I've got four comments (to begin with :), Have never heard Pop Pantheon, so no doubt I'm at least somewhat straw-manning it in my mind. But, you know, I think Jefferson Airplane outrank Girls' Generation, and Ashlee Simpson outranks Taylor Swift.
Comment 1 is to ask: what about "content"? – though I'll rephrase that in a funny way (I've been wrestling with what I mean by "content" since college, since it's not just "the lyrics," and I was claiming (not necessarily intelligibly) in my senior essay that "rock" (for instance) was much more a content than a form or a style (or a genre?)). My funny way of bringing up "content" is "Why should I – or anyone – *care* about Taylor Swift or Shakira, or Girls' Generation?" A quick but semi-vacuous answer is "Because a lot of other people, including maybe your friends or children, care about her." Then, following that particular line, but trying to overcome the vacuity, we ask, "Why do *they* care?" Obv one of the reasons is that *their* friends care but also that people's reactions to Taylor (and the music and the beat and the words) can relate them *comparatively* to their friends' reactions etc., so "content" isn't *restricted* to music and beats and words, it's embedded in human relations. But what is going *on* in that music and those beats and words and what's going on in those relationships? Why does anyone care about *those* beats and sounds and words? What moves people? If we don't pay attention to content we're staring at emptiness. But going directly to the heart of the question (which in my usual way I've already added complexity to, or as Scooter once stated: The Question Is What Is The Question?), what has Taylor-Shakira-Taeyeon&Sunny&crew done (incl. what their listeners have done) *that* *I* *Frank* *Kogan* (or anyone else) *should* *care* *about* (other than just being streamed and streaming)? Why wouldn't we be better talking about Pungdeng-E instead? – who unlike Girls Generation and Shakira and Taylor made my top 60 singles list for 2015 and who, RIGHT NOW, IN THE PRESENT, are touching me and moving me and being part of my bluesky-friendship-with-Dave-Moore (who points out that "Bbibbi Ppappa" has a salsa break; I'd heard that break and for some reason missed its obvious salsa-ness (or at least Latin jazziness) and was wondering if it was from New Orleans or just *where* it came from) and have made my top 30 of 2015 that I'm going to post for Brad in the next few days (whether he wants it or not).
Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" was eligible for being a 2015 single (was a 2014 album cut) and would've had a shot if it hadn't included "pointless, chantless Kendrick Lamar verses that undercut the elementary-school incantations" (FK, Mar 2016). "King Kunta" did make the 2015 top 30 but was only longlisted in the Current Right Now 2015-In-2025 List. BTW, whenever I blog about Pungdeng-E, Badkiz, Crayon Pop, ZZBest, and other small-label K-pop acts I give them the tag "no tiers for the creatures of the night." SO THERE!
"If we don't pay attention to content we're staring at emptiness"
My biggest hesitation about pursuing the "A-Pop" concept is that I'm not sure what it actually gets you that just talking about the artists who are doing X Y or Z already gets you -- faster, better, stronger, etc. I'm much more likely to figure out (and care about) what huge communities do with music I *like*; I'm not here for the anthropology, even if it comes with the territory.
But it does give me a framework for a whole bunch of frustrations around conventional wisdom that the term puts in a language that I think other people might use. I don't think the term does much *beyond* this, because as you say, being the most X-pop doesn't tell you why you'd want to listen to the thing. (Many artists I think are significant in terms of their global popularity I couldn't care less about.)
My sense of Pop Pantheon is that they're pretty good at packaging something like a conventional wisdom, and if you ask "whose conventional wisdom" I would then say "well, really an American-centric conventional wisdom of people I spend a lot of time overhearing on the internet, even though the people I *interact* with on the internet don't seem to go for that CW as much and are a pretty heterodox bunch." I'm not sure why I care about folks who fit that scare-quotes description. (In fact I'd guess I'm mostly free riding *their* popularity to talk about *my* stuff. And by "my stuff" I don't mean A-pop musings, I mean the newsletters I spend more time on, finding the content and writing about it.)
