Photo: Courtesy of Asylum Records UK.Pop music gets a bad rap because it's too often seen as being easy and unintelligent; it's formulaic and pop stars are often fed songs rather than writing their own. And, sure, many of them do, but that doesn't mean it's dumb.
Hell, often times the simplest thing is the hardest thing to create. Charli XCX, pop's forthcoming force of nature, knows this to be true and sounds off in a new interview with Cosmopolitan.
"I think it's all genuinely clever, good music," she says, responding to a question of whether she sees pop music as a guilty pleasure. "When I say that about Britney Spears, some people are like, 'What? Are you serious?' Have you heard her albums? They're so intelligent. The way her songs are crafted is really amazing. I think that music is really interesting and clever."
Charli has a point here. If sarcasm is, as Oscar Wilde said, the lowest form of wit but the highest form of intelligence, so too must be pop. It takes a lot to craft an earworm, after all. The most successful example of this, she says, is Rihanna's "We Found Love"— a track with "amazing poetry" and a beat that "goes off."
If it's something you "can sing along to," it's pop. Perhaps that can be unpacked further to say pop is something you can sing along to for days — no, years — on end. But, can that thought transfer to other forms of media, like the movies? Is Mean Girls a carb pop? By Charli's philosophy, it sure is. Grool. (Cosmopolitan)