pop music in the 2020s: a hopeful future

in the 2010s, pop had gone through a notorious and infamous "difficult transition to 3d". because of the internet and its influences on how culture works, the mainstream failed to maintain or create timeless icons in the way every other decade did. not for a lack of trying, though. the 2010s gave us Lorde, Charli xcx, and later, Billie Eilish. but the internet made time have a disgustingly fast pace where something that happened a month ago feels like it happened ten years ago, therefore, pop artists had a hard time keeping a momentum. a few artists, mostly from the 2000s, kept their relevancy by default, but when i say the 2010s failed to give us great icons, it's because like, my parents know who Bruno Mars is, but they have never heard of Halsey.

non-flattering artistic rendition of the writer of this article in their room

besides the cultural, the musical also stumbled. in the 2010s, something that was present in the 2000s became the norm, which is the dogshit compression that some producers used to mix their albums. some radical examples i can give so you can understand what i mean are St. Anger and shiina ringo's Hi izuru tokoro. those are both rock albums, but that was also universally present in mainstream pop. through the years i acquired the ability to ignore this factor because if i gave a fuck in every instance i would never enjoy anything. 

something else of note was the rise of Trap around 2016, which had Industrial Revolution levels of global impact, making so that virtually every pop album or single released between 2016 and 2020 (when Dua Lipa released Future Nostalgia and changed the status quo) would contain at least one instance of trap instrumentation. don't get me wrong, i'm not a trap-hater boomer, i just think it got stale pretty quickly.

the album that the 2010s will be known for.

however, after all this banter, i'm happy to INFORM that as i'm writing this in 2024, things are looking pretty good.

in the cultural sense, we're seeing a renaissance of the pop icon. people like Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, pinkpantheress and Ice Spice have proved themselves to be trustworthy hit makers while pushing for better and more genuine artistry in pop. not like, technical shit. i mean just good music. while they're far from the timeless stardom of, say, Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, they are pretty obviously beloved icons that can pull off a #1 hit by name alone.

and that's not even to mention kpop!! a group i previously had disbelief in, aespa, managed to radicalize me into a hardcore activist with their latest two releases (Armageddon and Whiplash), which in my opinion sound like the most clean, authentic and fresh pop music today. it sounds like what the 2020s should sound like, more than any other act honestly.

iThink we all Love Aespa

the musical aspect has seen the rise of hyperpop, thanks mostly to tiktok (oh god i gotta talk about tiktok later. shit. shit!!!), not only giving us new artists like the aforementioned pinkpantheress who managed to make drum n' bass a mainstream favorite, but also putting 2010s singers into the spotlight, with the most obvious example being charli's absurd success with BRAT.

trap instrumentation is slowly becoming a rarer find -- i guess this started with dua lipa's Future Nostalgia and doja cat's Say So making 70s disco the norm now -- and overcompression (at least in pop, rock still suffers from it) slash bad mixing is also hard to find.

"comedy"

the beggining of the decade looked very grim: tiktok music became a thing. it was a thing in 2019 but in 2020 it became like, THE thing. tiktok was now the most profitable and practical way to advertise your music, since in these early years you'd see the top billboard hits being super indie acts that were popular only because of tiktok. the app, or should i say, the destructor of mankind, also fucked up subcultures by introducing a bunch of posers and lame-os into them. the breakcore scene suffered a lot, mostly because of Pretty Cvnt going viral and flooding the scene with middle of the road sewerslvt copycats, which mirrors the mainstreamification of emo in the 2000s or the later creation of brostep. 

along with this, some of the big boys were insufferable shit like Say So or powfu's death bed or that whack ass kwai-sounding ass jason derulo song with the horns which made me and most people wonder what the fuck was wrong with the mainstream's music taste. the technological antichrist also made so that 2 minutes or even 1 minute long songs were the norm because of shorter attention spams and the marketing strategies of making a catchy, streaming friendly songs that can also provide fun little tiktok dances and viral sounds.

this is a scientific spectrogram showing the effects of tiktok on the human brain

these tiktok hits were not always bad though. pinkpantheress was a godsend, benée kicked ass and i'm pretty sure Megan Thee Stallion got famous because of tiktok as well and we can all agree she rules. 

thankfully, in the current year 2024, tiktok is not the "only way" to make music big anymore (probably because of the copyright issues it brought us). hits are now back to being 3 to 4 minutes long and labels are not trying to cater to teenagers on they god damn phones, and people are getting smarter about the music they want to hear. charli and chappell roan are currently the biggest things and they are two artists that only rose to prominence because people WANTED to listen to them. it wasn't marketing, tiktok, or peer pressure. it is just because they rule.

really cool painting i saw on twitter while searching photos to put here. go follow this person!

with all this said, i feel way more optimistic about the future of pop now. seeing the new hit makers being people who actually care about the music they make and, independently from the audience, other big acts sounding gooder, it feels like by the end of the 2020s we'll be mad chilling, with new artists inspiring a whole new generation of kids to make good ass pop.

i care about this because despite my usual mysanthropy and disdain for normies, i really do believe everyone without exclusion deserves good art, and pop is always going to be the most consistent way to bring good music to normal people who aren't looking out for it. 

music is for everyone, bad music is for no one, 

MUSIC FOREVER therhinestonehawk dot com