Thanks for your patience while Record Store took a much needed break! Back to our regular schedule this week.
Today’s title is bit misleading; I’m not actually going to discuss this playlist much at all. It’s a pretty standard pop mix with all of my favorite heavy-hitters, made in the part of the pandemic when I was listening to a lot of Electric Guest and Lorde. I think it’s actually one of my better playlists from this period, but I’m going to let you listen and decide for yourself.
I’m dedicating this issue to pop music’s identity crisis, its dilemma of transformation. I’ve been noticing this shift recently, but heard it mentioned for the first time in a recent episode of NPR’s New Music Friday in which co-host Christina Lee, in discussing Tove Lo’s newest record Dirt Femme (2022), posits that pop music is becoming genre-specific as hip-hop rises to a more prominent commercial status. She mentions Beyoncé’s latest album as an example of this phenomenon; the queen of pop made an intricate and immersive ode to club music, but it would be inaccurate to classify RENAISSANCE (2022) as a popular music record. Pop is becoming disaggregated and muddled as the entire concept of genre crumbles at the hands of musicians refusing to be put into a box. While this innovation is often exciting, pop seems to shouldering the collateral damage of clear genre delineations, grasping for the rulebooks and outlines that once were law.
2022 has seen many highly-anticipated releases from pop artists—reigning monarch Jack Antonoff’s credits alone account for two of the biggest records of this year, Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022) and Midnights (2022). Off the top of my head, I can remember records from Florence and the Machine, Charli XCX, FKA twigs, Carly Rae Jepsen, MUNA, Rosalía, Harry Styles, Rina Sawayama, Post Malone, Lizzo, and King Princess, not to mention releases from the generation of teen stars like Conan Gray, Sabrina Carpenter, Lizzy McAlpine, and Tate McRae. TikTok surely plays a leading role in the wild proliferation of pop artists in the past few years, but that’s an entirely different topic that deserves its own issue.
I’m here today to complain about what is usually my favorite aspect of music: lyrics. I’ve recently been feeling frustrated with the way that pop music is written and discussed, the shift in content and presentation in the genre. I read a reviewer recently describe this move towards hyper-specificity as an increase in the presence of “cultural ephemera” in songs—iPhones, antidepressants, Zipcars—if your Gen-Z friend can name it, you’ve got it.
I have a personal vendetta against songs that mention therapy. I see a therapist, I have for years, so do most of my friends—I’m famously pro-therapy. It’s not that I think musicians shouldn’t have mental healthcare, but I don’t often seek out representation of my particular demographic (twenty-somethings with good insurance and complicated relationships with their dads) in music. Further, the discussion of a difficult topic like mental health, while valiant, does not excuse you from having to write a song that is good.
For example, Carly Rae Jepsen’s new song “Surrender My Heart:”
So, I've been trying hard to open up
When I lost someone, it hit me rough
I paid to toughen up in therapy
She said to me, soften up
If you’re not listening too hard, this song is a banger, akin to her Dedicated (2019) material, but once you’re actually paying attention, it’s just a mish-mash of buzzwords: open, honest, not-so-perfect family. If you’re going to address something as delicate as anxiety around relationships and familial stressors, it’s perhaps even more necessary to treat subjects of songs with care and intentionality. It often feels, at least to me, that artists are using these topics as filler to pander to a younger audience who struggles significantly more with depression and anxiety.
Taylor Swift just released an album full of confessional hot-takes about her past and her treatment by the media. While fascinating and tragic, this history is presented without nuance or an artistic angle that would make it listenable. The material itself can provide the basis for a good record, but cannot carry it entirely. Like a nice house decorated poorly, Midnights distracts from itself with its heavy-handed lyrical motifs:
Did you hear my covert narcissism
I disguise as altruism
Like some kind of congressman?
In “Anti-Hero” the use of buzzwords and the careless nod to politics feels indulgent, marketed towards a generation of listeners who dissect lyrics for their exact application to their very online lives. Lyrics like those on Midnights are trendy at best and tacky at worst.
MUNA walks the line between topical material and listenability, a prime example of writing that both addresses difficult subjects and maintains its artistic integrity. “Loose Garment” off of MUNA (2022) is beautifully written:
I could come up with reasons
I didn't love you well enough
Shooting a second arrow
Into the hole where the first was
We've paid in pain, now we'll keep the change
The blame is for the birds
I'll break it up into pieces and feed it to them by the river
I think my major gripe with music about delivery services and texting and Instagram is rooted in the a-romanticism of these facts of modern life, and the refusal to treat them as such. Part of the reason why pop music about falling in love is still good is that it’s been done so many times, artists are forced to think of interesting and unique ways to describe such a universal feeling. Cultural ephemera is still so shiny and new that people don’t think that it requires any sort of poeticism, but music requires poeticism, point blank.
As pop gets more and more confused about its place in the ever-growing canon of music, lyrics that eschew the aspects of the genre which make it good—namely listenability—are only serving as ironic odes to the internet. While the technologies that surround us and the new forms of relationships we engage in are complex topics worth exploring, songwriters must discuss them in ways that are still creative and beautiful. More pretty language, less talk of therapists! Thank you.
100% yes. Talking about things like therapy absolutely feels like pandering (and yeah, Jepsen's record is fantastic sounding). I've noticed lately that a lot of the music I like tells a story; like, a /story/. one that involves some sort of conflict and resolution, but more than anything else resilience. I think that's part of why I've enjoyed the new record from Plains. Previously, I wouldn't have given it a second glance.
YES. SOMEONE SAID IT. It really does seem like people trade poetry for buzzwords when they try to talk about certain issues. I generally listen to more folk and alternative than pop, genres that I would say are more focused on poetic and beautiful lyrics then some others, but even they aren’t immune to the effect and it makes it all the more jarring. For example, a recent favorite of mine is an artist named SYML. His lyrics are like if an indescribable emotion was somehow put in to words, so the sense of whiplash I feel when I hear him sing the line “I’m just a closeted misogynist in love with myself” is absurd.
I’ll admit that I do think that falling in love is a tired concept for a song at this point, but singing about therapy is NOT the answer. We need more songs about getting stalked by sentient cursed forests (like Lord Huron does) or going feral and being happily abducted by aliens (like AURORA) or how much you like prairies (like Colter Wall) or the small towns we live in (like Noah Kahan). There are a wealth of feelings and experiences just waiting to be poeticized. Surely we can find something to sing about besides love, sex and psychological terms.