Five Norwegians and the Case for Pop

Pop is the only genre that requires a defense. Not jazz, not country, not even nu-metal attracts the specific contempt reserved for hooks engineered to work on first listen—that curled lip suggesting that if something comes easily, it probably came dishonestly. I’ve never had patience for this, and nothing I’ve heard in twenty years of paying attention to music has changed my mind.

The argument against pop usually calls its worst practitioners as witnesses: the boardroom-assembled boy group, the sixteen-year-old star as product, the whole apparatus Dieter Bohlen and Lou Pearlman built by extracting money from preteens and stuffing cheap sentiment into three-minute packages. All true, all terrible. But you don’t indict a form by pointing at its garbage. Literature has airport fiction. Cinema has franchise sequels. The form doesn’t generate the disease; the people strip-mining it do.

What pop can do, when someone actually cares about it, is deliver emotional directness that more serious forms spend enormous effort trying to achieve and usually fail at. Alphabeat understood this. Little Boots understood it in a different register. La Roux built an entire career on synthetic precision and a refusal to apologize for any of it. And now five Norwegians called Donkeyboy, already enormous in a country where success counts for less because the audience is smaller, are making the same argument—songs that are round and immediate and completely at ease with being exactly what they are.

Norway in February is darkness and frozen things. That their music sounds like it was made for daylight is probably the whole point.