That is SO Pop!.

S-Club have split up. Cue wailing tweens in one corner and smug, carping critics in the other. Naturally, their demise will be used by some as evidence that the day of the ‘manufactured’ pop band is nearing its end – that the Pop Idol / Fame Academy phenomenon has exposed the ugly cogs and gears of the music business and that it is only a matter of time before a new wave of ‘real’, ‘authentic’ bands take the charts by storm and introduce Britain’s kids to the virtues of barre chords, denim, and a stolid, workmanlike stage show.

Bullshit of course. There will always be an important place for catchy, upbeat, pop music. All the whining and moralising about rapacious record executives exploiting poor young singers and dancers, and picking the pockets of the parents of our under-10s is rendered pathetically moot in the face of a song as brilliant as S Club’s ‘Don’t Stop Moving’. This is not to say that dozens of their other songs weren’t appalling. Simply that, as ‘manufactured’ and ‘false’ as their critics would have us believe they were (unlike, of course, the furiously anti-image media darlings The Strokes and The White Stripes), they – and their team – have produced a number of superb pop songs. The fact that they didn’t write them, or that some weak-willed parents allowed themselves to be bullied into buying this spin-off video or that band-endorsed boob-tube makes no difference. Is the shitty David Sneddon more of an artist because he writes his own shitty songs? Are The Stereophonics more worthy of respect because no eight year-old in their right mind would wish to own a lunch-box bearing Kelley Jones’ hateful visage, let alone be associated with his agonizingly dull music?

Of course not. But defending ‘pop’ music (a stoopid label, but you know what I mean – not rock, not hip-hop, not ‘indie’, which is a whole other stoopid label) is not easy. At the risk of stating the mind-bendingly obvious, the vast majority of music in any genre is crap. Not that this oh-so-simple fact prevents enormous numbers of people from deliberately painting themselves into musical corners – usually in the hope that associating oneself closely enough with a particular type of music will be acceptable in lieu of a personality or coherent set of opinions. But it means that defending a song like ‘Don’t Stop Moving’ means that you are expected also to answer for such crimes as ‘5, 6, 7, 8’ by Steps or Gareth Gates’ baleful interpretation of ‘The Long and Winding Road’. Similarly, stating the simple fact that Justin Timberlake is – at this point in time – far and away the coolest man in the charts, not only means that you must also love Westlife, Boyzone and the rest, but that you must also be (if you are male of course) gay.

While the notion that some things are good whilst others are bad should be a relatively simple one for most people to grasp, there is a failure of logic that takes place somewhere between the ear and the brain of the ‘rock fan’ or the ‘indie fan’. They lapse into a twilight zone of reason that I call ‘The Kilroy Zone’ (picture the tattooed chimp-man repeatedly bellowing that God made Adam and Eve NOT Adam and Steve to make his point about the adoption rights of same-sex couples). While this can be frustrating, it can also be deeply rewarding. It doesn’t take a great deal of brainpower or verbal dexterity to tie these brainless oafs in logical knots, and the look of hurt and bewilderment on their faces at such times is a joy to behold.

In fact, the biggest enemies to my utopian vision of a harmonious, meritocratic musical world are not the boss-eyed rock, indie, or jazz fans. It is the pop fans. Or rather, the Pop! fans. Not the mummy-badgering tweenagers who make up 90% of the Smash Hits readership, but the cadaverous, mid-20s, pseudo-intellectual dilettantes who make up the other 10%. The poor, contemptible fools who – not that they would admit it – champion pop music ironically. The motivation for this is unknown. I propose that it is partly a need to intellectualise the fact that they genuinely do like some pop music, but that they cannot defend it on its own merits, and feel compelled to cobble together some spurious manifesto to justify themselves. This has the added advantage of setting them apart from their Strokes-liking peers, thus giving them back the outsider-status they had when they were grey t-shirt-wearing Pop Will Eat Itself fans. So now, when an acquaintance is talking about how good the new Radiohead album is, the pop! fan can chime in imperiously, “I wouldn’t know: I prefer pop! music - the Tatu album is a work of genius”, with a smug ‘now how fucking iconoclastic is that?’ expression on their punchable face.

And there is the problem. There is now just a new type of idiot to argue with. I have no doubt that the day I try to communicate to the Pop! fan that while Tatu’s ‘All The Things She Said’ is a great song, but the follow-up, ‘Not Gonna Get Us’, is an unlistenable dirge, I will be accused of being a blues-loving, fogeyish luddite. And I fear that the Pop! fan may be harder to break down than their indie and rock brothers-in-ignorance, as – not only are they invariably smug intellectuals - but deep down they know that there is more at stake. Their whole self-concept is precariously balanced on an ill-judged, often arbitrary conceit, and they are going to fight tooth and nail to preserve it. That is, until the fancy passes and they move onto their next faddish persona.

If you live outside London, you are probably more likely to bump into the indie or the rock fool than you are the Pop! fool. But should you ever find yourself treading those gold paved streets, keep an ear open for the braying clarion call – “That is sooooo Pop!”