Anyway, this is a long way of saying I'm not actually sure this adds anything to a conversation that just talking about artists and the music they make and whatever glimpses of an audience (and the meaning they make) wouldn't anyway, which is why I've spent a lot more time on the mixes than on digging *too* far into a hole. I think it's similar to the Taylor Swift series, where I have one (I think) important intervention/idea into conversations about Taylor Swift, but ultimately care more about a lot of related ideas around this hook.
Well, I do think your idea of "A-pop" is both correct and necessary, so I hope you continue to think and write about it. No one else I know about seems to have brought up anything similar. Somewhere on my computer I have some "Notes about A-pop" (unfortunately I suspect the term "A-pop" is not something that Microsoft File Explorer would know how to search).
I do get why you think there might not be a whole lot more to say about it other than the broad facts you're already pointing out. But I have a few ideas where we could go that gets specific while still being relevant to A-pop. E.g., our knowing "American popular music" at least somewhat from the inside, so we know of the music not just as sounds but as arguments among sounds: mainstream country and how "rock" or "hip-hop" it does or doesn't allow itself to get, country that leans more traditional, folk, Americana, alternative country, how those arguments echo some other arguments that don't have "country" in their titles, e.g., general indie and alternative and postpunk and their relation to other musics and cultural conflicts, as well as fights among critics (e.g., the derogatory term "indie landfill" that showed up in People's Pop Polls), and the difference between now and the 1980s where now instead of there being a sense of "world music" that's outside of that,* there are specific Korean, Japanese, Thai, Swedish musics that can potentially compete in the American landscape while being part of specific American arguments (so BTS not representing "world" or "Korea" but actually being part of EDM and such, and amapiano becoming actual potential players in the American market with collaborations with American dance and R&B artists and so forth) while also of course being part of arguments in their home countries that match and don't match ours, etc. (This is all stuff you've more or less said, of course.)
*What I said is too simplistic, e.g. use of "world music" echoed old uses of "folk music" but so did "indie," "postpunk," and "alternative," depending on which aspect of "folk" one is leaning into.
Yeah, I think the value is exactly this, rescuing the world from "world" by putting the US in quotation marks instead to see what happens. The thing is, I think I and the critics who influenced me really didn't need to do that -- were always just generally curious about what was going on anywhere in the world they could hear and give a fair shake. There is also some value I think in understanding some of the journey from the 80s, where I think you could have made many of these very same arguments *conceptually* (as Bordaghs is doing a bit in the intro to his book) but it being a tougher sell for an audience focused on American pop. Now it really does seem strange to ignore all the K-pop and Spanish-language/Latin American pop playing at the elementary schoolyard, my kids' obsession with Eurovision, plenty of examples of global music scenes that aren't just imitating American pop or providing a tour guide glimpse at some other culture for western audiences.
Comment two, which partly undercuts number one, but which – without my having heard Pop Pantheon – I assume nonetheless is a challenge to Pop Pantheon.
Here's the link for my Duncan Watts/Cumulative Advantage piece:
Watts's argument (or how I've extrapolated it) is that *anything* that's famous is, in part, famous for being famous, and that its fame far exceeds the intrinsic ("intrinsic"?) appeal of its particular attributes. I'm not saying that its fame is *all* luck – in fact, for any particular phenomenon, it's impossible to determine just how much of a role luck plays. But the idea of cumulative advantage partly (underscore *partly*) undercuts the idea that the content, or the promotion, or any particular aspect, somehow *causes* the fame – counters the idea that we can see, in retrospect, an inevitability to a particular phenomenon's stature and dominance. Contra that, there's always an ineradicable randomness – the randomness never total but always there – to which artists and songs make it big and which don't; but also, given cumulative advantage, once something *is* big, its stature can keep it big (to some extent not to all extent) despite what's going on with the content (etc.) and its audience's relation to such content (etc.).
