Pop is fucking (aka. Everything to all people? / aka. Coldplay is just as bad as Wavves)

There is a rather distasteful joke on Family Guy (yes, I know family guy is horrible - bear with me), it is a flashback sequence of sorts, where we find the Peter's ancestors (who happen to be southern slaves) sitting around a humble dinner table. As the joke goes, it is revealed that this 'black Peter's' children are actually the sons and daughter of the white slave owner's daughter (played by Lois). The punch line comes when Stewie, the youngest child of this inter-racial relationship, upon hearing this news, exclaims: "You mean I am black AND white? That means I'll be accepted by EVERYONE!" The irony of course is that unfortunately, in present day, that is pretty far from the truth. In reality, which is the crux of the joke, the way it works is that the white community finds you as a black person, and the black community sees you as white - and neither fully accept you as their own.
I know that is a strange story to open up a blog post with - but I do have a point. It has always been my prerogative to try and bridge the gap between the mainstream music world, and the insular 'indie' world. It seems that very few artists can convince the critics and the public that popularity and artistic credibility are, at the very least, not inversely correlated, and even more - mutually exclusive. It's a strange musical landscape we live in now, the schism between underground rock and mainstream rock is so wide, that to bridge that gap has become increasingly more daunting. It wasn't always this way: all the bands that got me INTO music - Nirvana, Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, etc. were ALL major acts - Nirvana could sell out stadiums, Sonic Youth used to be played on MTV! Yet, they still would have appealed (and do appeal) to the 'pitchfork crowd'. (Note: Pitchfork media is a website that focuses on the underground music scene, it is commonly known as THE taste maker site exposing the next big underground thing).
However, the trouble I find myself with is that this duality that existed when I started music, this duality that I longed for has gone away. The acts that still achieve this balance, in my opinion, Radiohead, Wilco, Pearl Jam and the like have all been 'grandfathered in' it seems by this free pass to be as much of a stadium act as they like, and still have the indie cool of an underground band. This is most troubling to me since I feel that THIS is where The Everyday Visuals and I exist. One foot firmly in the indie world, one foot in the pop, and as the joke goes, instead of everyone liking us, we cannot find full acceptance in either group. I find we are just a little too noisy, too off-beat to have a big pop hit - yet, too hooky to find buzz in the indie world. What we have found is our fan base is just like us - savvy enough to know that a catchy tune isn't something to be afraid of, and loves the challenge of a song that doesn't exactly go where you think it should. A person that loves how a Wilco tune can get stuck in your head, but also loves how noisy the Dirty Projectors can be. This group is a small, exclusive, group it seems. It's a group of people who remember how music used to be, how artists STRIVED to appeal to a larger audience because, for fuck sake, they had something to say.
I don't want to just preach to the choir - I don't want our music to stay under the radar, appealing to only a small group of people that read one online music blog to decide what their tastes should be. I want to sneak in the back door (dirty jokes notwithstanding) of the pop world, to catch the ear of the Jonas Brothers fan, the Fray fan, the Coldplay fan, just a SLIVER of a song to catch their ear, so that they can discover a whole other world of music. I want to be that band that got them INTO good music, that got them to throw away their Jonas Brothers CDs and buy a Pet Sounds CD instead. For as much as we look at the pop world as self-serving and ignorant, the indie world is as big of a circle jerk as what it originally was a response to. It has become a parody of itself. I want a fate where a 10.0 on pitchfork doesn't doom us to playing clubs sizes like the Mideast downstairs forever, and where a pop hit means we'll never have any artistic credibility.

I wrote a song once - it was off our CD Media Crush. On the record it was called: "Radio Edit Sing Along", but the original title was "Pop is fucking". The name came from this analogy I used to make about the spectrum of music, it went something like this:
Good music, that is, real, meaningful, heartfelt music is akin to making love. You commit to this music, it touches you deeply and when you are done listening it stays with you. That, to me, is making love.
Bad music is superfluous - sure, it feels good to listen to, but it doesn't challenge you, it makes you happy while its happening, but when its done, it leaves your mind as quickly as it enters. That, is pop music - that is FUCKING.

The pop world is obsessed with fucking. They just want the quick fix, and it is on to the next big thing. Yet, the indie world has shaped up to the same thing - quick fix, and then: what's the next big band? Well, I don't want to fuck. I don't want to be part of a scene that just fucks - and I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to try to sell ourselves short appealing to either crowd exclusively. I think we have it in us to be better than both of those alternatives - and if you're reading this, you know what I mean.
As wide as the gap is between two world only concerned with appealing to themselves, we will bridge it, we will find that medium space where where bringing our music to the mass doesn't mean that we had to compromise or water down anything. We'll teach these fuckers how to make love.