I've been a fan of the New Pornographers for nearly a decade, but this just disappoints me. I don't know if their stab at Lady Gaga was meant as a joke or what, but I wish we could stop pitting "cool, genuine 'indie'" against "shallow, image-conscious pop." I say this because I spent years doing this myself. It took two years writing at a fairly mainstream blog where I had to reign in the snark before I realized, "You know, most pop music isn't bad." At this point, the line between indie and pop, commercial and alternative, is so blurred that the two are nearly indistinguishable.
I wonder how much of this is an age thing? Most of the people I come in contact with are over thirty, the last generation to have gotten their music through more traditional avenues: radio, television, and record stores. When I was a teenager, there was a definite line between what was commercial and what wasn't. If you had the wherewithal to seek out music that wasn't getting airplay, well, you were deemed a person of taste. Now it's not so simple, and when a guy running a small label out of Omaha can have hit records, the playing field has leveled considerably.
