Buzzfeed: Katy Perry’s & Taylor Swift’s Flops Are Bad News For Big Pop

[BUtterfield 8 41,544]

Perry and Swift used to effortlessly dominate the conversation as they sent their sonic earworms shooting up the charts and into gyms and Starbucks everywhere. These minor missteps hardly mean their careers — especially Swift’s — are in crisis. But they are at similar moments in their trajectories — Swift is now six albums into her career, and Perry five — and in many ways their current releases illustrate some of the perils of being centrist, risk-averse pop stars in a music world that’s becoming more niche.

At some point, striving for the biggest audience starts sucking the fun and whimsy out of pop. And without the goodwill generated by risk-taking in service of a deeper artistic agenda — à la Beyoncé starting with her 4 album — the strategy of trying to mean everything to everyone starts looking, and sounding, rather pointless.

Perry’s and Swift’s specific troubles with radio or streaming might be attributed to the increasing nichification of Top 40 pop. Of course, other pop divas have figured out how to solve that in different ways.

Lady Gaga had to sashay away into a fantasy film world to make her music connect again. (In the process, A Star Is Bornreglamorized white heterosexuality more than the entire Bachelorfranchise, and I say this with love for both artifacts.) Ariana Grande is currently achieving the biggest success of her career because — with songs like “Thank U, Next”and “7 Rings” — she leaned into trap, like Perry, and made her love life the content of her songs, like Swift. (Still, she did so in distinctly Grande-ian terms, trapifying the Sound of Music to stick with her fascination with musical theater.) Newcomer Billie Eilish is about to have her first No. 1 Hot 100 hit with her spooky pop and art school white girl theatrics, which read as more authentic for the streaming niche pop moment. Who knows what Miley Cyrus thinks she’s doing.

Part of what’s interesting about Swift and Perry is that they prefer to stay away from controversy. Aside from exceptions like Perry’s queerbaiting “I Kissed a Girl” and Taylor’s Reputation era, they seem not to want to turn off their teenybopper fanbases (or their parents) in any way. To their credit, that means they never had a Miley Cyrus twerking moment of “growing up” as white girls by acting out a “transgressive” proximity to blackness. But at the same time, they seem unwilling to take the kinds of risks that separate the good pop divas from the greatest: Mariah making hip-hop features central to her pop, Madonna using electronica, Rihanna insistently making dancehall mainstream, Beyoncé moving away from girl group melodies to unapologetically speak from her perspective as a black woman.

Pop music doesn’t have to be personal, original, political, or transgressive to be great or deep. If anything, Perry’s attempt to explicitly wade into politics — however subtly — demonstrates that it can be a tough balancing act. The funny thing about pop is that when it works, it’s seamless, but when it doesn’t — when you can somehow see what a song is going for but doesn’t quite get at — the illusion is broken. And right now, both Swift and Perry seem remarkably basic.

“I'm the only one of me,” Swift sings in “Me!” It’s the distance between the song’s supposed self-defining empowerment and its actual blandness that provides the most interesting commentary on both Perry’s and Swift’s current moments.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pdominguez/taylor-swift-katy-perry-boring-risk-taking-pop-music?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bffbbuzzfeednews&ref=bffbbuzzfeednews

[ElectricKing 9,405]

taylor smith's 'ME!' hardly flopped

[Zander 14,911]

#2 ain't a flop...

[Robo Ga 15,314]

4 minutes ago, Rainbow1 said:

Lady Gaga had to sashay away into a fantasy film world to make her music connect again. (In the process, A Star Is Bornreglamorized white heterosexuality more than the entire Bachelorfranchise, and I say this with love for both artifacts.)

Give me a f**King break b*tch 

[The BPD Monster 1,718]

Buzzfeed cancelledT

[DelusionalGaga 29,589]

Buzzfeed is what happens when you give stans a platform. 

[Zaskar 3,962]

Kim, there are people dying.gif

[HoneyB 27,926]

You know for a second I thought I was gonna bother, but then I realized it was buzzfeed continuing to be a roach. Pop music might be changing into something we don’t like, but unfortunately that’s just how it is. Music constantly changes and that’s because the target consumers change as well we can’t really stop that. Anyways NRO is better than ME! And that’s all that matters in my book so buzzfeed, you can continue to seethe mama. xoxo

[Username239 1,002]

11 minutes ago, Rainbow1 said:

Who knows what Miley Cyrus thinks she’s doing.

I love Miley and the EP, but still I -

[LaLa 19,704]

You know what's so funny about that? Just yesterday I came across an article about Gaga from 2015 while I was looking for something else, and it was comparing her (unfavorably) to Katy. Their theory was that Gaga is too "artistic" to serve longevity and that because Katy basically stood for nothing she had a better chance of lasting. It's so so funny to read just a few years later, look how the tables have turned! Gaga not giving a f*ck what people think and just doing her thing is serving her much better in the long run. 

"For a more recent comparison, we can look to Katy Perry.  In 2014, "Roar" beat out "Applause" as part of Perry's ever-swelling collection of hits. Perry's timeline and approach to stardom make her the ultimate foil for Gaga. Where Gaga steeped herself in meaning and pretension, Perry stands for nothing. Her songs are not anymore about her than they are about the 13-year-old girl in Tulsa who really does feel like a plastic bag. As Rich Juzwiak wrote after her Super Bowl performance, "[It's unclear] Katy Perry has anything to say, any unique perspective, any capacity to challenge or surprise, any persona beyond vaguely goofy and occasionally sentimental."

In looking at all three we see where Madonna and Perry have maintained their fame while Gaga has waned. Perry is a sort of a vessel for the pop-culture machine, where Madonna imbues artistry into the artifice of her persona, but both embrace the manufactured nature of their stardom. We know that these figures are created for us, almost as if in a "Josie And The Pussycats" lab. Gaga didn't fail because she is inauthentic -- all pop stars are -- but because she refused to embrace the reality of her act. As an icon of the millennial pop, Gaga may never truly be "over," but until she can channel the authentic inauthenticity we see in Perry and Madonna, let's hope she has enough room for that meat dress in her freezer."

[devilrhino 394]

NRO and Perfect illusion are both pop gems and I'm done with the stupid gp sleeping on these hits for old town road 

[Sepsami 19,191]

Ok why is everything about color in this article lmao, how many times did he mention white girl/black girl as if that's all that these artists are

[GagaMariaSpears 1,627]

Buzzfeed is the McDonalds of journalism 

[BenG 19,908]

Buzzfeed News is different from Buzzfeed.

Buzzfeed is trash but Buzzfeed News is suppose to be reliable.

[Reginald 13,841]

They're a little late if they're just noticing this trend lol like years late