You can keep your fancy-pants Pitchfork criticism. For my money -- and believe me, I have none of it -- the finest music prose isn't some college boy's flower-power review of the new long player by England's hottest beat group. It's not some hepcat rap blogger carving up Weezy's toots with a silver fork and knife, pal. For the best pop writing, you've gotta get down in the trenches and wallow in the serious shit. Buddy, I'm talking about the press releases.

These are dispatches from hell itself, the front lines where art fights commerce and loses. Written by men and women who maybe aren't the fanciest writers, maybe aren't the brightest, but they've got a god-damned job to do: whatever the cost to their souls, they're gonna tell you what kind of shoes Justin Bieber is pretending to like this week. They're going to throw themselves down in the muck and the slime and they're going to dig up the story on Taylor Swift's latest brand collaboration. I salute these brave reporters, and it's the least I can do to make fun of them until I throw up laughing.

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Unlike many a male performer before him who created an epic legacy through their unique musical talents and tragic deaths (SHOUT OUT to Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Tupac Shakur, and Hugo Chavez!), Justin Bieber has chosen a different path towards earning respect: purposefully engaging in destructive behavior in an effort to ditch his tween fan base and reconstruct himself as a tragically flawed, artistically deep man worth listening to. Don't believe it? Let us be your boyfriend break it down.

See also: No One Trusts the Tastes of Teenage Girls, But Should: Why Justin Bieber Is the Next Beatles

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At what point did teen girls suddenly just become wrong? "Serious" music fans seem to have universally accepted a critique of quality that befalls any artist who willingly sells to the rabid teen girl market and stigmatized the fans who dare to sometimes be male or at least above the age of 18. It's why we only divulge our love for Justin Bieber with a laugh and overdose of self-awareness that lets the world know we don't feel he or the boys in One Direction are legitimate artists.

See also: Beliebers on One Direction: "They're Nothing"

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As expected, the Bieber/Bieber Saturday Night Live episode doled out plenty of lesbian haircut jabs and opportunities for the Canadian teen idol to bust out with the giggles in the middle of each skit. With a hilarious opening monologue that had Bieber handing out roses and misguided Black History Month trivia to members of the audience ("Girl, you driving me crazy--but did you also know that Denzel Washington invented the peanut?") it became clear SNL wasn't taking Bieber too seriously by putting his comedic chops to work, which is exactly the route they should've taken. The kid seemingly had an enjoyable time and his addition to The Californians was a goofy one indeed. But we're not here to talk about how silly the Biebs was! We're here to talk about how silly the Biebs' musical performance was, which was the portion of the program he took way, way too seriously.

See also: Beliebers on One Direction: "They're Nothing"

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Marnie Stern. This week, you can meet her dog, Fig.

Hunker down with our favorite music stories of the week while Nemo blows through. Best of luck to youuuuuuuuus.

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All photos Ashley de la Montaña

This morning on Today music's biggest deal One Direction played for their diehard fans, many of whom had camped out since Friday of last week to ensure they'd get a spot in the crowd. Across the river last night, music's other biggest deal, Justin Bieber, played Barclays. Reporter Brett Koshkin lives across the street from Barclays, and now the high-pitched screams of Beliebers soundtrack his nightmares, so constant they have been since noon yesterday. He ventured out to interview a few Beliebers for us . . . about One Direction. Their answers might very well lead to a pop music Benghazi , but we have no choice but to report them here. Apologies in advance when the blood Beliebers begin to fill our streets.

See Also:
- Justin Bieber Attack at NYC Macy's Caught on Video
- Six Things To Know About One Direction, The Quintet Taking Over The Metropolitan Area For The Next Few Days

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This week, teen-idol-of-the-moment Justin Bieber released his second proper full-length, Believe, a record studded with cameos by the likes of Drake and Nicki Minaj and stuffed with different styles of music—from R&B to simply sung acoustic-guitar balladry to something that's either arena rock or moombahton, or maybe a hybrid of both. (The song in question was produced by Diplo, so the latter might very well be true.) In the wake of this monumental pop event, the Voice's Maura Johnston and Nick Murray got on the horn (or, rather, Gchat) to discuss the album.

Maura Johnston: So the official narrative goes that Justin Bieber's Believe is his "growth" album, the one where he gets rid of the floppy hair and lets his changed voice lead the proceedings. His... justification of himself as an artist, if you will. And I guess the last track on the album, "Maria," is the exclamation point on that statement—it's a broadside against the woman who famously accused him of fathering her child last year.

Nick Murray: Yeah totally, and it's a bit unexpected to hear something so specific and so autobiographical at the end of an album whose lyrics are almost unanimously generic. I don't mean that in a bad way, of course, just that when Bieber tells us(?), someone(?), Selena(?), whoever, that he could just die in our arms, he's not revealing much about himself. That being said, I think the albums last few tracks are particularly smart. "Maria" is the broadside, but it's a sympathetic one, particularly following "She Don't Like the Lights," which uses camera flashes as percussion (the teenpop equivalent to the gun sounds in Waka's "Bustin' at Em?" and tells the opposite story, of a girl who avoids fame rather than seeks it.

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After three weeks of patiently waiting at No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100, Carly Rae Jepsen this week became the first solo female Canadian since Céline Dion to top America's premier song chart. Right on schedule for the start of summer, the ubiquitous "Call Me Maybe" finally climbs into the penthouse.

Or should I say treehouse? With its featherweight synth-string arrangement, its gently clubby dance beats and its boycrush-oriented video, "CMM" is the closest thing to a pure teenpop song we've had at No. 1 since the turn of the decade. You can keep your Teenage Dream, Katy Perry—it's Jepsen who's poised to clean up at the Teen Choice Awards this year.

Interesting, considering that Jepsen is 26. That's eight years older than fellow Canadian and actual teenager Justin Bieber, who with the tweet heard 'round the net helped break Jepsen in America. He's having a busy week, too, having just dropped his preordained blockbuster album Believe.

The age difference between these two—plus Carly Rae's gender—may account for why she is sitting atop our singles chart and he isn't. Bieber's album is poised for a massive No. 1 debut next week. But if he's ever going to earn a No. 1 U.S. single to match his blockbuster album sales and online-media dominance, he's going to have to get past U.S. radio programmers, who are inherently averse to the objects of teen crushes. Getting kids to buy singles by major teenpop acts has never been all that difficult. Getting radio to play those same songs is a perpetual struggle.

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It's nearly impossible to definitively pinpoint the moment when a phenomenon hits its saturation point. Thanks in no small part to the internet's insistence on not only "more," but also "now," we as consumers live in an era where there are more opportunities to kill the things we love even faster, and with only the click of a mouse. But it was possible to target something of a tipping point with "Call Me Maybe," Canadian singer Carly Rae Jepsen's inescapable hit that is most definitively the proud owner of the coveted title of Song of the Summer, 2012. Said tipping point came last week, in the form of click-baiting little headlines suggesting that the Crooner-In-Chief had finally succumbed to the will of the American people and taken on their favorite summer jam.

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via ABC

Justin Bieber at last year's American Music Awards.

Welcome to Sound of the City's liveblog of the 2011 American Music Awards, the annual salute to the most popular popular music that exists in the American wild this year. While Lady Gaga and Adele and Beyoncé are absent, this year's show apparently has one performance that will cost $500,000 to pull off, as well as a David Guetta/Nicki Minaj outing that is heavy—heavy in the weight sense, not in the "societal import" sense because c'mon we're talking about King Of Eurogloss David Guetta here—and appearances by Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Katy (sigh) Perry, Kelly Clarkson, and other notables from the Hot 100. Come join us for the next three hours, won't you?

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