Sir, – Tanya Sweeney ("'Basic bitches' and an anodyne pop culture", July 6th) claims that pop culture has become "pedestrian", but her article is a strawman argument.
While attempting to typify the pop artists of today, she reduced Kanye West to a man who "flubbed the lines of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at Glastonbury". Kanye is recognised as a profound and talented lyricist. He is perhaps one of the most intelligent social commentators to emerge in mainstream rap. To attempt to misrepresent him as some sort of second-rate cover artist is disingenuous.
Similarly, her reduction of Mrs Brown's Boys to a show about "a Dubliner saying feck in a frock", is unfair. Mrs Brown's Boys could just as easily be described as a brilliant satire of Dublin working class family life and Irish culture as a whole. One could even say it has tracked our cultural evolution, for example, by portraying the struggle of a working class mother in accepting her gay son.
She complained of a lack of subversive acts, but subversion can be found everywhere in pop. For example, Nicki Minaj's video for Anaconda, which was dismissed in the media as semi-pornographic, can be seen as a subversive feminist work.
It requires some effort to see through the veil of glamour and commercialism in today’s pop, but if you do, you’ll often find depth where you wouldn’t expect. – Yours, etc,
BRIAN O’FLYNN
Little Island,
Cork.