How pop's Teenage Dream ended – fascinating Atlanic article

[socotra 3,292]

Super well-done article in The Atlantic explaining pop music's decline since the early 2010s. Some highlights below:

"“I am a walking cartoon most days,” Katy Perry told Billboard in 2010, and anyone who lived through the reign of Teenage Dream—Perry’s smash album that turned 10 years old on August 24—knows what she meant. Everywhere you looked or clicked back then, there was Perry, wrapped in candy-cane stripes, firing whipped cream from her breasts, wearing a toothpaste-blue wig, and grinning like an emoji.

Perry wasn’t alone in achieving domination through colorful looks and stomping songs. Teenage Dream arrived amid a wave of female pop singers selling their own costumed fictions: Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas. Beyoncé shimmied in the guise of her alter ego, Sasha Fierce. Nicki Minaj flipped through personalities while wearing anime silhouettes and fuschia patterns. Kesha, glitter-strewn and studded, babbled her battle cries. Taylor Swift trundled around in horse-drawn carriages. Each singer achieved impressive things, though arguably none of their albums so purely epitomized pop—in commercial, aesthetic, or sociological terms—like Perry’s Teenage Dream did.

A decade later, that early-2010s fantasy has ended, and Perry and her peers have seemed to switch gears. Rihanna has put her music career on pause while building a fashion and makeup empire. Beyoncé has turned her focus to richly textured visual albums that don’t necessarily spawn monster singles. Gaga, after a long detour away from dance floors, has returned to sounds and looks comparable to those of her early days, but she cannot bank on mass listenership for doing so. Swift keeps reinventing herself with greater seriousness, and little about her latest best seller, Folklore, scans as pop. Perry’s latest album, Smile, came out Friday. Regarding her new music’s likelihood of world domination, Perry told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “My expectations are very managed right now.”

For the younger class of today’s stars, Teenage Dream seems like a faint influence. The Billboard Hot 100 is largely the terrain of raunchy rap, political rap, and emo rap, with a smattering of country drinking songs thrown in.

The recent state of commercial music has led to much commentary arguing that pop is dying, dead, or dormant. That’s a funny concept to consider—isn’t popular music, definitionally, whatever’s popular? In one sense, yes. But pop also refers to a compositional tradition, one with go-to chords, structures, and tropes.

By late 2009, when Perry set out to record her follow-up to One of the Boys, the musical landscape had shifted again thanks to the arrival of Lady Gaga, a former cabaret singer with mystique-infused visuals and an electro-dance sound. What made Gaga different was not only her thundering Euro-club beats, but also her persona, or lack thereof. Gaga’s work overflowed with camp fun while keeping the singer’s true nature hidden under outrageous headpieces. By forgoing any attempts at banal relatability, Gaga seemed deep. In this way, she updated the glam antics of Prince, Madonna, and David Bowie for the YouTube era. Many of her peers took note, including Perry. Teenage Dream was lighter and happier than anything Gaga did, but it was electronic and fanciful in a manner that Perry’s previous work had not been. The cartoon Perry was born.

[...]

Perry released her next album in 2013, a year that now seems pivotal in mainstream music’s trajectory. That’s the year Gaga pushed her meta-superficial shtick until it broke on the bombastic ARTPOP, which earned mixed reviews and soft sales. It’s also the year Lorde, a New Zealand teenager whose confessional lyrics and glum sonic sensibility would be copied for the rest of the decade, released her debut. Then in December, Beyoncé surprise-dropped a self-titled album whose opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” convincingly critiqued the way society asks women to construct beauty-pageant versions of themselves. Later on the album, Beyoncé sang in shockingly explicit detail about her marriage to Jay-Z. Tropes of drunken hookups, simmering jealousy, and near-breakups were reinvigorated as specific and biographical, thanks in part to Beyoncé’s fluency with rap’s and R&B’s storytelling methods. She ended up seeming more glamorous than ever for the appearance of honesty.

The Kesha-versus-Luke chapter added to a brewing sense that the carefree pop of the early 2010s was built on dark realities: Perry and Gaga have both described their most profitable years as personally torturous. Broader social and political developments—Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement, and the election of Donald Trump—also proved impossible to ignore for even the most frivolous-seeming entertainers.

[...]

