Superior pop songs

There's a dearth of songs like this in the hit parades, in fact, it's more or less what hit parades are for, deliciously sweet, sentimentally encrusted caramel lattices of music covering a gooey center of asinine teenage emotions. It fizzes, pops, it's cracking. It has all the style and chops missing from those dour representations of teenage misery or inexplicably awful rapper bullshit that pervades the rest of the charts. So why is it missing so often? My theory is the total unwillingness of record executives and artists to venture into this area without ironic quotation marks, lest heartbroken teenagers dismiss it as uncool. In the scuffle for some kind of general relatability to the public, mediocrity tends to triumph in the most surprising ways.