Proto-Hipster Music Critic Too Cool To Agree With Other Hipster Music Critics

Having to justify that you are a music fan, even though you don’t love Electric Light Orchestra, is bad. Gritting your teeth through a Titus Andronicus album because it made everybody’s top 10 list is worse. Hipster Music Critics will stop at nothing to make listening to music a joyless and soul-crushing experience as long as it reaffirms their holistic separation from whatever tropes dominate the mainstream at that time.

But you have not experienced the true agony of the Hipster Music Critic until you have seen one double back on itself like an all-consuming black hole. This never-ending vortex of music suck is called Ann Powers and it writes for Slate.com.

In Slate’s 2010 year in review roundtable on music, Powers’ colleagues provided the usual hipster fodder: Taylor Swift is a spoiled brat; Kanye West is a tortured genius; Arcade Fire and MIA deserve waaaaay more attention. Powers, though, was not content to beat that hipster drum. Powers longed so hopelessly for attention that she had to push even further away from the mainstream.

Some hipsters posit themselves as better than you by telling you that your taste is derivative and you can’t really enjoy Nirvana until you have listened to Leadbelly’s entire discography nine times. Others say that you favorite band is untalented and that you should check out Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for a more organic musical experience.

Powers is so consumed by her own self-righteousness that she is too cool for all the stuff that’s cool to the people who are too cool for everything else. To separate herself from even those other “cool kids,” Powers spent her “Best of 2010” space explaining that Katy Perry is actually a musical genius.

I have explained before that Katy Perry’s music is oppressively and insultingly bad. She is an adequate singer who is not good looking enough to be famous for her looks, but she markets herself relentlessly. It’s not her skill that makes her uniquely bad, though, it’s her atrociously manipulative song writing. She pulls out every cheap trick in the book. She switches from rhyming couplets to slant rhymes to non-rhymes in the same verse. She passionately belts out lyrics that make as much sense as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, but without the irony or the drugs. She throws around popular locations and activities as a proxy for evoking actual emotion or intrigue. I don’t blame Katy Perry- she’s raking in money by being a publicity whore and many others have done far worse. I blame Powers because she has the credentials that suggest that she should know better. You can’t convict a child of murder because the law says that a child can’t have the necessary mindset to appreciate what murder is. Katy Perry is the child who either doesn’t understand how bad her music is or doesn’t care to find out. Ann Powers is the adult, but instead of murder, she’s committing journalistic atrocities on par with Pol Pot’s killing fields.

Powers thinks she can get away with it because the science behind being a Hipster Music Critic is so flimsy. Music is a highly individualized art and intelligent people can disagree on what makes a song good or bad. Powers metastasizes this lark to expose it for its true folly. Food is another highly personalized issue, but everyone knows that a McDonald’s hamburger sucks. If a food critic wrote a column explaining that everyone had been missing out on how McDonald’s hamburgers were secret culinary masterpieces, he would be exposed as a fraud or a liar trying to get attention. Katy Perry’s music caters to the lowest common denominator at least as egregiously McDonald’s, so Powers deserves the same treatment. So I will take that responsibility: Ann Powers is a fraud or she lies to get attention.

Powers writes, “What finally allowed me to come to terms with Perry—and it was the song ‘Teenage Dream’ that really did it—was realizing that the very point of Perry is the way her old-fashioned emotions rub up so provocatively against her right-now poses.” Of course, you have “realized” what the point is. It’s all so obvious to you, Ann Powers, while the rest of us dither away at our desks, you have the rational ability to strip the pretense away and see Katy Perry for what she really is. That is the blessing and the curse of having the supernatural abilities of being a Hipster Music Critic. She goes on:

"’You think I'm pretty without any makeup on,’ Perry whispers incredulously in the first line of 'Teenage Dream,' her voice leaning slightly stunned against a latticework-privacy-fence of kick drum. The plucked way Perry sings the lyric—as if what she's saying is just impossible—says so much about how far we all feel we've strayed from our genuine selves. That line is the most important one to make the Top 10 this year, I think: its tragic nostalgia, playing out the new version of the hard-soft dynamic that made 1990s alt-rock so shocking.”

Congratulations, Ann Powers, you just spent more time typing out that run-on sentence than Katy Perry did recording that song in the studio. If you think you have strayed so far from you genuine self, you can be reminded of it by just about any musician who has ever performed. Katy Perry is not some musical sage who bestows her wisdom through carefully crafted verses, intoned for maximum soul-searching effect. She’s a stripper with a five-head. And that line is not “the most important one.” It’s an age-old pillow talk cliché. What is tragic about the nostalgia? That doesn’t even make sense. Why am I wasting time trying to figure out the nonsense language that this bold deceiver used to throw everyone off her scent?

It’s not possible for a Hipster Music Critic to write an honestly flattering review of Katy Perry, so Ann Powers had to dip into Perry’s bag of tricks and play the “unintelligible gibberish” card. Please go back to telling us how great the Flaming Lips are live and drinking your PBR. Defending Katy Perry is not going to work, and you aren’t going to get hipster bonus points for trying.