FEATURE:
I think about it all the time
PHOTO CREDIT: Nadin Sh/Pexels
Are We Slowly Seeing a Return to the More Fun and Free Style of Pop Music?
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I have featured Charli XCX…
IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX/PHOTO CREDIT: Harley Weir
a couple of times in recent features. It is relevant and apt. Recently, she released her critically acclaimed album, BRAT. It is one of the most popular albums of the year so far. Signalling a fun and fresh brand of Pop with vulnerability and sensitivity, it bursts with colour, energy and innovation. It seems like almost every year where we ask whether Pop music is dead. Whether it is as good as it used to be. I guess, subjectively, there were peaks in the 1980s, 1990s and even early-2000s where we had some of the best Pop music ever made. That consistency and choice. Now, in such a crowded landscape, how easy is it to identify and spotlight those really standout Pop moments?! It is a fantastically broad scene, yet it is clear that there is a lot of quite routine, tired or manufactured Pop. In the sense that it seems made for TikTok videos and something digestible and simple. Even a lot of the catchier Pop lacks any real depth or fun. I would disagree that Pop music completely lacks fun and real spark. There are plenty of more infused and colourful artists injecting personality into the mix. The thing is, how much of this Pop music seems genuinely free and abandoned?! I think that a lot of it I still quite polished and similar to everything around it. I am reminded of Charli XCX because, in a recent feature from The Guardian, they argued how Charli XCX was offering something refreshingly brash, direct, open and rebellious. At a time when many artists have lyrics that need to be decoded and there is this strictness and restraint to their music, that is not the case with BRAT. It is an album that, aside from being the most acclaimed of the year, is also being met with huge fan love. Artists around Charli XCX are inspired and adapting her sound for their own purpose. An artist who is leading a charge against the more stifled and commercial Pop that doesn’t feel as fun and direct as it could be:
“That coolness feels like a direct rejection of a sanitized, often tedious pop landscape of late; along with upstarts Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX is bringing playful personality back to pop music. While the big pop stars go on stadium tours and tightly guard their image, Charli is hosting highly sought-after raves, harkening back to the messy, scuzzy, paparazzi-flash days of the mid-aughts and indie sleaze. Her lyricism on Brat, by her own description, mimics the type of drunk, unguarded texts you’d send to friends. Where the other pop girls attempt to look perfect, or chafe against spotlight or bleed onto the page, Charli embodies simply having a good time. “You’re all about writing poems / But I’m about throwing parties,” she sings on Girl, so confusing – a kiss-off to a friendship in which rooting for one’s success and demise are indistinct.
Which is not to say that the album isn’t vulnerable; for every track expressing straight hedonism – “365, party girl, bumpin’ that / should we do a little key, should we have a little line?” she says on album highlight 365 – there’s a song teasing out something deeper, harder, over an undeniable beat. Sympathy is a Knife is a banger on cutting insecurity in the face of a bigger pop star; So I is a moving tribute to mentor and collaborator Sophie, who died at 34 in 2021, which laments allowing genius to stand in the way of human connection. For an artist who balks at the mandate for authenticity from celebrities, the juxtaposition hits something universal; few artists are going to follow up a song about pondering the possibility of motherhood with one about doing coke and loving it.
All of the tracks invite participation, but not overanalysis; the point is to get lost in it. I’ve tended to think of her music as the sonic equivalent of what cultural critic Max Read once called social media’s Freudian death drive: “our latent instinct toward inorganic oblivion, destruction, self-obliteration”. Total encompassing of song, obliteration by sound – the lyrics, always delivered in autotune, important but not critical, secondary to the power of beautiful cacophony. Pop at its most playful, cutting, and uncomplicatedly fun. As the music critic and pre-eminent Charli scholar Lindsay Zoladz put it: “I believe that most great pop music strikes a precise equilibrium between the smart and the stupid, and few artists working today understand that balance more intuitively than [Charli XCX].” With Brat, she’s everyone’s favorite reference, baby”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Helena Lopes/Pexels
The feature got me thinking more widely about Pop. It has been over twenty years since we had the last real burst of this kind of raw and exciting Pop. Not to say the years since have not produced some magnificent Pop. Whether it is artists blending in Disco and Dance or this giddy and 1980s-inspired brand, Pop is in no danger of dying or being irrelevant. It is true that, with more and more Pop on the market, there is more of the safer and less exciting Pop that drops any guards and protective layers and seems very genuine and unabashed. Not to say that Charli XCX is crude or vulgar. Instead, you tend to get more of the core of who she is. Not wanting to compete with her peers or create an album that is designed to slot into radio station’s playlists or get a chart position. This more genuine and loose Pop. It sort of takes you back to the past. A bit of the 1990s. Some Rave culture and underground sounds. It is almost hard to describe. I do think that BRAT and Charli XCX, given this huge respect and acclaim, will spark many more Pop music of that sort. It will not completely override and replace some of the more commercial and safe Pop. Four years ago, this article from The Atlantic noted how a more cartoonish and American teen-dream style of Pop had faded away. How it was replaced by something less fantastical and multicoloured. I would disagree that Pop completely lost its colour, juvenile edge and reckless. I would say that the genre has gone a little stiff. Maybe TikTok and other platforms have had an impact. If you get major mainstream artists putting out a particular sound, then it is inevitable that a score of upcoming artists will mine that sound for themselves. I do hope that the incredible success of artists like Charli XCX does integrate heavily into a new Pop wave. Not necessarily something nostalgic that takes us back to a different time. Just a new dynamic and preference. Pop with no real walls or mystery. Unguarded and brash, but also music that has real emotion and deeper moments. In a Pop landscape that has lost a bit of its verve and fun, I do think we will see soon it…
KICK back into life.