There was a time, according to my impeccable memory, when pop music had completely lost its goddamn direction and any value of melody. Just go listen to anything from 1995 to 2003. Tell me one pop melody that really strikes you as magical. I defy you to find me anything with a melody you'd define as transformational, something that just drilled into your cerebral cortex and left you a vegetable. There is nothing there. A Death Valley.
This is not to say music was completely lost. There was plenty, plenty of fun invention going on at this time. It just didn't win Grammys. It didn't make the mainstream pop radio stations.
Then one day, I was a salesman in a mall. Yes, I was. I was surrounded by the sheen of peak acquisitive, pre-08 ecomonic meltdown vanity. I sold cellphones to people of breathtaking profligacy from 2003 to 2006, compiling reams of character study that I will one day convert to proper use. But one day, I noticed our showiest, clubbiest, most of-the-zeitgeist salesman singing along with a song playing on the mall intercom. I had developed an aural/psychological circuit breaker to tune this out.
Strangely, something tripped it.
It was... a melody.
The song playing was "Hey Ya!" by OutKast.
Okay, the song was catchy, I granted, then went back to the sale I had on the hook. I privately granted my glitzy coworker the respect of enjoying one halfway respectable song in the parched environment of those times.
There was a problem.
The song was still playing and I was having a hard time not listening.
The verses were so novel, sung so free and uniquely, to a driving drum pattern and a truly cool guitar strum. The choruses were pure addiction in four wonderful notes. The middle breakdown was too much, just ridiculously audacious, so blatant and so beautiful in its music. The repeated line was unforgettable, really poetry.
My life began to crumble.
"Hey Ya!" remains a towering example of pop melody, a monument to what happened when pop artists let in a little of the indy weirdness happening at the time. More pop artists have learned that lesson since then.
A few years after the release of this song, the whole damned economy collapsed and the party was over. I had been long fled from that scene.
Behind the glitzy public areas of malls are bare, dark, sullen cement tunnels and metal doors.