Pop music. Funny term isn't it? I guess it just means popular, but we categorise it all the same as a style. There's something about the concept of pop music which means people don't see it as having the depth that rock, alternative or even indie have.
Fable
Am I meant to be a pop artist? I don't know really. It bothers me that we feel this necessity to stick things in a box and say they're this or that. It seems to be a device to make things accessible, like a filing cabinet, for industry and press. I'd rather be without labels in all forms of life - we're all people. We're all individuals and should be judged on that basis (if we have to be judged at all) - not as a male or female, gay or straight, black or white. We're just individual people living our own stories.
Same for music really. When Lady Gaga or Robbie Williams do a swing album, do they become swing artists? Or are they still pop artists? I think the whole labeling stuff is part of the problem within music. Art should be conceived, played, drawn, whatever, without restraint. Putting things into genres means they're automatically constrained.
The other big issue that I can see these days is that the industry, stripped of money, seems to now revolve around fear of the different. Because you've got a crowd of people at a label petrified of losing their job, they'll gradate towards the safe option and that's going to do nothing but create this drudgery of homogenous crap throughout the charts. The thing that scares me is that given a choice of a safe singer-songwriter that people 'know' will sell, and a Bowie or a Hendrix right now, people will put the time and investment into the safe option. What kind of musical landscape are we creating then? The creative industries should be the ones that are the furthest away from that way of thinking - it's the capitalist mindset applied to something that should be fighting against exactly that.
So yeah, I'm proud not to be too safe! But that creates its own hurdles in terms of getting heard.
The stuff I like? All music has it's merits. There's some really interesting acts outside of the charts as always - artists like St. Vincent, Antony and the Johnsons, Alt-J are all inspiring and have impacted the mainstream too so hopefully we can get around these hurdles, but I wonder where the next real underground scene is. I take a lot of inspiration from the classic artists of the past too - the likes of Bowie, Queen, Kate Bush, Bob Marley, and I'm a big fan of Muse too.
There will always be great, inspiring, interesting and risky music out there, we just need to make sure it gets heard.