The UK Pop Charts used to be a crazy collision of rampant commerce & grass-roots democracy: people 'voted' by buying records & then watching their progress up the charts. It was a national pastime - I can even remember kids bringing radios to school so they could hear the midweek chart positions at break time. That's taking an interest. It was absolutely mainstream & commercial but also - crucially - anyone could take part. Strange things could happen.
I'm thinking of a song like 'O Superman' by Laurie Anderson which got to Number 2 in the UK Singles Chart in 1981. That record is basically someone talking through a vocoder whilst someone else repeats the word 'ah' for five minutes - if something that strange & radical could be a chart hit then surely pop was a positive influence: new & challenging ideas could enter mainstream culture if enough people decided to buy the records & put them there. Pop could expand (& blow) minds.
Whether a record was a hit or not was determined by the public. Labels could 'push' a single as hard as they liked but the final decision rested with the general population. Either you bought it or you didn't. That was the magic of pop: it couldn't be predicted. A hit had to have that mysterious 'something' that caught the popular imagination.
A 'something' that cut through all preconceptions about taste, cool, intelligence, class, race & touched some common human aspect of UK citizens in the latter half of the twentieth century. Dziga Vertov's dream of a self-generated proletarian art form made manifest. In the record department of Woolworths. Good pop.
- Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop Bad Pop, London, 2022, p.47-8.
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