Їℕℙ ☺ℙ Ш ∃ ✞ℝÜ$† by DEVIN O’NEILL ḰḰ ∀✞Ẏ ℙ€ ℜℜẎ ON THE SPARK ḺẎḠѦḠѦÅÐ ON THE PROCESS ℳЇ¥ ℒℰ ℃ẎℜṲϟ ON THE PUBLIC ✝Ѧ¥ ℒѺℝ + ℬ∃Ẏϴℕ☾É ON BOUNDARIES ḰḰ Å¥ℕℰ Ш$ ∃✞ ON TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES Ѧℱ† ∃ℜ Ш ϴℜ Ð THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT When I was in middle school, I loved "Barbie Girl,” by Aqua. I didn't tell anybody. In the high-stakes game of teen social life in my small, conservative desert town, being a boy and liking "Barbie Girl" was a clear marker of social failure. I didn’t need to invite any more bullying. ​ ​ I was raised an evangelical Christian, very meat-and-potatoes, but there was always something about the exotic feel of candy-coated pop that enticed me. Pop felt like the big city. Everybody at school was listening to Nirvana and Metallica, all the boys anyway, but I kept gravitating toward tracks by the Backstreet Boys and La Bouche. I felt like pop stars lived in a world I wanted to explore, where the visual and musical markers were hallucinatory fantasies and the energy of each person was totally liberated. Barbie Girl made me feel more free than Smells Like Teen Spirit ever did; the latter was already a dated classic by the time I was in eighth grade, a relic marked as territory by elder record store statesmen. Pop seemed to reject credibility in favor of adventure. But pop back then was so soft, so commercial, so safe. I was becoming a teenager, and I wanted something dangerous. Then I discovered Nine Inch Nails. Their sound was a thick, funky, serrated roar. Trent Reznor's simple rhyming couplets were, to me, perfect. The symmetry. The power. Years later, I would be told repeatedly that they could never hold up against poetic accomplishments by people like Springsteen and Dylan, but I never really recovered from the masterful simplicity of: “(help me)— you broke apart my insides (help me)— I've got no soul to sell (help me)— the only thing that works for me… …help me get away from myself.” I was hooked. We all have to exit teen angst eventually. At some point I got tired of dressing in black and wearing spikes. I moved on to what I thought was more "serious" music— Pearl Jam, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos. I finally bought in to the idea I’d ignored in middle school and throughout childhood: that authentic performers wear rough, earth-toned clothes and play real instruments and reference historic works of literature, things like that. Artifice is bad and “authenticity” is good. The most important thing you can do is write your own songs and perform them without the aid of any electronic equipment. But I always felt like something was missing. Some kind of energy. Occasionally I'd pick up a new Madonna album (if it was "critically acclaimed"), or I'd catch myself tuning in to Top 40 radio. I listened to bands like Garbage: plenty of juicy electronic textures, but with just enough alternative cred to make me comfortable. Or I'd blast PJ Harvey: raw guitar music, but straight, simple, rhythmic blues, with lyrics about love, longing, desire, and power. The same structures and ideas I was missing from mainstream pop music. The whole time, I longed for for some sort of collision of all these elements— the most intense textures, the most incredible characters, the most delicious sounds and most aggressive philosophies, the catchiest, most flawless hooks. I wanted it all to come together. I wanted some kind of ultimate apotheosis, some sort of orgasm. I wanted to see performers that would explode themselves outward into psychedelic kaleidoscopes that represented everything a person could become, could express. Though slickly presented, the measured burlesque coquetry of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera couldn't compare to the one-man circus of somebody like Marilyn Manson, and I struggled to find what I wanted in my music and my performers. Nobody was hitting the nail squarely on the head. Then, when I was in college, Lady Gaga arrived. I watched the Bad Romance video, and I was hooked. Here was someone who took everything I loved about pop music and accelerated it until it was a drug trip, a brain-destroying fuck of an experience. That's what she wanted out of pop, and what I wanted, too— it wasn't just an exercise in the careful re-creation of Disney tropes: the Sci Fi Video, the Bad Schoolgirl Video, the Tropical Paradise Video. It wasn't a series of disconnected Saturday Night Live vignettes. Lady Gaga was pop with a purpose, with passion. She screamed from the core of every video and every