Pop’s malaise is not MOR itself but its corruption by indie authenticity

Evidence

The Junior Boys’ songs have always had more in common with a certain type of modernist MOR – Hall and Oates, Prefab Sprout, Blue Nile, Lindsay Buckingham – than with any rock. Modernist MOR is the opposite of the discredited strategy of entryism: it doesn’t ‘conform to deform’, it locates the alien right in the heart of the familiar. The problem with current Pop is not the predominance of MOR, but the fact that MOR has been corrupted by the wheedling whine of Indie authenticity. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 488

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduced the concept of ‘modernist MOR’ as locating the alien in the familiar, and identifies its opposite in ‘conform to deform’ entryism.
• XREF: connects to: Pop’s current malaise is that its missing vitality goes unnoticed rather than being mourned — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1089

Broader Connections

• Pop’s current malaise is that its missing vitality goes unnoticed rather than being mourned #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1089