Why Pop may be the new Folk

This past weekend, a visiting friend introduced me to the video of Kidz Bop’s cover of “Since U Been Gone.” (It goes without saying that there were never any slow moments over my Green Key.) Starring in the video is a prepubescent girl singing into the mouth of a rubber shark toy next to a boom box blasting Kelly Clarkson’s original. She is accompanied by a tiger on guitar, a gator on bass, and a walrus manning the trap. The video artfully resembles footage taken with a home camera. Its homey quality is furthered by the star singer’s brother, who makes sporadic appearances as the video’s meticulous and overzealous director. The video’s sincerity and unmasked enthusiasm is weirdly compelling. If downloaded, it is the type of file that sits on your desktop, begs to be viewed at least six times a day, and precludes the completion of anything constructive.

For 25 weeks, Kelly Clarkson’s song has sat atop Billboard’s “Top 100 Songs Receiving Airplay.” The public appetite for Clarkson’s gleeful apostrophe to an ex-lover still remains to be satiated; last week, her song was going strong at number two. Her song was also covered by Ted Leo, the front man of the indie-punk band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. Unlike the Kidz Bop cover, Leo’s is a solo acoustic effort which, despite its lack of bass-strumming gators, is also weirdly compelling in its own, rough-around-the-edges way.

What explains the confluence of indie, a genre most easily characterized by its inaccessibility, and artless children’s music? Does Kelly Clarkson’s song represent a modern-day folk staple which can be repeated by musicians of all types of backgrounds? I would argue that it does. The structure of “Since U Been Gone” is simple, which makes for easy memorization. Despite the song’s normal length, it only has two verses; essentially, over half the song is taken up by repeating the chorus. Similarly, it’s almost impossible to start singing “Since U Been Gone” and forget what words come next. (I attempted this for purely professional reasons only, of course.) There are few monosyllabic words, and the vocabulary does not stray far from the limits of, say, a prepubescent girl. Though the simplicity of the song alone would suffice to clinch its popularity, it is undeniable that Clarkson, the performer who owes her stardom to a popular election, also enhances the song’s mass appeal.

Clarkson is the poster child for the theory that the formula for a successful a pop star now must include all forms of media. Television was responsible for Clarkson’s initial rise to fame, as she was the first winner of American Idol. The radio was largely responsible for the success of Clarkson’s follow-up effort, “Since U Been Gone,” and the internet was the media through which both the Kidz Bop and Ted Leo covers of Clarkson’s song were transmitted. The combination of radio and music videos has been essential to the making of a pop star for years, but the use of the internet in spreading a mainstream artist’s popularity is relatively novel, as is evidenced by the fact that record labels have not yet figured out yet how to use the web as a tool for making profit. Though Leo’s cover of Clarkson and, two years ago, DJ Dangermouse’s mix of Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” undoubtedly increased the popularity of the original artists, they failed to produce financial windfalls for Clarkson and Jay-Z’s record labels. Perhaps this is why pop songs that have been bastardized on the internet are often among the most creative music recently produced. Free from the burden of commercialization, musicians like Leo and DJ Dangermouse are given an artistic license that enables them to infuse a strain of their own personalities into danceable yet soulless pop tunes.

Speculative implications aside, Clarkson’s song demonstrates that pop music taste is moving towards simplicity. Clarkson is pure pop; she makes no attempt to feign allegiance to any other genre. She has no pretension, and she, unlike Eminem and other recent pop stars, stirs up no controversy. Her songs say nothing, so she can offend no one. But her songs say nothing in a delightful way, which is the key to their success. Clarkson is ultimately pop music stripped down to its bare essentials: it is danceable, it is suited for repeated listening, and it is simple enough for a tiger without opposable thumbs to play on guitar.