But this isn’t anything cooked up by a team of overpaid producer-songwriters lounging around a glassed-in studio with a souped-up Korg workstation. It’s the latest record by three-piece NYC indie stalwarts the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band that’s been fairly unanimously praised by tastemakers since releasing its self-titled EP in 2001. 

Is this development even that surprising? Hasn’t indie rock — at least many of its vital representatives — already embraced pop music? Plenty of bands have shown their love of Top 40 through covers. Bloc Party covered Nelly Furtado and Timbaland’s “Say It Right” on BBC Radio 1 in 2007, the Mae Shi released a version of Disney Channel confection Miley Cyrus’ “See You Again” last year, and Kevin Barnes has been known to whip out a soulful version of Danger Mouse’s hit “Crazy” at Of Montreal concerts. 

“If cleaning up their sound gets them more popular or mainstream, therefore more money, then so be it — I don’t care. It’s so hard to make a living playing music,” says Kelly Alvarez, a San Diego-based musician and record store manager. 

This attitude may have been very different to someone who came of age on the 1980s fanzine and followed crucial underground labels like SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Touch and Go. But many modern music fans may be changing with the advent of the MP3, blog, and instant access to all kinds of music that would have taken months or years of record-diving to accumulate. Between the young women interviewed for this piece, the bands mentioned as favorites ranged from expected indie standouts such as M.I.A., Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, and Cat Power to new pop Top 40 artists such as Lady Gaga and Duffy — and even to even older pop artists like Sandie Shaw and Hall and Oates. 

There was a time in very recent memory when any association with Top 40 music was instantly derided and labeled as a sell-out. Can you imagine Black Flag or the Minutemen or the Slits with a fretless bass player and choruses of Yamaha DX7s? It wouldn’t have flown. But now it’s a little different. “People seem less totally invested in music subcultures than they used to,” says Cathy de la Cruz, a filmmaker and teacher who sometimes DJs in Los Angeles under the name DJ OMG. She rhetorically muses, “How many people scream when a punk band they love covers a top 40 pop song really raw?” 

In 2009, indie artists find themselves in a different situation than in the early days of the alternative music movement in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Inflation of potential musical palettes, due to the Internet and a flurry of options for independent artists, has devalued the coin of credibility. Without the urgency of a movement like punk to rally the disenfranchised against anything that smacks of rockism or a cash-in, there don’t seem to be as many barriers to shamelessly creating catchy pop tunes. 

There could be other factors at work. A commonly accepted meme for people who like to think about this stuff is that the quality of the product on the pop charts has consistently gone down since the golden era of the single in the 1960s. But compare the Billboard Hot 100 Singles charts of 1998 and 2008, and this theory falls apart pretty quickly. Maybe indie rockers are being turned on to Top 40 simply because the stuff is getting better: I think I’m being as objective as one can about these things by calling the singles of 1998 execrable. The sooner we collectively forget the music of a year that brought us Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris,” Matchbox 20’s “Real World,” and (the number one single of the year) Savage Garden’s “Truly Madly Deeply,” the better. But 2008’s Top 100 list was surprisingly solid. Sure, there’s plenty of mediocre R&B ballads and stale modern rockers, but for every other Alicia Keys’ “No One” there’s a weird Lil’ Wayne track such as “A Milli” or straight-up barnburners such as T.I.’s “Whatever You Like” or Kanye West’s “Flashing Lights.” 

“Kanye. He amazes me with what he’s able to pull off,” says Alisha Torrealba, a New York-based musician who plays in a band called Eleven and the Falcons. “Same goes with Justin Timberlake.” She goes on to observe that her friends are loosening up their musical tastes. Alvarez sees the same thing happening with her friends. 

“When Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’ first came out, I couldn’t stop listening to it,” she says. “I actually bought a 7-inch jukebox single of it on eBay. My music snob friend thought I was a total idiot and would roll her eyes every time I would talk about how fucking catchy that song was. Then the day came where I made her sit down and listen to it. She loved it. We would drive around for hours in my car blasting that song on repeat.” 

It seems that perhaps the most important qualities that distinguish between the kind of pop that turns people out for its sell-out factor and the kind of pop that’s just about catchy tunes is a subtle line that’s enunciated by attitude and positioning. 

“Frankly, something like M.I.A. or Santigold, music not traditionally deemed punk or underground, sounds a lot more punk and worthy of my support as a feminist music lover than Jenny Lewis or the Vivian Girls,” de la Cruz says. Torrealba adds, “There’s nothing wrong with pop — what differentiates mainstream pop from an artist with a poppy sound is their intended audience and money.” 

If there’s anything to be culled from this, a positive person might say that music fans are getting more educated and nuanced in their musical tastes; the politics of pop may be slowly disintegrating. But Alvarez thinks that some things will always be the same. 

“There will always be the super cool dudes who won’t admit that Hall and Oates is catchy as fuck but don’t know shit about anything they supposedly like,” she says. “And there will always be people like me that can still have that super rare, limited edition, hand-numbered colored vinyl 7-inch who think Hall and Oates is catchy as fuck and aren’t ashamed to admit it.”