A Confession:

Hi, my name is Keir Bristol, and I love pop music. 

I can’t hold it back anymore. I love pop music. I love Rihanna and I love Christina Aguilera. I love Britney Spears and regularly pray at the altar of Beyonce Knowles. I love music that makes me want to dance and belt out notes I know I can’t hit. I have playlists dedicated to pre-parties; putting on makeup with my friends, deciding what shoes go best with my outfit, and blasting up-tempo anthems to get pumped for the night ahead. Pop music keeps me running at the gym and it brightens up my ride to the job that I hate. And if that isn’t love, what is?

I have a Last.fm account, and while I love the concept of Last.fm, it did make me paranoid about people judging my music taste. Was I listening to enough indie bands? Why did the scrobbling feature crash when I was listening to old school hip-hop the other day? What if I had too many scrobbles of Lady Gaga and not enough of Madonna- would people accuse me of being a poser? I know I’m not the only one who has this problem, and I also know I’m not the only one to overcome it. 

My friend Lindsey recently said that listening to music has become infinitely more fun since she stopped caring about what people considered ‘good’ or ‘real’ music. In theory, I knew she was right, but in practice? I was still partially worried, and mostly exhausted. I was tired of feeling like I should delete certain songs to take down the listens of a certain artist for the sake of my ‘music cred.’ Tired of going to YouTube to listen to Ke$ha because if I scrobbled her a couple more times she would be above the Pixies in my listens, and that was just UNACCEPTABLE. For me, music makes everything more fun, and worrying about what random people on the internet thought of my music taste was decidedly not fun.

So I’m letting go. I refuse to worry about it anymore. I’m going to listen to what I want, when I want. I’m not going to worry about people saying things like, “oh, I hate everything on the radio- I listen strictly to unsigned indie bands.” And don’t get me wrong- if that’s what you like, by all means listen to it! But grant me the same courtesy. There are days where I want to listen to Kanye West and days where I want to listen to La Roux and days where I want to listen to the Amelie soundtrack, and that’s all fine. I really don’t care that you listened to Animal Collective before Merriweather Post Pavillion came out, and now that “My Girls” became a hit they are too mainstream for you. Quite frankly, that’s some pretentious B.S. and I feel really sorry for you.

Now I’m going to put on some 2NE1 and have a dance party in my bedroom. If you’re into it, come dance with me. If not, go contemplate why you think you’re better than me because you happen to like Neutral Milk Hotel.