Recently on our blog, Jessica Hopper, author of The Girls' Guide to Rocking, wrote about the possible future of pop music.

July 7, 2009:
Pop Goes the Pop

The gig is up. This much we know. The big paradigm shift is upon us, or at least floating down the pike, and so pop music function must follow cultural form. For the better part of the last decade (we can shorthand this as Bush-administration era), pop was a refuge from war and national shame — we could stick our heads into its golden sand and blot out the ever-grimmer feelings associated with American citizenship.

Pop, dance music, and even indie rock, for the last few years, have done well in mirroring the manic tenor of American consumerism, goading and gilding our insatiable appetite for more. Post-9/11 pop reflects our desire to deny and escape the problems we're now confronting, and certainly all the irony, "cocaine-glamour," and display of excess that pop was presenting us was a great fucking way to blot out the misery and instability. It all had its glorious moments (I'm looking at you, Beyoncé), but now its time is irrefutably up. More than being parcel of the Obama-age sea change, music's shift is just as tied to the music industry collapsing on itself — there is less money and glamour to be had. No one is sure how exactly making a living from music is going to work (or if that's even possible, as we are several fan-generations into the idea of "music = free")....

Zooey and Oreo were the last ones awake, and now they were fading. As midnight approached, each gap in their conversation stretched longer than the one before.

The big dog might have been dreaming when Oreo asked, "You're scared to see how Bear will react, aren't you?"

If Zooey hadn't seen the Fup look-alike himself, he wouldn't have believed it. Only nine or ten years old but, otherwise, she could have been Fup's twin.

Zooey imagined tennis balls falling from the sky. He caught one after another, counting one, two, three, four, five... until about a dozen catches along the balls turned into Fup's green eyes. Again Zooey put off sleeping.

"Bear's been carrying around this idea," he told Oreo. "And it's become fixed in his head." The idea, left unspoken: that Fup was gone forever.

"It's fixed in all of our heads."

"Right. But it's different for Bear." Because Fup meant everything to Bear, Zooey almost said — but didn't. He withheld that bit as a kindness to Bear, which struck him as odd given that Bear wasn't even in the room.

"A new Fup," Oreo marveled.

"Except that she's not."