The Atlantic predicted end of pop in 2010

[derpmonster 22,412]

I just came across two very interesting articles by The Atlantic. One, a recent one, is about Katy Perry and titled, "How Pop Music’s Teenage Dream Ended."

It links to an article from June 2010 called "The Last Pop Star: Lady Gaga is simultaneously embodying and eviscerating Pop."

Here are some of the key takeaways from that article:

"Her assault on the culture has been meticulous. Pre-Gaga, she wrote songs for Britney Spears and New Kids on the Block, a line of work she pursued while immersing herself in burlesque, performance art, and all-round club madness. As Lady Gaga she has made two albums, of which more than 12 million copies have been sold. Her music is top-quality revenge-of-the-machines dance-stomp with beefy, unforgettable choruses.

"In the current generation of Pop divas—Ke$ha, Rihanna, Shakira, Britney, Katy Perry, Beyoncé herself—there’s no match for the alienness of Gaga. Pop in 2010 is thoroughly ****ographized and tattoo-demented; the mainstream, as you may have noticed, is not very mainstream anymore. But there perches Lady Gaga, in paradoxical elegance, her plumage bristling, with an uncanny feel for just how much of her freakery we are prepared to absorb. She has successfully managed the rumor that she is a hermaphrodite. (She’s not.) Sweetly and demurely, she has ridden the couch of Ellen DeGeneres: “Who doesn’t love Ellen?” she cooed to the audience. The culture will not victimize her. Rather the reverse: with songs like “Paparazzi” she is, as English soccer commentators are fond of observing in the wake of a particularly jarring early tackle, “getting her retaliation in first.”

"Madonna, the Madonna of the conical bras and the dancing myrmidons, had a similar thing going for a while, but tempered always with her rather frigid sense of self-importance. Gaga is post-Madonna and therefore freer: bandaged in yellow police tape or pounding at the piano with one leg up on the keyboard, she fears no trespass on her dignity. There’s nothing in Madonna’s videography comparable to the John Waters–esque sequence at the end of Telephone, in which a mass poisoning is perpetrated and fried food falls in lumps from people’s mouths. What does it mean, the image of an aproned Gaga turning a diner into a vomitorium? It means gaga, it means gagging, it means nothing. Or rather, right now, somehow, it means Pop. And who will be post-Gaga? Nobody. She’s finishing it off, each of her productions gleefully laying waste to another area of possibility. So let’s just say it: she’s the last Pop star. Après Gaga, the void."

Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/the-last-pop-star/308089/

 

Meanwhile, fast forward to 2020, they are kind of right. Pop has faded out as a chart-topping mainstream genre and the GP isn't as interested in pop stars' lives and next steps as they used to be.

Here are some articles from the Katy Perry 2020 article (includes some bits about Gaga):

"A decade ago, Katy Perry’s sound was ubiquitous. Today, it’s niche. How did a genre defined by popularity become unpopular?

"“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.

"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.”

"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.

"The title of Perry’s album, Prism, not-so-subtly advertised her trying, too, to show more dimension. But the songs’ greeting-card empowerment messages, hokey spirituality, and awkward genre hopping made it seem as if Perry had simply changed costumes rather than had a true breakthrough. Still, both the cliché-parade of “Roar” and the trap-appropriating “Dark Horse” hit No. 1., and Prism’s track list includes a few examples of expert, big-budget songcraft. The album would turn out to be Perry’s last outing with a key collaborator, Dr. Luke. While she has maintained that she’s had only positive experiences with the producer, Perry hasn’t recorded a song with him since Kesha filed her 2014 lawsuit.

"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. “When I first came out, we were living in a different mindset in the world,” Perry said in a recent Rolling Stone interview. “We were flying high off of, like, life. We weren’t struggling like we are. There wasn’t so much of a divide. All of the inequality was kind of underneath the mat. It was unspoken. It wasn’t facing us. And now it’s really facing us. I just feel like I can’t just put an escapist record out: Like, let’s go to Disneyland in our mind for 45 minutes.”

"If that point of view sounds blinkered by privilege—who wasn’t struggling before, Katy?—Perry probably wouldn’t disagree. Her 2017 album, Witness, arrived with a blitz of publicity about how the star had become politically awakened and had decided to strip back her Katy Perry character to show more of the real Katheryn Hudson. A multiday live-stream in which fans watched her sleep, wake up, have fun, and go to therapy certainly conveyed that she didn’t want to seem like a posterized picture anymore. Yet neither Witness’s attempts at light sloganeering (the anti-apathy “Chained to the Rhythm”) nor its sillier side (the charmingly odd “Swish Swish”) connected with the public. It’s hard to say whether the problem was more temperamental or technological: By 2017, streaming had fully upended the radio-centric monoculture that stars like Perry once thrived in.

