In 2014 a YouTube video by Dutch channel LifeHunters did the rounds on social media. It showed two presenters attending a food conference, masquerading as restaurateurs making healthy, organic fast food – when in fact they were serving real McDonald’s to unknowing critics. As the critics taste the deconstructed Big Macs on camera, they comment earnestly on flavour and texture, and hilarity ensues. It is not that the critics are exposed as frauds, per se: it’s that for once they are not superior. Their sophisticated palate and florid vocabulary are useless, because we know something they don’t.
Pop music is a bit like fast food. Both can be as satisfying as their haute counterparts. Almost everyone enjoys them in a certain context, guiltily or otherwise. And one of the reasons that both are so often dismissed intellectually is that their detractors tend to be better equipped to justify their feelings about them than their fans. In music, the high-low divide remains the most contested of any art form.
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