This is what the next installment is about -- thoughts about the role of global cumulative advantage, basically. (Have a longish comment I drafted after you wrote the first comment but will wait for all four comments first)
Comment three. My first two comments don't directly address your A-pop ideas, but one way to work those comments in is to ask, Well, in the 20th century, when American music crossed borders and went overseas, *which* American music hit where, and why? I'm guessing it was not the same in Hong Kong as in Nigeria. So we're back to content, even if the idea of cumulative advantage is always in the background as a kind of not-quite-usable counterpoint. But also, it wasn't just America's size and might that gave its music a vast impact on the world. The impact also came from what was going on in the music, incl. especially the extraordinary impact of the music of poor blacks and poor whites in the southeast United States, its impact on the rest of the United States and the cumulative impact on the rest of the world – the content of *that* music, what it was dealing with, who heard it and what they heard. I gotta keep movin, I gotta keep movin, blues fallin down like hail. Hold it fellow! *That* don't move. Let's get real real *gone* for a change.
Comment four. I'm going to go sideways to a smaller point, which is that some of what's in the American canon from its era of dominance got there with the help of non-Americans. Which is to say that in the mid '70s when I was discovering the late '50s/early '60s girl groups, I was buying some of their music in oldies stores that had out-of-print records, but was also getting it from regular record-store IMPORT bins, Ronettes and Crystals anthologies compiled and issued (so newly in-print) in places like Germany. And I got the electric mid-'70s Miles Davis records on Japanese imports.
(Wondering about American acts whose careers got started or kept going because of a potential European or Japanese audience. Not just jazz. What about glam?)
To go even more sideways, maybe there's an analogy to the American movie canon, which was fundamentally put together by critics who were auteurist, which is to say owes a lot to the tastes of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in the French 1950s. (Whatever you think of auteurism as an idea, without it we don't have a sense of the American movies of the past as *art*, nor a way to sort through the past and talk about it.)
I've got four comments (to begin with :), Have never heard Pop Pantheon, so no doubt I'm at least somewhat straw-manning it in my mind. But, you know, I think Jefferson Airplane outrank Girls' Generation, and Ashlee Simpson outranks Taylor Swift.
Comment 1 is to ask: what about "content"? – though I'll rephrase that in a funny way (I've been wrestling with what I mean by "content" since college, since it's not just "the lyrics," and I was claiming (not necessarily intelligibly) in my senior essay that "rock" (for instance) was much more a content than a form or a style (or a genre?)). My funny way of bringing up "content" is "Why should I – or anyone – *care* about Taylor Swift or Shakira, or Girls' Generation?" A quick but semi-vacuous answer is "Because a lot of other people, including maybe your friends or children, care about her." Then, following that particular line, but trying to overcome the vacuity, we ask, "Why do *they* care?" Obv one of the reasons is that *their* friends care but also that people's reactions to Taylor (and the music and the beat and the words) can relate them *comparatively* to their friends' reactions etc., so "content" isn't *restricted* to music and beats and words, it's embedded in human relations. But what is going *on* in that music and those beats and words and what's going on in those relationships? Why does anyone care about *those* beats and sounds and words? What moves people? If we don't pay attention to content we're staring at emptiness. But going directly to the heart of the question (which in my usual way I've already added complexity to, or as Scooter once stated: The Question Is What Is The Question?), what has Taylor-Shakira-Taeyeon&Sunny&crew done (incl. what their listeners have done) *that* *I* *Frank* *Kogan* (or anyone else) *should* *care* *about* (other than just being streamed and streaming)? Why wouldn't we be better talking about Pungdeng-E instead? – who unlike Girls Generation and Shakira and Taylor made my top 60 singles list for 2015 and who, RIGHT NOW, IN THE PRESENT, are touching me and moving me and being part of my bluesky-friendship-with-Dave-Moore (who points out that "Bbibbi Ppappa" has a salsa break; I'd heard that break and for some reason missed its obvious salsa-ness (or at least Latin jazziness) and was wondering if it was from New Orleans or just *where* it came from) and have made my top 30 of 2015 that I'm going to post for Brad in the next few days (whether he wants it or not).
Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" was eligible for being a 2015 single (was a 2014 album cut) and would've had a shot if it hadn't included "pointless, chantless Kendrick Lamar verses that undercut the elementary-school incantations" (FK, Mar 2016). "King Kunta" did make the 2015 top 30 but was only longlisted in the Current Right Now 2015-In-2025 List. BTW, whenever I blog about Pungdeng-E, Badkiz, Crayon Pop, ZZBest, and other small-label K-pop acts I give them the tag "no tiers for the creatures of the night." SO THERE!
"If we don't pay attention to content we're staring at emptiness"
My biggest hesitation about pursuing the "A-Pop" concept is that I'm not sure what it actually gets you that just talking about the artists who are doing X Y or Z already gets you -- faster, better, stronger, etc. I'm much more likely to figure out (and care about) what huge communities do with music I *like*; I'm not here for the anthropology, even if it comes with the territory.
But it does give me a framework for a whole bunch of frustrations around conventional wisdom that the term puts in a language that I think other people might use. I don't think the term does much *beyond* this, because as you say, being the most X-pop doesn't tell you why you'd want to listen to the thing. (Many artists I think are significant in terms of their global popularity I couldn't care less about.)
My sense of Pop Pantheon is that they're pretty good at packaging something like a conventional wisdom, and if you ask "whose conventional wisdom" I would then say "well, really an American-centric conventional wisdom of people I spend a lot of time overhearing on the internet, even though the people I *interact* with on the internet don't seem to go for that CW as much and are a pretty heterodox bunch." I'm not sure why I care about folks who fit that scare-quotes description. (In fact I'd guess I'm mostly free riding *their* popularity to talk about *my* stuff. And by "my stuff" I don't mean A-pop musings, I mean the newsletters I spend more time on, finding the content and writing about it.)
Anyway, this is a long way of saying I'm not actually sure this adds anything to a conversation that just talking about artists and the music they make and whatever glimpses of an audience (and the meaning they make) wouldn't anyway, which is why I've spent a lot more time on the mixes than on digging *too* far into a hole. I think it's similar to the Taylor Swift series, where I have one (I think) important intervention/idea into conversations about Taylor Swift, but ultimately care more about a lot of related ideas around this hook.
Well, I do think your idea of "A-pop" is both correct and necessary, so I hope you continue to think and write about it. No one else I know about seems to have brought up anything similar. Somewhere on my computer I have some "Notes about A-pop" (unfortunately I suspect the term "A-pop" is not something that Microsoft File Explorer would know how to search).
I do get why you think there might not be a whole lot more to say about it other than the broad facts you're already pointing out. But I have a few ideas where we could go that gets specific while still being relevant to A-pop. E.g., our knowing "American popular music" at least somewhat from the inside, so we know of the music not just as sounds but as arguments among sounds: mainstream country and how "rock" or "hip-hop" it does or doesn't allow itself to get, country that leans more traditional, folk, Americana, alternative country, how those arguments echo some other arguments that don't have "country" in their titles, e.g., general indie and alternative and postpunk and their relation to other musics and cultural conflicts, as well as fights among critics (e.g., the derogatory term "indie landfill" that showed up in People's Pop Polls), and the difference between now and the 1980s where now instead of there being a sense of "world music" that's outside of that,* there are specific Korean, Japanese, Thai, Swedish musics that can potentially compete in the American landscape while being part of specific American arguments (so BTS not representing "world" or "Korea" but actually being part of EDM and such, and amapiano becoming actual potential players in the American market with collaborations with American dance and R&B artists and so forth) while also of course being part of arguments in their home countries that match and don't match ours, etc. (This is all stuff you've more or less said, of course.)
