Metric "Help I'm Alive" (Finally something besides the written word!)

I don't know whether it is the onset of chronic unhipness that seems to share a chromosome with the gene responsible for graying hair or if, perhaps, I was never hip in the first place--the two may not be mutually exclusive in any case--but the older I get, the more I can fell the power of pop music, regardless of its cheesy, commercial, cliche, or blah blah blah qualities.

This song would be an example, as would be a few others from my recent listening experiences that just a few years ago I would have dismissed as what I sometimes label "government music" (The Dead Kennedys 0:42) or plastic music. 

And now that I've invoked this change in my listening habits, I'm not sure what to say about it.

[Awkward pause in blog entry]

In honest, I think the change is due to my time my exposure to Korean pop music.  Much K-pop is intentionally derivative and a key reason (is there ever any other?) is economic: to appeal outside of South Korea, the music has to be familiar to other audiences.   Anyway, I've spent time from this angle considering the old debate that I used to have with an unabashedly hipster friend back at Syracuse University: must music be obscure and or original to be authentic?

And a more pressing question is: at what level does the originality, authenticity, cynicism, or whatever commercial ethos affecting an artists material affect the pleasurability of the sound?  Or must one rather decide that they don't like something and ask their interlocutors to kindly ignore their tapping foot?

Of course Theodor Adorno has devoted much more brainpower to this question than I (or anyone else) ever could.  

 

So I will not pretend to write anything so dialectically aware.  I would simply like to offer the above song (the video isn't the point, though its got a few interesting qualities) as something that I heard for the first time today and really really liked.  It is another testament to the pleasurable repeatability of musical patterns, for better or for worse.