The Metro: 'Oh boo hoo hoo isn't pop music dreadful'Robot Pigeon: 'Well, no actually, it really isn't'

No one is under the impression that music from Glee, JLS or Katy Perry is of any great significance in the grand scheme of things and we won't be burying any of it in boxes under schools for future generations to unearth but lets be honest here: the current top twenty is a vibrant and exciting place to be right now. Unless of course, you're writing articles about pop music in The Metro newspaper, in which case you're seeing something terrible and something we, as British people, should apparently be ashamed of. At least according to the following article in today's paper:


Should we be ashamed of what's in our charts? Oh course we bloody shouldn't be and we clearly AREN'T ashamed of liking fun pop music because we're all buying so bloody much of it right now. Should we be embarrassed for buying music by reality show stars? Yes - if their music is crap, but the days of Steve Brookstein are gone and the stuff JLS, Leona or Alexandra Burke are turning out is some of the best and most polished pop music this country has produced in years. So what if they were discovered on TV - do people write moany little articles about Ant & Dec once being on Byker Grove? If we don't care about how they got their jobs, why should we care about how Marvin, Aston, JB and Oritse got theirs? Call Ke$ha annoying, immature or just plain stupid - but 'Blah Blah Bland'? No sorry, you used that because the word fit. She's hardly Mozart but she's anything but bland. Even Marina and The Diamonds isn't spared an insult and a dreadfully clunky pun or two.

This vicious little swipe at pop music is something we thought we'd left behind in the days when all people cared about was The View, The Kooks and those countless other indentikit guitar bands circa 2006. A thoughtless piece of writing which tries to take fault with something making a lot of people very happy. The writer may have gotten away with it too if he hadn't then gone on to namecheck the likes of The Human League, XTC or The Stranglers to highlight the last time Britain was making pop music to be proud of. It saddens us to know that comment pieces on modern pop music are allowed to be written by people with a cassette collection that has not moved on from 1982.

Places like the Top Forty is not meant for people like this and the writer in question should steer far away from it at all costs - it would be like asking your grandmother for her opinion on the latest Saw movie, your four-year-old nephew what he thinks about War & Peace or RobotPigeon what they think about UK politics. It would be ill-informed and completely irrelevant.