Faking it

Another year, another missed opportunity to go to Field Day. Viet Cong and Ex Hex would both have been a major draw, but I can't say I'm sorry to have avoided any chance of exposure to PC music, a new genre of sorts that appears to have been initiated and embraced by East London hipsters but that (to my knowledge) is yet to make any impression further afield.

This Guardian article is a useful primer of a very confusing phenomenon. For starters, PC music isn't so much a genre as the output of a label of the same name. The label's performers - mainly female, often made up in press shots to look like mannequins or CGI creations - have next to no musical experience and often seem to be less interested in music than in marketing, branding and fashion.

I get the point: now that talk of musical "authenticity" is largely dead in the water, people are actively embracing artificiality and fakery, revelling in the manufactured nature of pop music and pop stars. PC music takes this to extremes and, as such, is less a genuine genre and more an intricate piece of conceptual art (or a contrived conceptual joke).

However, appreciating the concept doesn't mean that you need to appreciate the actual results, which are horrible, vacuous little Europop ditties of the shittiest kind. The fact that hipsters are going crazy for them is like something straight out of Nathan Barley. I can just imagine poor Dan Ashcroft shaking his head in disbelief now.