Responsible Pleasure Pop Music Is As Important For Your Mind As Trash TV

We all have our guilty pleasures. For some it’s food, for others it’s reality TV, for me it’s definitely trash pop music. This article goes out to all the unapologetic lovers of kitsch. The fans of musical ham with a side of word salad.

There are many important issues to think about in the year 2023. You’ve got climate change, the cost of living, and rising house prices just to name a few.

But with all that going on, sometimes we just need to be dumb for a second.

Sometimes we just need to have absolutely zero thoughts and make our noggins as vacant as possible. For our own sanity, if nothing else.

It’s like Aussie icon Kath Day-Knight once said, “Empty your mind, empty your mind… Empty! Oh that was quick”.

It’s in moments like these that I turn to trashy pop music.

I’m talking Pitbull, Flo Rida, Ke$ha, Jason Derulo, LMFAO, Timbaland, Katy Perry, 3OH!3, Nicki Minaj and David Guetta. 

Did I just name every artist on the So Fresh Hits Of 2008 CD? No, but it certainly felt like it.

To be honest, any song with a hefty bass line with lyrics make very little (if not zero) sense has a special place in my heart.

For example’s sake, let’s look at the end-of-verse lyrics in Flo Rida’s 2010 banger “Club Can’t Handle Me”:

Fall out cause that’s the business

All out it’s so ridiculous

Zone out so much attention

Scream out I’m in the building (hey)

They watchin’ I know this

I’m rockin’ I’m rolling

I’m holding, I know it

You know it

I think I can speak for most of us when I say “holy shit”.

If those words meant any less, they’d be appearing in Tony Abbot‘s 2009 autobiography “Battlelines”. Though, I know which of the two I’d rather consume as a leisure activity.

The lyrics of Flo Rida, Pitbull, Ke$ha and their counterparts are so absurd, so meaningless, that they come full circle and become meaningful again.

They end their initial existence as pawns in a game of trash pop chess and take on new lives as distractions from the burdensome aspects of life. In my opinion, this is precisely why they are valid.

They fail in the pursuit of being philosophically engaging musical masterpieces, no doubt. But they succeed at making us sing along, clap in time and nod our heads to the beat.

And that my friends, is why trash shouldn’t always go in the bin.

Image:
Instagram via Flo Rida, Ke$ha and Pitbull