song; a real live personality. She briefly but violently revived something our culture killed back when we collectively destroyed Michael Jackson. She, really, was the turning point, the idea my modern understanding of pop pivoted on. This music now felt like it had a purpose, aside from just entertainment. I could feel it, seething under the surface of the songs and the images. Gaga was a driven woman. But driven toward what? I started to look around, at the pop music on the radio, on the billboards, on YouTube. Instead of just allowing it to wash over me like a glittering waterfall, I started paying attention. Where did these tastes, smells, and colors come from? What were the people who made this music embodying, transmitting, trying to do? What made a good pop song? A good pop video? A good pop star? I also realized that somewhere along the line, the sounds I loved had taken over the culture. Before the mid-2000s, pop radio was still dominated by R&B sounds developed in the late 90s. Not a lot of big, uplifting choruses or soaring bridges, and definitely no thumping, big-beat electronic music. Contemporary Top 40, the kind of music that dominated the airwaves on stations like LA's 97.1 AMP later on in the decade, didn't exist at all. People like the Norwegian production team Stargate are largely responsible for the creation of that new pop sound. They cut their teeth doing European remixes of American hip-hop and R&B hits, and brought that sensibility to the table when they started producing original songs, hits like Katy Perry’s Firework and Rihanna's Only Girl in the World. They, like Max Martin (of Swedish origin), put their unique approach to electronic production and Abba melody in a blender with their deep love of American hip-hop and dance music, and this new pop was the result. They crunched synths, swelled strings, and put big, buttery beats under the brain-stroking vocal textures of the American stars they worked with. The result was a focused burst of musical positivity like nothing the world had ever experienced before. Pop was no longer just "popular music"— pop was a specific musical aesthetic, a new tradition, a sound, where the legacy of the Beatles had fused with a deep, primal, pounding rhythm. This was the sound of the new millennium on planet earth, so far widespread that even Korean stars like Psy echoed it precisely. This new music by itself wasn't enough, though. We live in the age of the visual and the social, and this music needed personality. And that, of course, is what the pop stars are for. Corporate branding has gone through an interesting transition during the same period of time. With the advent of social media and online culture, we have more intimate relationships with brands than we ever have before. And brands like Apple do everything they can to make their company and their products personal, relatable, and unified in character. They want us to see these vast constellations of sensation and experience as if they're a next-door neighbor we're interacting with. A human being. Hello, Coca Cola. Hello, Starbucks. Hello, Virgin. Hello Kitty. This is precisely the process pop stars have always engaged in, and this is the ingredient they bring to the equation. The personality. Focus only on their lyrics, or their music, or their choreography, and we miss the point— pop stars exist to show us what a human being looks like when exploded into a brand. And that brand is usually about positivity, freedom, sex, power, and love— all the human markers of paradise. Pop is representative of the aspirational forces in our individual human lives and in human civilization. It's a collective vision of desire: the way we want the world to be. And that vision is not a thing to be taken lightly. Large companies, and singular human beings, try every day to create the kind of world they want. A guiding vision is something the world's biggest corporations acknowledge is crucial— to the development of a cohesive organization and a cohesive mission in the world. The same holds true on an individual level— what do we want to be when we grow up? What are our goals? How does our vision guide our life? A vision has to be living. A static, boring vision, like a sleepy version of heaven where angels strum harps forever, doesn’t have the power to lead us forward. Our vision has to contain our energy, our fuel, our fire. It can’t just make us feel good— it has to make us feel alive. These pop stars, and the teams that help build them, are the innovators of feel-alive culture, not just feel-good culture.