David

“Pop music does not throw the same cultural weight it once did; its ideas and challenges are no longer central to social movements. In the UK and US, ruinously expensive tuition fees and cuts to art education have narrowed the range of class backgrounds that art students are coming from. But the magpie cultural education that pop music provided has left a strong legacy ... Postmodernism, and all its liquid games of reference, was not just an idea incubated by the art gallery, the academy, or the architecture studio; it came from pop’s intellectual permissiveness. The pretensions of individuals from all walks of life—their ambition, their curiosity, their desires to make the world around them a more interesting place—is cultural literacy in action.”
― Dan Fox

“Try describing a few of the most wildly successful pop albums of the twentieth century without mentioning the artist and title. A concept rock album about a fictional Edwardian military band, featuring musical styles borrowed from Indian classical music, vaudeville, and musique concrete, its sleeve design including images of Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Marilyn Monroe, Carl Gustav Jung, Sir Robert Peel, Marlene Dietrich, and Aleister Crowley? That’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, one of the biggest selling records of all time. How about a record exploring the perception of time, mental illness, and alterity? Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which has to date sold around 45 million copies worldwide. Ask any of those 45 million who bought a copy of The Dark Side of the Moon if they thought themselves pretentious for listening to an album described by one of the band members as “an expression of political, philosophical, humanitarian empathy,” and the answer would almost certainly be no.”
― Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters

“Why can’t a musician try to make a cinematic “state of the nation” poem told through dream imagery and pop music? They may fail miserably or they may fluke a masterpiece, but at least they tried to push their creativity. As Howard Devoto, of the bands Buzzcocks and Magazine, put it: “Pretentiousness is interesting. At least you’re making an effort. Your ambition has to outstrip your ability at some point.”
― Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters

“Pretension is a question of optics. The pessimist sees pretension as a sham. The optimist views it as innocent, tragicomic, an excess of effort. Like watching amateur actors in a local village play, a wooden or overambitious performance might not be deliberate, It could be deeply sincere; the am-dram troupe putting everything they’ve got into their production. Pretentiousness resides in someone’s lack of awareness that their ambition might exceed their capability, or inability to laugh about one’s own limitations.”
― Dan Fox, Pretentiousness: Why It Matters