Elise's Christmas Pop Mix

Elise's Christmas Pop Mix

Elise Ostergaard, 2011

My sisters have copped quite a bit of musical opinionating from me in their time. Last year this culminated in an anti-Christmas mix from Elise, one of these sisters. She went out of her Pandora way to find foreign and obscure music. She did pretty well on the account, almost found some. Sigor Ros was her crowning glory. Unfortunately I already owned and loved all their albums and played their music documentary in the background of drawing and such.

This year, she went the opposite direction. She found things I was certain not to listen to: Pop. Super popular, over produced, bump/grind music found pulsing through the ibuds of kids in the states. She knew I might not like it etc. but she is forcing me into knowledge and love of main stream pop.

The weird thing? I kinda like a lot of it. While I prefer to listen to lo-fi crooners with lyrics that span the breadth of the Bible and all the philosophy since then, or gritty rock for cleaning and anger purposes, I have found that Elise's mix keeps me on boring work track. Dozens of lesson plans need written and they're repetitive. Beyonce and Justin Timberlake (1 song) and Katy Perry(1 song), they have the perfect blend of fast metronome and bland sound that lets me concentrate on the nuances of scrambled sentence application and past perfect progressive tense explanations. If each song sounds like the last, I can gloss straight through.

I'll never bring myself to feel anything but the throat strangling contempt for Key$ha, but Lady Gaga (1 song), and Britney Spears (4 songs) I can really get into. They don't say terribly interesting things, they don't say anything in a particularly new way, but they have production teams that spend more money on one or another of these albums than the country I live in makes in a year. Not only that, but those production teams know what to do with each tool and person they employ.

The result is slick sounding beats and voices with predictable and wholly fulfilling buildups and climaxes. Quick stories are told, or single emotions explored, in a way that simple words can't deliver. Music is, after all, the quickest plug into the human brain for instant motivation. It's noise (pure animal stimulus) and words (advanced human stimulus). It's not just connecting on a cognitive level, but also on an instinctive one.

The reason pop music kicks so much ass, and becomes so inherently popular is because it synthesizes these in the same time. Instinctively, we want to move our butts to the beat in a way our brains can't quite grasp. Cognitively, we're connecting with the woman/man telling us a woe or urging us to indulge that ass motion. And the production teams know when the words get more urgent, they have to add more instruments, up the tempo, change the key, change the tempo altogether, bring in some background choir, warp the voice(s) or whatever. They are The Band for The Face.

This mix Elise made me, pretty freaking listenable—there are even some bands on here who embody all parts of album art: writing, music making and production. La Roux, for example is not only well put together, instrument and technology-wise, but they have a unique flavor. Their syncopated electronics and experimentation with voice aesthetics etc are the same thing that draws me to The Faint and The Kills.

More surprises were B.O.B's Airplanes, a laid back hip hop thing, and Handlebars by Flobot, with a buildup that includes staccato strings and mariachi trumpets.

Saddest moment: Kanye West over-sampling Daft Punk's Harder, Faster, Stronger, Better, and a couple songs I listened to a couple times but deleted regardless because they were just too much badness that I expect from mainstream music. The other 16 songs though—awesome.