Saturday nights are for going out into the world and finding adventure. They are for being young and alive, for perfecting the smokey eye, for getting your hair twisted just so, for wearing the most daring thing you own, and ultimately, for giving into the possibility of what your life could be if your life was the sort of thing people might want to feature in a short art film or, say, a commercial for BMW. But there’s one thing you’ll need to pull off this dramatic piece of performance art: a good pop song. Or six.
Pop songs are brilliant, deceptively simple and make people happy; pop songs are a vapid, crass commercialization of art made for 12-year-old girls and therefore can’t be taken seriously. While this sounds like a pointless argument to most of the world, it is in fact a real argument being had among irritating music snobs all the time since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of pop songs. But sorry, music nerds, you lose this one, because there’s one thing you’ll never get from knowing too much about Jandek: how to go out in the world on a Saturday night and give into the romance of the night. For that, pop songs got your back.
Yes, pop songs are disposable as fuck. You say that like it’s a bad thing. They are meant to come and go, to lodge in your brain for one night, one month, one summer, one semester. And yet, in spite of this obvious limitation, pop songs are extremely versatile and useful, perhaps moreso because they know they are not built to last, so they get shit done fast. Against a typically upbeat backdrop that makes all manner of people feel like standing up and getting down, you can work out all sorts of complex human emotions, sometimes — how can this not impress you? — in under three minutes. That’s cheaper than drugs, therapy, or hoping someone is online to chat about your dumb problems on Facebook.
And as if you needed science to tell you: while your body is swaying, the music is lighting your brain up something good. (In fact, they can tell based on how much your brain lights up how much you like it.) Scientists may not know exactly what/how chemicals are involved in the pleasure involved in listening to music, but my money is on whichever ones most resemble the hardest opiates, because there’s a feeling I get from pop that I just can’t score off the most up-all-night drug. All the lab coats know is that we like it, and it makes us feel better, with virtually no ill effects.
Luckily, it is always in supply. It is an always-replenishing pool of shiny-slick affirmations, glamorous beats, alluring hooks, truer-than-true-truths. And since your life is made up of a bunch of Saturday nights, here’s a fresh-out-of-the-oven batch of six new pop songs to get you through the next few.
Band: Haim
Song: “Falling”
Mood: Transcendent
As if the comparisons to 90s girl groups, Fleetwood Mac and Michael Jackson are not enough to lure you, the band Haim combine these things to transcendent effect. These ladies from Los Angeles and their killer vid filmed in the hills of Pasadena are like your pop music spirit animals, and the fact that they have satin jackets with their names on them pretty much seals the deal for me. I played this for a friend who said it made her want to throw on some cut offs and dance on a rock. Holla.