CSS: "City Grrrl"

Indie rock fans are often excoriated for being too dismissive of mainstream pop music - obligatory, token coverage of R&B titans like Rihanna and Beyonce in Pitchfork and other indie-centric blogs not really fooling anybody - but to that I would respond: if Top 40 pop music is about anything other than formulaic, unchallenging pablum (musical comfort food) repeated ad nauseum - same production values, sound-alike verse-chorus-verse structures - then there would be no reason "indie" mainstays like CSS wouldn't regularly show up on the charts.  Unpolished, rough around the edges beat aside, "City Grrrl" has everything the mainstream demands out of a Katy Perry song - catchy yet familiar chorus, teen-friendly rock star posturing - but, unlike an actual Perry song, there is a sense of individuality here.

So basically my rebuttal is this: it's not so much that indie rock fans reject pop music as it is that pop fans tend to marginalize anything that indie aficionados would consider "pop" in the first place.  Without the multimedia blitz of cookie cutter superstar producers, high profile hip hop guest stars for that added street cred, and frequent radio play sandwiched between established giants like Coldplay and Lady GaGa, what chance does CSS - an inherently pop band whether you want to admit it or not - have in the cold light of the status quo?


CSS - City Grrrl feat. SSION from Freak! Produtora on Vimeo.