MTVs, VMAs, GLEEs, and pop culture that exists mostly for you to be clever about it
I get the feeling people will read this quick thing I wrote about the VMAs as me being cranky or old or anti-pop, but it’s not meant that way. I really like mainstream pop. Enough so that I like it to stay fairly distinct from Glee, when possible. You know, pop where music and image come together to create new aesthetics, instead of doing a lot of hairbrush-and-mirror dress-up with old ones.
I never watched any of series 1 of Glee, and only watched distractedly a few series 2 episodes, because my wife enjoys it. (Supposedly series 2 is much worse). Anyway what really struck me about it isn’t that it’s dressing up old music, but something a bit more subversive and/or horrible - it’s riffing on, dramatising, commodifying the idealised response to pop music: every episode shows kids using songs as superpowers at their moment of maximum emotional need, which is TOTALLY what being an adolescent Smiths (or whatever) fan felt like. (Minus, in general, the happy endings. But one kept trying.)
