Upon greater reflection, I've been unfair to Ms. Nash, in that she is but a tiny piece of a much bigger and grosser context. And while I don't want to be listening to her music, neither am I interested in the alternative I seemed to have suggested she default to (self serious emotionalism). I suppose what's obnoxious to me is that these little tricks of non-committal meta-song interruption seem favorable enough to audiences, for instance, college kids hosting radio shows, into deciding Kate Nash or Jason Schwartzman (the song West Coast, also a campus hit), or Yael Naim, are more honest or interesting or otherwise credible than the monolithic mainstream that they are most formally aligned with.
I don't mean this as a "fuck those tasteless college kids." I simply find it interesting, and frustrating, that there's a serious commercial market that has sprung from, in part, the indie rock idiom, marketing music to the moderately contrary youth, and this youth market still recognizes something of themselves in this stuff. Or maybe they just like those catchy beats.
But the indie rock self-consciousness was grating enough when coupled with an often imaginative musical freedom and invention and the righteousness of a reactionary alternative and autonomy.
