That said, I’m trying really hard to come up with some recent examples that contradict Marxy’s point but I can’t. In the late 90s and early 2000s labels were throwing a lot of money around and I think bands had a lot more freedom to mess around, but nowadays they seem to have tightened up a lot and no one’s funding diversity and experimentation unless it’s by proven bankable artists.

Ha.

I also find Shiina Ringo’s songwriting more impressive than most everyone else. But her combination of this with innovation in the production and lyrics makes her a greater force than others. Perfume’s songs are fun, but I think they are going to age extremely poorly because of the over-autotuning and amazingly FLAT compression.

OK, that is a sensible argument, although still with elements of subjectivity (were her electronics more “good” than e.g. Perfume’s?). I don’t really follow the pops, so I don’t know whether it can be countered effectively, and I won’t bother muddying the waters by throwing in other potential value systems (“Serious-seishun pop-punk is a powerful reaction against that overelaborate stuff! Ayumi speaks for the gals!”). But I will observe that your list of positives sounds like it was borrowed from a Yes vs King Crimson usenet thread.

If we are comparing all art by its meaning to viewers/listeners, you have a point, in that everyone tends to overassociate value with music that liked at the time when that music really “reached” them. Pop music just sounds better to teenagers than 30 year olds. But I don’t think that means that critically speaking, in that strange formula in which we read the value of music from a semi-objective standpoint, J-Pop today in any way holds up to what has come before. It certainly doesn’t in sales and in reach, and I am arguing, it also doesn’t in “critical value.”

Amida: I guess we can argue about definitions of pop history. I’m not trying to argue that the pop music scene of 2008 is exactly analogous to that of 1998. Just that there will always be bands we like and bands we don’t like, their sales will go up and down, but people’s response to music will still have little to nothing to do with quality and everything to do with context, marketing, and other factors entirely unrelated to the music itself.

Look, I don’t mean to be a total musical relativist. I just don’t think it’s wise to confuse personal taste with objective facts. That road leads to Yngwie Malmsteen albums.

And don’t you think that “end of pop history” thing is a little…not true at all?

I think the end of pop history occurred around 2001.