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Reneé Rapp and the future of pop music

I love Reneé Rapp. I love the little accent on her name; I love her trajectory from comedy actress to contract breaker to athletic riff singer. I love her sense of humor and her bisexual icon status. I think she deserves all the hype she’s getting for her debut album Snow Angel, out August 18.

Reneé Rapp got her big break playing Regina George in the Broadway production of Mean Girls in 2019. There are videos of her annihilating her runs onstage like she’s Beyoncé. She grew up doing musical theatre, and it shows; the way that she sings is dripping with emotional inflection and peppered with impossibly high belted notes. Though her stint in the show was cut short by the pandemic, she made a big impression.

I am always enamored with these kinds of singers, as someone who did musical theatre but was certainly not built for it. There are a few things that no amount of training can give you, and the ability to belt an F5 is one of them. I’ll say it again: she’s a star.

After gaining more mainstream recognition as a main character in two seasons of the HBO Max series “The Sex Lives of College Girls”, Rapp will be exiting the show presumably to pursue being a full time musician. She played a few live shows in 2022 that sold out immediately and at the beginning of this year, she announced her first album. The second single, “Talk Too Much”, caught my attention for many reasons, but mainly because I think the style of the track says a lot about where pop music is headed.

I’m sure many of the subscribers of this newsletter have seen the viral Jack Antonoff article that came out last week, detailing Antonoff’s journey from the guitarist of viral one-hit-wonder band Fun. to the super-producer whose frustratingly ephemeral signature style has reshaped the landscape of pop music. I could really get into it at this point, attempting to accomplish what science has failed to do and describe his chokehold on music, but the point of this piece is not the past of pop, but the future.

I’ll leave it at this: Jack Antonoff loves a synth. Everything is buffed out to be kind of shiny, as if you’re at the club under the effects of a very pleasant drug. Take “Green Light” for example, Lorde’s lead single from her hugely anticipated sophomore album Melodrama (2017). I’m sure they’re in there somewhere, but I really cannot for the life of me hear any chordal instruments that are not pianos or synthesizers. Take also the crowd-favorite album track off of The 1975’s latest record Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022), “Oh Caroline.” To be clear, I love this song; it makes me feel quite literally like my heart is going to shatter into a shower of confetti. But if you think too hard, everything starts to sound like the the steel drums from “Under the Sea.”

The removal of sharp edges in pop music represents a completely predictable, even reasonable, reaction by society to the increasing unpredictability and peculiarity of daily life. Escapism has become more popular across all forms of media, while we continue to be barraged by bad, bad news. Jack Antonoff’s neutered sound rose to popularity not in spite of the perceptivity of pop music listeners, but because of it.

I’m particularly excited about Reneé Rapp’s “Talk Too Much” not just because it’s a banger and a great single, but also because it, along with a few other recent hits, signals a sea change in the way that pop music is produced. This transformation I speak of actually comes down to one single instrument, and not even a new one—baby, guitars are back.

Specifically, distorted guitars are back in pop. After years of Antonoff (and others, but he has such a punchable face), desexing the genre, it has regained its je ne sais quoi and is hurtling towards a messy, sloppy, chaotic apex. Dan Nigro and Olivia Rodrigo used the momentum behind “drivers license” to release an album obviously influenced by Alanis Morissette and Gwen Stefani, especially on tracks like “brutal.” Newcomer Lindsey Lomis, who also got her name from a squarely ballad hit, just released an EP full of prominent guitar licks.

“Talk Too Much” brilliantly blends the grunge of alt-rock with the airtightness of pop percussion production. Pop singers are finding ways to completely explode the genre; Madison Beer’s “Home to Another One” sounds like 2015 Tame Impala in a Fantasia (1940) fever dream. The refusal to adhere to genre guidelines is becoming more and more blatant as producers get bolder and consumers get more adventurous. The result is something exciting but completely familiar; distorted guitars aren’t new, they just got lost.

Antonoff and his army of beautiful women will always have a place in my heart. I think that Melodrama is one of the best albums ever made, and while I’ll attribute most of that credit to Lorde’s emotionally arresting songwriting, I cannot entirely separate out the glossy production from those huge teenage feelings she sings about. I’m just excited about more guitars, frankly, as there’s nothing better than another man inspired to become a shredder and proceed to tell you all about his pickups, his pedals, his strings—

Enough from me. Stream “Talk Too Much.”