Intellipop

A tragically shortened version of this piece was published in BULL's seventh edition for 2012.

The year is 2002. You’re at your primary school’s bi-annual disco. The ageing hall is lit half-heartedly by glow sticks and a dusty disco ball, and you’ve just finished dancing ironically to The Ketchup Song. You can’t wait to get out of this dump.

As you roll your eyes and reach for your cup of watery yellow cordial, something changes. The terrible soundtrack you’ve been putting up with all night is suspended for 30 seconds or so by an intriguing melodic line backed by stabs of piano and a downbeat baritone sax. It feels slower, and the beat is different.

You come to a sudden realisation. It’s a bloody time signature change. In a pop song. This isn’t ‘Stairway To Heaven’. It’s ‘Round Round’ by the Sugababes. And it is brilliant.

You might not have experienced a eureka moment quite like this. In any case, such instances – relatively few and far between, admittedly –exemplify the revelatory nature of pop music that pushes boundaries. We might call it ‘intellipop’. A genre that manages to combine the un-combinable: the spark and catchiness of pop music, and the structural variation and credibility of more alternative genres.

‘Intellipop’ is often found in the least expected of places. Below a glossy surface may lie a surprisingly innovative musical makeup. Of course, certain popstars shove their intellect down the listener’s throat with metaphor and social commentary and allusion and imagery and concept, but the most exhilarating ‘intelli-pop’ tends to stem not from self-crafted ingénues, but rather manufactured acts and the sonic scientists who fiddle with mixing desk knobs.

‘Round Round’ – which was a solid Top Twenty single here, and a Number One in the UK – is an example of the conscious breaking of every rule upon which the standard pop song is based. The song was written and produced by British outfit Xenomania, and received praise by rock-centric music publication NME for its “whip-smart rhythms” and indie-esque “if-we-could-be-arsed drawl”. Xenomania’s name more-or-less refers to an intense obsession with everything foreign, and sums up their attitude to pop.

As well as a handful of hits for the Sugababes, the production house can also be credited with the odds-defying career of Girls Aloud. Formed on a reality TV show almost a decade ago, Girls Aloud could so easily have gone the way of Bardot or Scandal’us (we will not forget). However, steered by Xenomania they became the most successful girl-group in UK chart history, scoring twenty consecutive Top Ten hits before taking a hiatus to launch largely-disappointing solo careers.

The success of Girls Aloud is even more bizarre given their music. It’s pop in essence, and proudly so, but plays with all the structures and lyrical themes we expect from a pop song.  Their last Number One, ‘The Promise’, packs seven melodic cells – more than double the standard three - into less than four minutes. One of their other signature singles, ‘Biology’, is as baffling as it is catchy. There’s a chorus, but it’s the last of five melodies to be introduced. Sonically, it could be described as the musical equivalent of a futuristic Grace Kelly falling elegantly from a rickety apple cart into the muscled arms of a country bumpkin from the deep south of America.

"How dare they claim Skrillex brought dubstep to the masses!"

Of course, British eccentricity, while all well and good, does not a veritable musical phenomenon make. Intelli-pop has also seen fits and bursts of activity in the US. During her most hedonistic, crazy days, Britney Spears got in on the act of producing stupefying, innovative pop. On 2007’s Blackout –on which she’s listed as an Executive Producer, unlike her other albums – Spears flirted with dubstep five years before ‘Bangarang’. The sinister, dark sounds that dominate the album paved the way for the rise of Lady Gaga, and caused the album to be named “the most influential pop album of the past five years” by Rolling Stone. Turn up your noses though you may at the mere mention of Britney, Blackout was described by the indie-loving, pop-loathing Pitchfork as “envelope-pushing…disorientating and thrilling”, and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Of course, all this raises the question of how these rather bombastic, abnormal pieces of music manage to sit prettily in the Top 10. I know what you’re thinking: “the public will buy anything if it’s marketed well”. Perhaps this is true. Flashes of flesh, tabloid tidbits, multiple costumes changes and dance routines executed with varying degrees of accuracy probably play some role in masking innovation in familiarity.

This assumption might underestimate the discerning power of the public, though. Is it not possible that the masses, as well as the popstars themselves, are in on the joke? 

We’re constantly told that the music written and played by its ‘face’ is superior to digitised, outsourced alternatives. We could attribute the success of ‘intellipop’ with the brief suspension of these assumptions. The most exciting purveyors of the genre play on pop stereotypes – the manufactured girl-group and the ditzy pop-puppet, for example. They embody them wryly and knowingly, with a literal and/or metaphorical wink-and-nudge routine, and incredibly refreshing results.

Those that lose out, then, are those who cling to notions of traditional credibility, and fail to look past what is admittedly a glamorous and aesthetically pleasing surface.