"Her new album, Smile, is an explicit reaction to the commercial and critical disappointment of the Witness phase. Over jaunty arrangements, song after song talks about perking up after, per Smile’s title track, an “ego check.” There are also clear nods to her personal life. “Never Really Over” ruminates on a dead-then-revived relationship much like the one she has had with Orlando Bloom. “What Makes a Woman,” Perry has said, is a letter to her daughter, who was born on Wednesday. But she’s still mostly communicating in generic terms—lyrics depict flowers growing through pavement and frowns turned around—and with interchangeable songs. 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. Today’s most acclaimed indie acts include the likes of 100 Gecs and Sophie, who create parodic, deadpan pastiches of pop clichés. 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."

Read the full article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/katy-perry-and-end-pop-smile-album/615757/

[derpmonster 22,412]

My thoughts:

I think the articles made several points about both Katy and Gaga. I don't agree with it all but it's true in a way. Almost no pop artist after Gaga got the same treatment she did with the media and the GP. She weaponized Fame, played with it, and accelerated it to its extreme - the point where it changed not just her but the entire world around her. In a way, she "used up" so much of what the GP had in them for celebrity culture that there was nothing left - no one else had anything left to harvest. She was the last pop star like that.

Even her music did the same. It has always been pop while subverting it. It was never simply sugary bubble-gum pop. Not even The Fame. It took pop, and irrevocably changed it to something else. The Fame Monster exemplified this otherness with every single song. Starting with Born This Way, her albums remained pop but were heavily influenced by genres people don't typically recognize as pop. And her impact was significant - she not only accelerated and eviscerated pop star culture but also what pop music means. It did not take the direction she wanted to take it in but she started the change and other forces in pop culture simply picked up where she left it and made it their own thing. Now pop can mean anything - it can mean 80s synthpop, it can mean what's popular aka hiphop which itself is so fractured between rap, trap, R&B, Drake-style singing, Post Malone singing, pop singing over trap beats like so many artists do, etc.

The beauty of pop music is now in its plurality. I know many people here resent that traditional pop isn't popular anymore - but we're still getting a lot of excellent pop. We don't need it to top the charts. Let's enjoy the music and dance.

[TSUNAMI 20,948]

Well, IMO the market has reached all time high. There are more music choices than we had even in 2010. 

 

[derpmonster 22,412]

1 minute ago, TSUNAMI said:

Well, IMO the market has reached all time high. There are more music choices than we had even in 2010. 

 

This is true of course especially with streaming and the decline of radio; however, I think the point here is what's popular and not just what's available.  Most chart topping music isn't what has been traditionally considered pop and Top 40 type music.

[TSUNAMI 20,948]

2 minutes ago, derpmonster said:

This is true of course especially with streaming and the decline of radio; however, I think the point here is what's popular and not just what's available.  Most chart topping music isn't what has been traditionally considered pop and Top 40 type music.

I was about to edit my post because I wanted to reserve post #2

 

I also wanted to add that the music consumption is completely different than it was in 2010. 

In 2010 you had to decide who will you give your money to. Now yo don't. You have like 312931209381209381209389128309128309 artists available on Spotify/Deezer. 

 

A few days ago I read one nice article here about current popular music. The point I got from it was that the most popular music now is the music you don't need so much interaction with, aka background music. Post Malone, Chansmokers, etc. which people mostly listen to when they do something, while songs by artists like Gaga make music that you need to interact with (sing along, dance, bop, twerk, whatever). 

 

I also do think that radio is irrelevant in this age. 

 

 

 

 

[Lighter 15,376]

But Katy and Gaga is doing their efforts to bring those days. So let’s appreciate the Pop Culture Heroes

[TSUNAMI 20,948]

10 minutes ago, Lighter said:

But Katy and Gaga is doing their efforts to bring those days. So let’s appreciate the Pop Culture Heroes

 

But why should enjoyment of the music be tied with the popularity of it? 

[derpmonster 22,412]

18 minutes ago, Lighter said:

But Katy and Gaga is doing their efforts to bring those days. So let’s appreciate the Pop Culture Heroes

Agreed  This is just an analysis of popularity - it's not meant to disparage anyone.

8 minutes ago, TSUNAMI said:

But why should enjoyment of the music be tied with the popularity of it? 

Agreed as well. We can enjoy music just the same. We can also acknowledge that the industry has changed a lot, in part due to streaming. "The death of pop" is an exaggeration for impact/shock-value. There's still a lot of great pop we can enjoy. It's just not the ruler of pop culture that it used to be.