My basis for saying the below is this line from some Onion AV thing I’m reading while I graze on Doritos instead of whatever sleeping,
When Creed announced its breakup in 2004, it looked like another shitty, wrongfully popular band would be swept into the dustbin of history.
Who is [hold on a sec] Erik Adams, Steven Hyden, Josh Modell, Noel Murray, Sean O’Neal, Keith Phipps, Leonard Pierce, Nathan Rabin, or Brett Singer [all men, too] to say what is ‘wrongfully’ or ‘rightfully’ popular? Some quick Google + math shows that Creed sold over 42 million albums over four years. That’s a lot. I encourage you to see how many albums the Pitchfork top 10 sold. Do critics really think that AnCo could ever have the mass appeal of a Creed or Nickleback? This is important.
If critics think that there are ‘rightfully’ popular bands, then they’re creating a world in which over a four year period, a band like AnCo or Beirut or The Decemeberists sell over 40 million albums (in just the United States of America and Canada). Which means that, I suppose, the album-buying public is replaced by flighty, capricious college students; post-college scenester hangers on; and NPR-listening parents of the former two. Andrew Womack gets incisively to the latter demographic in his top albums of 2009 post on The Morning News,
This summer a friend mentioned that, as an upper-middle-class New Yorker in his mid-30s, he has no choice but to like Grizzly Bear. It’s targeted to his demographic: good for walking around the city, equally good for dinner parties (but with enough edge to remind everyone that just because you’re having a dinner party doesn’t make us provincial; after all, this is Brooklyn and we are drunk)
An America in which everyone is a white, upper-middle-class urbanite or the spawn of such sounds kind of all right, except that it’s the kind of undignified, immoral social and racial totalizing that you encounter in fascist regimes of the far left and far right.
Bands like Creed and Nickleback are generically bland and aimlessly propulsive enough to capture the passions of millions of people. I kind of like Creed. I know that a lot of elasticities and social groups wouldn’t really like Creed a fortieri, but they have enough mass appeal to find crossover success in, like, sports arenas and in summer blockbuster movie soundtracks that everyone attends.
The snottiness is repulsive that generally goes hand in hand with critical delineation. You get to pick where you live and whom you live with and whom you hang out with. Proselytize! Don’t tell me what should be popular, though.
