Better Pop Star: Dua Lipa vs Charli XCX

[Bronco 24,599]

Both are out of touch and spoiled.

But

One runs a library of censored books.

One supports Ratty Healey.

 

[Ladle Ghoulash 52,179]

18 minutes ago, Monstermilo said:

well then thats youre opinion and not everyone has the same opinion 

i personally feel like brat isnt a good album and charli cant really sing, FN was more consistent and dua has a more soulful, sultry voice thats more recongnizable 

if you dont wanna bring up objective stats then its just my subjective opinion versus yours 

I mean, commercial success isn’t an objective indicator of quality, so I don’t really see how it’s relevant to the question of whether something is overrated lmao. If anything, the question of something being overrated directly challenges popular consensus, so it feels pretty obtuse to use that as a response to that specific critique. I also don’t really see the value in using that as a crutch in a debate about quality because it basically vacates you from having to assess the music yourself and you just point to the charts and say, “the masses like it, therefore good.”

There is no objective metric for the quality of music and, like I said, if we were to use commercial success as that barometer, you would have to concede Taylor Swift is unquestionably the greatest artist of all-time, producing consistently high quality work. All conversations surrounding music and its quality are necessarily subjective interpretations of observable qualities of music (composition, production, structure, delivery) and that’s where the intrigue lies, imo.
 

Responding to that conversation with stats about commercial performance is a total non-starter and is incredibly reductive to the conversation surrounding quality. Commercial performance has *some* weight in the conversation surrounding quality, but uncritically leveraging it as a trump card without any qualitative analysis of what tends to succeed commercially and why isn’t it especially productive. Not to mention, that asserting that commercial success is the only barometer is a massive roadblock to any meaningful or interesting conversation as it turns all conversations surrounding music into a battle of stats, making the music secondary to how songs perform algorithmically instead of discussing the music itself. A type of thinking that misses the forest for the trees, imo.

Edited Tuesday at 05:05 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[River 127,234]

It feels like Future Nostalgia was an anomaly, a good one, in her average to bad discography lol

Charleen XCXuinzel has talent, vision, attitude, she's the whole package, and I swear, I'm not a big fan of her music, but I recognize her talent.

 

[phantasmas 12,324]

i think only one of them is actually a pop star, no?

and the other is (barely) a DJ 

[Ilia Malinin 2,869]

2 hours ago, JohnPokerface said:

so you'd rather be annoying than boring? 

i mean, i'd sure has hell rather be annoying 

[nATAH 56,781]

52 minutes ago, Monstermilo said:

numbers dont lie babe future nostagia has 15 billion streams and is the most streamed female album on spotify 

im not even a big dua stan but FN is bigger than brat and dua has a better voice 

dont start now and levitating dominated the charts from 2019-2021, brat barely had any hits, it was more about the cultural phenomena, not the music tbh 

duas levitating spent 70 weeks on the hot 100, the longest  charting song in hot 100 history for a woman

comparing a commercial pop star to an experimental indie act is multiple levels of delusional

of course dua has better numbers, her career is all about numbers

[nATAH 56,781]

these are 2 weird artists to compare; 2 different markets, 2 different styles, 2 different end goals

dua lipa is obviously the better pop star because she is a pop star, charli has never really been about mainstream success (apart from a couple of albums) and brat was just luck on her side

she doesn't chase pop stardom like dua does

[EART HL I NG 1,230]

Charli is MUCH more interesting than Dua and it isn’t even a close comparison. Dua’s commercial normalcy, Charli is the creative one out of the two. 

[MountainMonster 2,677]

Dua and it’s not even close. And I wouldn’t even consider them to live in the same universe. Ms. Chuck ain’t no pop star. 

[MountainMonster 2,677]

1 hour ago, Ladle Ghoulash said:

Why do you always act like commercial success is the be all end all?

To be fair - that is the metric by which music becomes popular music. And its also the same reason that Charli is not a pop star and Dua is - even her flop, Radical Optimism, outperformed Charli’s biggest, Brat. 

[Ladle Ghoulash 52,179]

24 minutes ago, MountainMonster said:

To be fair - that is the metric by which music becomes popular music. And its also the same reason that Charli is not a pop star and Dua is - even her flop, Radical Optimism, outperformed Charli’s biggest, Brat. 

I mean, sure, but tbf that user uses that argument in basically every convo surrounding music. And, if we’re getting into semantics, the term “pop” exists in many contexts outside of commercial success alone: it alludes to genre signifiers like structure, style, aesthetic, commercial categorization, and cultural proximity to what we’ve come to recognize as the “pop format” (eg Carly Rae Jepsen doesn’t need to be selling out stadiums to be making what most would recognize as “pop music”), which, regardless of commercial success, are criterion that *do* apply to Charli’s work. Not to mention that, in a fractured music landscape, the idea that a pop star is a star in a niche/cult sense is becoming increasingly the norm, so asserting that Charli XCX is a pop star in the modern sense is accurate and defensible, imo.

Edited Tuesday at 06:09 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[JohnPokerface 698]

27 minutes ago, Ilia Malinin said:

i mean, i'd sure has hell rather be annoying 

Same here 

[djBuffoon 12,235]

Neither are especially interesting to me, but Dua is a better singer and consistently puts out really well-constructed pop tracks.

[Ladle Ghoulash 52,179]

30 minutes ago, MountainMonster said:

Dua and it’s not even close.

Ns, but I do not fck w/ Miz Snoozah Sleepah. Boilerplate, paint by numbers disco pop that could be released by anyone. Decent music, but basically leaves no impression on me

Edited Tuesday at 06:13 PM by Ladle Ghoulash

[LadyxGaGa 3,218]

CHARLI HANDS DOWN 

 

i mean we have multiple works from charli compared to dua but i am rly rly excited for what dua comes up next !!!