Three Very Special Pop Albums I Love

Friday is fun. It’s about music. There’s a playlist. There’s often other links. And clips. And things. Plus…it’s Friday! Yay just for that. We made it. (Again).

I don’t listen to pop music much. The new stuff I mean. “Pop” as a genre – ie: “Classic Pop Music”, sure. That would mean The Beach Boys and The Beatles and XTC and Todd Rundgren and all sorts of things I love.

But pop music is the music du jour. It’s “popular” – so it is Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and Harry Styles and, um, whatever else that is happening there.

I’m not so good at that. And I never have been. I didn’t listen to The Spice Girls 25 years ago. I heard them, whenever they were on in a place where I was – but I wasn’t actively listening. It was far more likely I was out late at night at a bar back then. I also worked in a music store. We used to have those. So I was definitely hearing bits and pieces from radio playlists and whatever the new releases where that the record company was pushing. But I was taking Daft Punk and The Prodigy home to listen to again. I was leaving All Saints and Spice Girls right where I found them.

These days, genre is mostly meaningless – since music is marketed differently. But the one genre I still seem to avoid, is the modern pop music genre. Sometimes I know why. I hate trends: Autotune, etc. I hate buzzwords and terms, I hate producers that get known as rainmakers. All of that sort of phoney/manufactured buzz bugs me.

I’m not saying this as a badge, but I know very few Taylor Swift songs. I know she’s not the enemy. But that’s about all I know. Shake It Off is about the one Swift song I can name. I’d recognise a few others. But it would be single digits. This artist plays three hour shows, or something like that. Her fans know not only the name of every song she’s written but the street address of the coffee place she fuelled up in before writing each song. They know what she had for breakfast on the day each song was written. They know how long they spent in a queue on Record Store Day waiting in advance for a hope to get one of the allocated special edition versions of her records.

I’m definitely not a Swiftie. I’d fail the first test. But I also know that I neither hate her nor her music – it’s probably mostly okay, or even really good, it’s just not for me. Or I haven’t made myself available to it.

Ed Sheeran and Harry Styles though. I absolutely cannot name a single song by either of them. I’m aware that Styles covered Peter Gabriel, and he seemed to do an okay job. Great source material of course, so that makes sense. Peter Gabriel is actually my perfect example of what I think great pop music is. The ideal. Of course he was weird as all fuck for his first few albums, then had a big pop makeover which he was doing almost as an experiment. (And it’s fair to say he understood the assignment).

Same with Kate Bush. She’s the role-model now for a certain type of pop music that is big and arranged, it is weird – and also lush. It is odd in its metre, maybe, but it contains hallmarked traces of melodic pop songwriting, even if it goes a bit bonkers. It’s definitely rocking a side ponytail. It is untucked. Unhinged, at times. And all the better for it.

When I was a kid Kate Bush and Cyndi Lauper and Peter Gabriel and Prince were the pop stars I most revered. I liked Madonna a bit too, but found it hard to really say that out loud until the Like A Prayer song and video converted me completely. (Did they what!) I liked Michael Jackson too. Because everyone did. Even the people who said that they didn’t.

But these are the big stars. I have always like finding one-offs and standalones within this realm. And it’s so much harder to do with “pop” music and pop-stars. Because by the very nature of that title, and that idea, they are meant to be popular, they are meant to be known – and known for more than one thing I guess…

In 1992 I heard Vanessa Paradis’ self-titled album. It was, and remains, a revelation to me. A sixties hue, cute girl-group ditties, sassy little tunes and a bonus cover of the Velvet Underground’s Waiting For The Man. Of course, all of this was delivered by stealth via the hand of Lenny Kravitz. He was in a relationship with Paradis, and had written her an album as an act of devotion. That’s the narrative I remember and/or built up around it. Kravitz is pretty much the sole performer on many of the album’s songs (outside of Paradis’ voice). He plays almost every instrument, wrote all of the songs (apart from the one cover). He produced, and even duets on a track (or two). It was a stopgap before he broke big with Are You Gonna Go My Way. But, also, it is Vanessa Paradis’ album and she is fantastic on it.

She was probably not that fantastic on much else – musically. There are a couple of French-language records before this. There is some weaker material after it. Diminishing returns. In my mind, this is a one-off. An album that is now more than 30 years old but it lives and breathes in its own space always. It was, briefly, pop music of its time, and yet it was also never really quite of its time on account of the fact that it was so 60s-referencing in the early-90s; that was basically the ‘bit’ that Lenny Kravitz was super-committed to back then.

This album is a gem. And I love it. And I’ve always loved it. And I’m happy to think of it as its own thing – just hanging there in a space forever and always.

Sky Ferreira released her debut full-length album almost ten years ago now. It’s called Night Time, My Time and though it’s not normally my thing, or it was normally my thing to say things like “it’s not normally my thing”, this album must have found me at the time because I was at my peak of writing music reviews, in terms of how much I was covering. Music was finding me. I couldn’t escape it. So I was taking on board as much as I could. And then even more. And somewhere in there I heard Sky Ferreira. And it was probably not the sort of thing I might normally bother with – but I’m glad I did. And I loved it. A throwback to 80s synth-pop. And brilliantly executed. I still really love this album. I still tell people about it. It isn’t some weird curio or anything, it was big/ish at the time. But the fact that it’s nearly 10 years and still no follow-up means it’s going the way of a cult release.

Ferreira has been working on Masochism for years; that’s the second album. It was teased as early as 2016. Then 2018. And 2020. And so on. It might turn up later this year. Then again, it might never get released. But Night Time, My Time remains a gem. And if you haven’t heard it ever, you should. Or if you haven’t thought about it in a long time, you should think about it again.

Earlier this year Caroline Polachek released Desire, I Want To Turn Into You. I really like this album. Polachek is clever. She was part of a duo called Chairlift. They were synth-pop throwbacks in that 80s style. But Polachek wasn’t going to be defined by (just) that. She went off on her own and made an ambient record. She created this whole tonal alter-ego too (Ramona Lisa). And then also made pop albums under her own name. So, she’s not quite a one-off in terms of the amount of music. But she’s certainly a unique voice using the arty-side of pop as and when it suits. And Desire reminds me almost immediately of that Kate Bush ethos and vibe that is there in the work of Bat For Lashes and early Florence + The Machine.

I’m not sure what I was trying to achieve today, beyond telling you about a few albums. These three feel somehow linked to me. Probably just in my discovery of them. All of them were and are not quite my usual listen. But all of them sound great to me. And that’s why we should always stick our ears out in all directions. That’s why we should never be afraid of the “pop” label; not dismissive of it. These are pop albums through and through. Plain. And never so simple.

And all the more glorious for both facts.

So if you haven’t heard any of these – or in the case of the first two, if it’s been a while – give them a spin (or give them a spin again).

And if they don’t work for you maybe something on this week’s edition of the Something For The Weekend playlist will work for you instead. That would be volume 129.

And any recommendations for “pop” albums I should check out? What’s new and rocking your world?