Hi everyone - I'd like to introduce an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a long time. As much as I enjoy vomiting my opinions onto the page unadulterated, the real galaxy-brain vision for this thing has always been about yielding the soapbox as often as I'm taking it. Going back to my love for ancient forums, I've always been fascinated with the idea of a publication for which no distinction is drawn between author and audience.

The following was co-written by myself and Mina Tavakoli, who you may know as my former radio co-host at WTJU, or your former radio co-host at WTJU, or someone's co-worker at NPR. Neither of us had done any collaborative writing before, and it's still not totally clear how people do that. Nevertheless, if ever you have ideas that you'd like to contribute please don't hesitate to get in touch. I mean it - rebuttal, eulogy, fawning exegesis of your favorite album, I'd like to work with and/or for you to get more peoples' thoughts on here.

What a preposterous genre. Imagine my delight when, while browsing reviews of Roxy Music’s Avalon, I came across a pitch-perfect invocation of my favorite trope of bad masculinity: Avalon, some brandy, a roaring fire - you know where that’s going. This is funny because it is, but even more so because my parents recently informed me that Avalon was one of two cassettes reliably able to put me to sleep as an infant (the other was Kitaro’s Tenku). Avalon, some stuffed animals, a roaring night light - I knew where that was going.

Sophisti-Pop is necessarily self-aware and self-obsessed - to play by the genre’s rules requires a suspension of disbelief and of good taste; the conspicuous composition you’d expect from the nouveau riche as compared to jazz’s old money. Yet even among the self-delusion that this was something more than pop music, or that there was a certain degree of refinement needed to fully comprehend what you were hearing, a bunch of British assholes managed to capture some magic.

Like most genres after 1970, Sophisti-Pop's genesis was premised upon the fetishization of black music. Yet Sophisti-Pop leans on R&B and jazz as symbolic rather than structural forms—the genre preferred to liquefy and cream them, render them down to a feeling of jazz’s sophistication or R&B’s sentimentality, rather than to express them outright.

When Smokey Sings, for instance, may not be the best Sophisti-Pop song, but it does encapsulate this world crisply: nowhere does the music - with its louche sax, ‘woo woo’ girls, and lavishly dumb vocals - really sound like Smokey Robinson’s, but it calls upon him like a sage in velvet. Or, too, Machine Gun Ibiza, where the laxative smoothness of an Irishman’s croon can’t possibly be talking about…Jimi Hendrix...can it? Listen harder – blessedly, he is.

In 2017, everything’s so wrapped in irony that it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that something like this was ever genuinely cool. Indeed, the look was institutionally soft, living at the nexus of where glamour met gauche. The boys – and it is a disproportionately lad-helmed genre – were typically gangly and unmuscled, but could pass as debonair in the right suit, a coiff, and a close-up. It was a foppish style, built for the fantasies of limitless leisure.

Too Eton-educated for the debauched trappings of American rock, this was high-class scumbaggery, real white-collar business. Until Prefab Sprout’s so you’ve got a new girlfriend / how’s the wife taking it?, I’d never even realized that rock music acknowledged the institution of marriage. Female subjects are rarely named or embodied, although I suppose that the occasional you is at least a little bit better than relegation to a mere she. More often, morality or sheepishness forces any discussion of love into the abstract - proxying for dancefloor-type intimacy are musings on desire, consideration of a relationship or fling as one might describe a weather phenomenon. At least in the musician’s imagination, there seems to have been nothing sexier than a cosmopolitan sensibility, the bar low enough that a choice reference to a New York avenue or the mere hint of saxophone would suffice.

Curious in light of its breezy accessibility, my first encounter with Sophisti-pop preceded my appreciation of it by several years. While on a roadtrip with two of my dearest musical co-conspirators, an acquaintance who had put us up in North Carolina gifted us several burned CDs. The Blue Nile, The Style Council, Thomas Dolby, and especially Scritti Politti; all were laughed out of the car by the time we hit the freeway (it’s worth noting that we were on a multi-day trip dedicated to eating barbecue for every meal, so the atmosphere was less than ideal). After ejecting the last one, I’m pretty sure that we restored Yeezus to rotation. In that moment, the genre’s name rung true, if only as a symbol to rally against.

For better or for worse, the genre’s somnambulant properties would enable the music to be played in the CVSes and dental offices of the world for years to come. Like a charming, sexy muzak meant to drain away thought or compulsion, Sophisti-pop lives on, leaving only the amniotic sort of suspension necessary to buy socks or q-tips.

The Hip Replacement Guide to Sophisti-Pop:

01. Scritti Politti, The Word Girl
02. Danny Wilson, Mary's Prayer
03. Climie Fisher, Love Changes (Everything)
04. Prefab Sprout, Bonny
05. The Style Council, You're the Best Thing
06. Roxy Music, To Turn You On
07. The Colour Field, Armchair Theatre