POPmusicART

In all my years of art school, there has never been a shortage of weird looks when I put in the new Britney Spears record, or the Kylie Minogue album-the very day it came out. In art school Justin Timberlake isn’t quite as highly revered as the Decemberists, or Hendrix. My art always employed pop-y, shiny, brightly colored consumer products, but I’ve avoided placing the bubble gum slice of culture known as pop music into my art. At least, that is, until now: pop music has infiltrated my art.

I’ve always been shameless about raiding my memory banks, using kitschy objects such as pencils, matches, candy or shopping carts in my art. Yes, as objects these things are memorable; but these things are around us everyday. Would I remember something like a shopping cart if it were only popular for 2 months in 1994?(*) Why is it I am able to recall Snow’s Informer, Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You and Kriss Kross’ I Missed the Bus, or U2’s With or Without You (**) with ease, yet I have trouble remembering what I ate for dinner last night. Pop music, like celebrity is hardly timeless, on the play list today, gone tomorrow. Why am I able to recall the first time I heard Michael Jackson’s Bad: on a family trip to Canada (or it being introduced by an over-zealous DJ on 93Q… today’s hit music.)

How could I work these ever-resonant songs into my art? I decided to make a composite soundtrack, “an auditory history of my life as an American.” I took the top hit from each year, beginning with the year of my birth, 1981, and plucked from it, a memorable portion of the chorus. I then layered the clips into 3 tracks, so each song had 2 other songs competing for the listener’s ears. The resulting sound was dissonant and obtrusive; not necessarily my intention. My initially clear objective in the piece became muddled. People generally didn’t like the piece, it needed to be clarified; and there needed to be a better solution.

In search of that better solution I began to search for similarities in song titles: it turns out that themes and common lines from choruses appear again and again. First off “love” is everywhere: just look at a few no.1 hits: in 1982 Lionel Ritchie crooned Endless Love, while ten years later Whitney Houston was belted out I Will Love You. Eternal love isn’t the only option, of course: for instance 1987, 2 singers had hits entitled Is This Love (***). How can America’s taste be so generic and over-simplified? It is in the exposure of these ridiculous, nausea-inducing similarities that I begin my voyage into the realm of sound art; not having even an inkling of an idea where it might take me.

(*) I digress in saying if it was nearly as ubiquitous as POGs were in 1994 I might…

(**) And the infamous Saved By The Bell episode in which the gang camps out for U2 tickets inside of a mall.

(***) 1987 featured Bob Marley and White Snake; see also: Chris Brown Is this Love?, Groove Da Praia, Is this Love?, Frankie J, Is this what you call Love?, etc.