*What I said is too simplistic, e.g. use of "world music" echoed old uses of "folk music" but so did "indie," "postpunk," and "alternative," depending on which aspect of "folk" one is leaning into.
Yeah, I think the value is exactly this, rescuing the world from "world" by putting the US in quotation marks instead to see what happens. The thing is, I think I and the critics who influenced me really didn't need to do that -- were always just generally curious about what was going on anywhere in the world they could hear and give a fair shake. There is also some value I think in understanding some of the journey from the 80s, where I think you could have made many of these very same arguments *conceptually* (as Bordaghs is doing a bit in the intro to his book) but it being a tougher sell for an audience focused on American pop. Now it really does seem strange to ignore all the K-pop and Spanish-language/Latin American pop playing at the elementary schoolyard, my kids' obsession with Eurovision, plenty of examples of global music scenes that aren't just imitating American pop or providing a tour guide glimpse at some other culture for western audiences.
Comment two, which partly undercuts number one, but which – without my having heard Pop Pantheon – I assume nonetheless is a challenge to Pop Pantheon.
Here's the link for my Duncan Watts/Cumulative Advantage piece:
https://lasvegasweekly.com/news/archive/2007/oct/04/the-rules-of-the-game-no-18-the-social-butterfly-e
Watts's argument (or how I've extrapolated it) is that *anything* that's famous is, in part, famous for being famous, and that its fame far exceeds the intrinsic ("intrinsic"?) appeal of its particular attributes. I'm not saying that its fame is *all* luck – in fact, for any particular phenomenon, it's impossible to determine just how much of a role luck plays. But the idea of cumulative advantage partly (underscore *partly*) undercuts the idea that the content, or the promotion, or any particular aspect, somehow *causes* the fame – counters the idea that we can see, in retrospect, an inevitability to a particular phenomenon's stature and dominance. Contra that, there's always an ineradicable randomness – the randomness never total but always there – to which artists and songs make it big and which don't; but also, given cumulative advantage, once something *is* big, its stature can keep it big (to some extent not to all extent) despite what's going on with the content (etc.) and its audience's relation to such content (etc.).
This is what the next installment is about -- thoughts about the role of global cumulative advantage, basically. (Have a longish comment I drafted after you wrote the first comment but will wait for all four comments first)
Comment three. My first two comments don't directly address your A-pop ideas, but one way to work those comments in is to ask, Well, in the 20th century, when American music crossed borders and went overseas, *which* American music hit where, and why? I'm guessing it was not the same in Hong Kong as in Nigeria. So we're back to content, even if the idea of cumulative advantage is always in the background as a kind of not-quite-usable counterpoint. But also, it wasn't just America's size and might that gave its music a vast impact on the world. The impact also came from what was going on in the music, incl. especially the extraordinary impact of the music of poor blacks and poor whites in the southeast United States, its impact on the rest of the United States and the cumulative impact on the rest of the world – the content of *that* music, what it was dealing with, who heard it and what they heard. I gotta keep movin, I gotta keep movin, blues fallin down like hail. Hold it fellow! *That* don't move. Let's get real real *gone* for a change.
Comment four. I'm going to go sideways to a smaller point, which is that some of what's in the American canon from its era of dominance got there with the help of non-Americans. Which is to say that in the mid '70s when I was discovering the late '50s/early '60s girl groups, I was buying some of their music in oldies stores that had out-of-print records, but was also getting it from regular record-store IMPORT bins, Ronettes and Crystals anthologies compiled and issued (so newly in-print) in places like Germany. And I got the electric mid-'70s Miles Davis records on Japanese imports.
(Wondering about American acts whose careers got started or kept going because of a potential European or Japanese audience. Not just jazz. What about glam?)
To go even more sideways, maybe there's an analogy to the American movie canon, which was fundamentally put together by critics who were auteurist, which is to say owes a lot to the tastes of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd in the French 1950s. (Whatever you think of auteurism as an idea, without it we don't have a sense of the American movies of the past as *art*, nor a way to sort through the past and talk about it.)