The explosive optimism of Teenage Dream has been replaced by ambivalence and resolve, yet the musical mode hasn’t really changed to match. This leaves Perry tending to longtime fans but unlikely to mint many new ones. That’s because pure pop, the kind that thrives on doing simplicity really well, is largely a niche art form now. The delightful Carly Rae Jepsen will still sell out venues despite not having had a true hit in years.

[...]

Fixtures such as Lady Gaga do still have enough heft to ripple the charts (and thank God—her sense of spectacle saved the VMAs on Sunday). But her recent No. 1 single, “Rain on Me,” benefited from Ariana Grande, whose ongoing success comes from smartly channeling R&B.

[...]

Streaming, now the dominant form of music consumption, does not reward bright and insistent sing-alongs that demand attention but offer little depth. It instead works well for vibey background music, like the kind made by Post Malone, who’s maybe the most cartoonish figure of the present zeitgeist. It also works well for hip-hop with an obsession-worthy interplay of slangy lyrics, syncopated rhythms, and complex personas, all of which are presented in a context that feels like it has something to do with real life. Last week’s No. 1 song in the country, “WAP,” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, radiates some of the fantastical thrill of the 2010 charts. But it delivers that thrill as part of a lewd verbal onslaught by women whom the public has come to know on an alarmingly personal level. The video for “WAP” is bright and pink, yes, but also immersive. It’s not a cartoon—it’s virtual reality."

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thoughts?

[KennyRichie 1,936]

Wow love it. Agree with a lot, it truly is a well done article 

[Lorde Von Kok 4]

An amazing article. Thank you for sharing  It is interesting to study, or at least explain, what is happening and has happened with the pop music industry in the last decade. 

[GreenDiamond 6,286]

4 minutes ago, Indyl said:

Lady Gaga, a walking Gaudí cathedral, roared EDM operas.

love this one

[SLAG 7]

“a walking Gaudi’s cathedral” now that’s a tasty metaphor 

[flyaway 15,350]

We went from Super Bass, the best pop song of ALL TIME, to WAP.

Welp. 

That's why the world is worse now. 

[boyerased 2,879]

Just now, alicefromabove said:

We went from Super Bass, the best pop song of ALL TIME, to WAP.

Welp. 

We had a stop over to Anaconda first. 

[Andreu 37,216]

We stan Gaudí. Lets just hope Gaga is more careful when crossing the roads

[Runway 27,876]

They kinda did Katy dirty

[Bonkers 28,946]

Talking about her decline continues to annoy me.  I know the article is about more than just Katy, but she was the inspiration, I suppose.

What's the point of life if you can get to Katy's level of success only to have it ruined by people discussing your "decline."

She's got a family, she's got fans who love her art, she's got cash, can she just enjoy it please? 

It's a good article, I'm not coming for the OP, just doing my part to help pop stars live a happier life. 

[MonsterofFame 1,785]

I really hate to say it, but the golden-era of 2010's pop died with Dr. Luke's reputation. He knew how to take the best parts of other genres and weave it into pop, while still keeping the song POP.

For example, Timber definitely has country vibes but it's nowhere near as country as Miley, Gaga, or Kylie's spin on country-pop. In 2011, Good Feeling took Avicii's EDM sound and weaved it into a mainstream pop song. And how he managed to make dubstep work in a Britney Spears song (Hold It Against Me) so well, I'll never understand. When his music faded from the charts, so did most of the upbeat pop songs.

Anyway -- dance pop seems to be back on the rise. Gaga, Katy, Miley, and Kylie are all releasing good dance pop music again.

[melon 3,579]

really insightful piece but it doesn’t half make me sad... I love pop music and I wish more people nowadays would too!  

I can’t help but feel it’s because they don’t even give it a chance seeing as they’ll recite word for word gimme gimme gimme by ABBA whenever it comes on...

[A Fried Egg 8,310]

Well written 

[Runway 27,876]

13 minutes ago, Bonkers said:

What's the point of life if you can get to Katy's level of success only to have it ruined by people discussing your "decline."

Well that’s the thing. In music is not about just getting there but about maintaining that status. Something Beyonce, Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor have achieved but Katy hasn’t. That’s why she sticks out among her (former) peers

[Dr Fudge 8,625]

Really great read that captures the trajectory of pop music over the past 20 years.