The Deeper End of the Mainstream

“I’ve never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There’s always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music.”

– Thom Yorke

 

 

Mainstream or popular music, is a type of music that appeals to a generic audience. This music pervades contemporary culture, as you might hear it just about everywhere, like on the radio, in films, in social events, in retail stores and public spaces.

With that, it goes without saying that mainstream music can also affect us on a personal level, reminding us of certain moments or phases in our lives in which such music was prevalent. As filmmaker Todd Haynes remarked, mainstream music has the potential to “enter our memory bubbles” and provide us with “true Proustian moments,” thereby “unlocking sensations” and “unlocking our imaginations.”

Still, not everybody is into mainstream music.

In my case, I used to be quite the purist when it came to music. I had a disdain for just about anything that was popular or radio-material. I had the stubborn perception that mainstream music was all shallow and mindless, and had no deep meaning whatsoever. 

Even if I actually liked a popular song, I would find reasons to not like it on the basis of superficial criteria, like the artist’s image or looks, or just the fact that most other people liked it. 

Now that I’m older, though, I’ve learned to widen my horizons a little more. I still default to the heavier stuff. And I still start my day listening to the likes of Slayer and Slipknot while I have my morning coffee. But I also have the belief that all music is valid. 

If I like a song, I would listen to it, no matter the genre or artist. And if I don’t like a song, I wouldn’t necessarily see it as bad, in most cases, only that it isn’t for me. With that, it’s none of my concern to criticize the music that other people may like or dislike.

If you have a peek into my listening history in any given week, it’s dominated by heavy metal and rock music. But you can also find a dash of pop, disco, hip-hop and rap, and occasionally K-Pop, and on even rarer occasions, dangdut. 

One of the best things that came out of being more sonically open-minded is that I got to disprove my own blanket idea that mainstream music is all shallow.

Certainly, the music that you hear on the radio and other mainstream media are typically aired for your casual listening. But this doesn’t always mean that the music was written and recorded with such intentions.

This, I think, is a tragedy for a lot of mainstream music. Because the music is everywhere, it’s much easier to take it for granted, and to listen to it on a very surface level. But as I’ve learned, if you took the time to really listen, you just might find a depth to such music that you hadn’t realized before — that in fact, there is more melancholy in it than innocent bliss. 

In plenty of mainstream music, you would likely find that the feelgood vibes of “dancing the night away”, and the catchy melodies, are in a lot of ways, meagre attempts by the artists to escape reality or to numb their pain.

At the very root of such songs is a salient sense of idealization, or the elusive idea that our lives would be perfect, if only we made a certain amount of money or if we were in a relationship with a certain someone. Along the same line, there is also a deep sense of longing or nostalgia — the illusion that we can never be as happy as we were in our past.

In my own life, I had such an experience with ABBA. I had practically known many of their hits since as early as I could remember, thanks to the mainstream media. But I had little substantial impression of them other than one being about their appearance: they were two beautiful women, and two scruffy guys with awkward hairdos, all of whom wore very festive outfits onstage. 

Another big element in this were the two Mamma Mia! films, which were a lot of fun to watch. Nevertheless, the storylines and scenes from these films were etched into my memory, and to a large extent, colored whatever interpretations I had of ABBA’s music.

Gradually, though, I started listening to ABBA’s music more intently and presently for what it is, while putting aside the preconceptions I may have had. It was then that I realized that ABBA’s music is an entire world unto itself, that there were so much richness and meaning that lay hidden beneath the glittery surface. Underlying many of their songs are very candid themes of their personal struggles, insecurities, and loneliness.

With beautiful songs like Dancing Queen, for example, I found myself thinking, “I’ve heard this song so many times, but I never realized how sad it actually is.”

In the case of this song, it finally clicked in me that it is sung from the perspective of a presumably older person, who is watching a teenager enjoy herself on the dance floor, while the former rues her own sweet youth that she can never recapture.

Suddenly, the “you” in the chorus line weighs much, much heavier. It’s not so much of “You can dance, you can jive,” as “You can dance, you can jive. Having the time of your life.”

In a similar vein, it’s easy to get caught up in the jovial beats of Super Trouper and miss out on how raw the lyrics really are. The song sounds almost like a cry for help that’s disguised by its upbeat façade, reflecting how fame and popularity were privately tearing their lives apart by that point in their career.

For the longest time, I didn’t know what a Super Trouper even was. And if you didn’t know either, it is a type of stage light used in concerts to follow the performers around, thereby “finding” and “blinding” them, as the lyrics describe.

My experience with ABBA wasn’t all melancholy, though. Some of their bubblegum songs, like Honey, Honey had me laughing to myself, because I never realized how horny they were. “You’re a doggone beast” is a very creative line indeed.

There are so many other artists that I could talk about. But here are just a few more examples. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Have You Ever Seen the Rain might strike you as a song about nature, but it’s actually about an actual mutiny that was undoing the band. The Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive isn’t about picking up girls and dancing in nightclubs, but about desperate survival in the cold streets of New York. Sherman Kelly’s Dancing in the Moonlight might sound self-explanatory, but you wouldn’t have guessed that it is about a traumatic incident, one in which Kelly was brutally assaulted. 

Of course, I can’t speak the same way for every piece of mainstream music that’s out there. No matter what I do, there are certainly songs that I would still find trashy, or that I would be unable to connect to for whatever reason or bias.

For one thing, I personally could never not find Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda annoying, or see the point in it, being quite literally about her giant ass. But I guess some people are seriously into that kind of music. I don’t know.

Ultimately, it’s my openness to listen that matters to me. 

Music, after all, is borne out of the human experience. And every song has its own story to tell, even if I personally think it’s a plainly shitty one. And with that, there’s never an end to what we can learn about the human condition, and the world around us. 

As the great cellist Yo-Yo Ma brilliantly said, “As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody’s individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.”

If, like me, you are not that into mainstream music, I implore you temper your inner critic — at least every now and then — and give it an attentive listen.

You might either find gems within a mainstream song, or you might not like it at all. But however it turns out, you will have opened your mind to a different viewpoint of the same limitless world that we all coexist in.