Michael Berube ponders what the best pop song is and gets many nominations in reply, a surprising number of which I can endorse. (I’d have to choose Big Star’s “September Gurls” for showing that bubblegum can have texture, melancholy and complexity.)
But claiming that he doesn’t acknowledge the divide between rock and pop seems odd. Of course, those into rock think that those rock songs drawing inspiration from dated pop (1960s, even 1950s) are in fact pop songs, but their reception is entirely that of rock songs. Others - teens, gays, urban youth, single women who want a fun night out on the town - tend to be consuming a different genre and they’re consuming it differently. It’s not based on pop from the Shangri-las or Tommy James; it’s based on pop from 2005 or at earliest 1980. Mind you, this divide is historically contingent. I remember how the difficulty in teaching a Simon Frith essay on this issue to undergraduates was not in presenting the argument but in reconstructing the difference between pop and rock to begin with, a difference entirely readable in a British context but only variably in an American one.
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