Simon Reynolds (blah blah blah) said something about Björk being the last great pop innovator, so ofc. July 4 slow news week, I picked up on that and tried to figure out what that’s supposed to mean.

Pop music, at least pop music now (“now” entailing the consolidation of the channels of distribution and the stranglehold that the Top 40-style singles have on radio airplay, along with the broadening of music distribution offered by the internets—a paradoxical intensification of the very most popular songs’ popularity along with a growing, diverse array of popular songs that don’t make it on the radio at all), seems to be fairly backward-looking on the macro scale—record labels, like movie studios, don’t necessarily want to bet large on left-field artists—while being incredibly rich and interesting on the micro level. The most popular producers are making weird, space age productions that draw from 80s power pop riffs, trance, dubstep, European house music—anything that sounds cool.

In today’s environment, the term “great pop innovator” is particularly nebulous, but would seem to entail something like a musical orgy among Dr. Luke, Lady Gaga, and Kanye West. Perhaps fittingly, then, Björk is doing nothing of that sort right now.