Harvard Walking on Pop Sunshine

Every iTunes library has a few songs that leave their owner blushing. Listening to them is musical onanism; everyone does it, but no one wants to talk about what happens when the roommate’s out of the dorm.

Or do they?

The Crimson spoke with four of the most accomplished artists on campus and asked them: “What’s the point of ‘pop’ music?”

Fun may be a factor, but the answer isn’t pure hedonism. Pop plays a different role in the lives of all these performers. Each one offers a unique reason to suck up saccharine melody, and each reason is more nuanced than “it’s fun to dance to.”

ROAD TO JOY

For some, pop is a gateway drug to the musical underground. It’s practical, even if you’re past the first musical high.

“I think all the music that I spend my time listening to has substance, pretty much,” says Samuel M. Zornow ’08. “Certain elements of it could be considered ‘pop.’”

Zornow, also known as “DJ Shiftee,” plays dozens of professional gigs on campus and around Boston throughout the year. His performances use what he calls “the entirety of musical history.”

However, Zornow’s earlier flings with pop paved the way to his current broad tastes. “It has to start with whoever you see on MTV,” he says. “Depending on your background, popular culture is the only way you can get exposed to certain things, and the door by which you can enter the whole culture. That was my introduction to rap.”

Hearing Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. prompted hours spent poring over West Coast underground rap records in Manhattan. After that, the shift from fan to artist happened quickly. “I got my first set of turntables with my Bar Mitzvah money,” he recalls.

If not for a few Biggie videos, Zornow would be minus a job, and Harvard minus a star DJ.

BREAKAWAY

Pop isn’t always a gateway; it can also be an escape chute. And for avant-garde students, that’s sometimes just what they need.

“I really like Steve Reich,” Mary E. Birnbaum ’07 says with enthusiasm.

Birnbaum spends most of her day thinking about art. She’s starred in a number of Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club productions and is currently directing Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” in the Loeb Experimental Theatre.

And Steve Reich’s work is, if nothing else, “artistic” music. For its listeners, it’s hardly guilty; for most, it’s hardly a pleasure.

“Listen to this. It’s four minutes of people clapping,” Birnbaum says, giddily cueing a selection of Reich’s minimalist work. “I think it’s gonna be in my show.”

So, it all makes sense—artsy girl, artsy music. But there’s a complication. “I have Steve Reich next to Sondheim next to Spice Girls,” she says.

For Birnbaum, pop is no guilty pleasure—it’s a lifesaver.

“I feel [that] often at Harvard, we go through our days thinking so much about things and questioning every move we make, that it’s very hard to get into our purely visceral selves and react to something on a feeling basis,” she says.

“I listen to pop music to anchor my day,” she explains. “It’s music as endorphin, not music as intellectual.”

But balance is everything, and Birnbaum claims that a healthy dose of irony can be the only way to truly stomach some pop. “I think it’d be hard for anyone I know to say, ‘I accept all of Britney Spears’s lyrics unquestioningly,’” she says.

“Lindsay Lohan’s ‘Rumors’? It’s a shit show,” she admits.



A LITTLE TOO IRONIC

Birnbaum brings up that most crucial of pop listening tools—irony. Amy R. Klein ’07, lead singer of the punk band Plan B for the Type A’s, explains how an outwardly ironic stance towards pop can save one’s credibility.

“I’m a sucker for music as novelty, songs that are witty or funny,” Klein claims.

But for Klein, irony isn’t about keeping up appearances. It simply helps her accept a song’s shortcomings—to keep the baby and ditch the bathwater.

Take Plan B’s cover of Britney Spears’s “Toxic.”

“It’s a song that’s supposed to be very sexy and appealing,” Klein explains in an email, “and we reconstructed it as something snotty and slightly laughable…which is basically what Britney, in her essence, is.”

“I think ‘Toxic’ is a pretty fun song, though,” she adds, “or at least it was a few years ago.”

So, is irony the solution to the hipster’s dilemma, and the cure for her main source of guilt? Can it let you abide by your fiercest artistic commandments while admitting a few sins of your own? Can you be both prophet and sinner?

Some reject the idea of musical sin altogether—and where there’s no sin, irony can give no absolution.

Susan I. Putnins ’08, Jazz Director for the campus radio station WHRB, sees irony as a mask, not a tool. For her, enjoyment is enjoyment, ironic or not.

“If you enjoy the song, no matter on what level, then that’s sincerely enjoying it,” she says.

The hipster criticality, Putnins believes, is little more than a way to cover up true tastes. “Irony comes when [a song is] something you’re not expected to like. But who’s expecting it: me, or other people?

From Putnins’s view, pop is only shameful when you label it guilty, and only legitimate when you label it art. Pop music is as valid or as useful as its listeners make it.



—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.