to the Chamber s dictionary. And probably performed by an 18 year old black, female, Irish millionaire!

Boyzone, B*Witched, The Corrs, Samantha Mumba, Westlife, Ronan Keating, Stephen Gately, Mikey Graham, Chit-Chat, In Focus, Carly Hennessy, My Town, Re-Mix, Reel and, uh, Kerri-Ann; that s what most of us think of now when we hear the phrase pop music. Granted, The Corrs and Samantha Mumba excepted, a lot of what is being produced may not have great artistic merit, but there s no denying that Ireland has conquered the planet in terms of the success of its pop outfits in the last year. At the time of writing the aforementioned Ms Mumba is poised to top the US singles chart with Gotta Tell Ya , and the superior Body II Body is expected to emulate her debut s success, while Westlife have broken all previous records with a seemingly unending string of number one hits, and a top-selling album in Coast To Coast. The Corrs have already sold five million copies of In Blue, gone No. 1 all over the world, and seem poised finally for the major breakthrough in the US that ll accelerate them right to the top of the pop tree. Clearly people are buying this stuff in droves.
The reason for this revolution in Irish pop is manifold. On the one hand, the business acumen of Louis Walsh and assorted wannabes has re-invented the manager as Svengali, and provided record companies with a pre-packaged, saleable, quality product that the public is clearly only too eager to devour. Which brings us to point two. The average pop record buyer, according to Q magazine earlier this year, is between 8 and 15 years old. It s reasonable to suppose that the average 8 year old probably doesn t have the critical faculties to appreciate exactly how mind-numbingly awful a band like S Club 7 actually are, but pop outfits of that ilk are about much more, or indeed less, than their musical output.
With manufactured pop acts, image is everything. Teenage fans of such sugar-pop collectives are as concerned about the look, the dance, the clothes and the favourite colour of their preferred artists as they are about the music. In fairness, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Anything that encourages people to listen to music of any kind is to be commended, and to pre-suppose that the teenagers who are growing up with this music will not in time graduate to a musical form which more reflects their life experiences and emotions is to miss the point of the transient appeal of teen pop.
The third key reason why Ireland is streets ahead of the competition in pop circles is down, simply, to old-fashioned hard work on the parts of the acts themselves. While some rock and alternative acts are frequently too busy, too lazy or simply too indifferent to see promotional work as necessary to their career, pop outfits generally undertake a gruelling press and PR schedule that, in the case of Samantha Mumba, has meant a non-stop three-month promotional tour of the US, during which she s been appearing on literally hundreds of radio and television shows. And it s paid off.
She s Irish and she s black, she s female and she s a teenager, she s talented and intelligent. All of that is important. But, crucially, she also knows how to work it.
Coupled with this attitude and just as important to her success are the production values on her Gotta Tell You album, recorded in Sweden and produced by Anders Bagge. Quite simply, US producers can t (yet) master this level of pop-polish. In the words of a forgotten pop phenomena, if you want to do it do it right .
On a similar theme, B*Witched, currently denying a rumoured rift with their record company, were recently seen to be hawking their, uh, wares, in lad s glossy FHM. It s a dirty job, but somebody wants to do it
To limit pop music to the (largely) manufactured acts listed above is to misunderstand the scope of the genre. The Corrs, Naimee Coleman, Dara, The Walls and Picture House are all organically home-grown pop outfits, and while the latter act might see themselves as wild-style rock n rollers and with no little justification, believe me supporting Mel C and The Corrs in Europe is hardly Lollapolooza. And why should it be? The Beatles displayed many of the attributes of a pop boy-band up till the release of Revolver.
If Picture House offer a kind of quality pop that crosses over into rock a la Crowded House, then the undoubted Irish kingpins in this respect are The Corrs. Too finely-honed and pop conscious in their music ever to be dismissed by the cognoscenti, with In Blue for the first time they have won widespread critical praise from hotpress to Rolling Stone for an album that combines emotional depth with the kind of crafted mature pop for which pop-icons Abba were particularly noted.
So pop music, even in its modern sense, can deliver much more than mere pastiche. But even where that is the milieu, is it all bad?
While some music writers bemoan the mere existence of Westlife et al, to lend these acts any kind of enduring significance is to miss the point. If such writers are right, then my generation s exposure to the Bay City Rollers (God help us) should have forever warped us to the point where our musical development would have been immediately halted. Then again, I think Ronan Keating s When You Say Nothing At All is a damn fine tune
It s been a poptastic year, kids, but don t forget to brush your teeth.