(From andrewtsks)
Time for a huge digression! This was also always one of the things that bugged me about the way people treated pop music. The idea being that people liked stuff in the Top 40 simply because they hadn’t been exposed to the alternative.
I can’t speak for the genres you’re talking about, but one of the reasons it’s a powerful idea for pop music is that, well, it’s true. For a lot of people. They listened to pop first, then they discovered semi-pop (of whatever subcultural stripe) and they never looked back.
Except another group discovered semi-pop and basically ignored it, and another group discovered it and kept on listening to the Top 40 too, and yet another group DID look back, and so on. But the existence of those groups doesn’t stop the basic idea from being powerful: it creates something to talk about, an initiation story, and a story of making a trade-up.
It sounds like the music you’re talking about is dismissed as “adolescent” rather than “kids stuff”, and as you say is more class-bound, but the idea is similar: that there’s an evolutionary ladder in music listening and you’re a rung or two down. (My parents believed in the ladder too but for them ‘classical’ was at the top, not Animal Collective. And in the 90s I knew a few people who’d put ‘jazz’ up there.)
Anyway, this all relates to the Best Coast conversation earlier today, and it’s why I think the relationship - such as it is - between Best Coast and teenpop is something of a red herring (even though I raised it in the first place!).
Basically, you can answer the question “Does Best Coast do similar stuff to Taylor Swift but in a different idiom?” with a “Yes”, and you can answer the question “Is Taylor Swift better at it?” with a “Yes” too, and you would still have only a slim chance of convincing a Best Coast fan to listen to Taylor Swift on that basis. Not just because they don’t SOUND much like one another but because socially it’s difficult to frame it as a trade-up (not impossible though). You can frame Best Coast as a social trade-up from Taylor Swift a lot easier, though. Even if you think it’s worse music. (There’s nothing to say your music taste has to improve as you age - I was into MUCH worse things age 15 or 17 than I was at 12 or 22).
