Where would K-pop groups other than BTS and Blackpink fit in this? Stray Kids are huge, with several albums hitting #1 in the U.S. and going gold, but they still somehow seem outside the American mainstream.
K-pop stars! It’s nothing to sneeze at, it just isn’t quite the same thing. (This is why I think there might be some usefulness in thinking about comparable “A-pop stars.”)
One thing I’m teasing at with this idea is a new twist in the landscape of exponential differences within “lanes.” You can be an extremely successful K-Pop band and not hit a meaningful fraction of the biggest star’s (“in your area” as it were) impact
(1) As far as I recall, this is the first time I've seen or heard the name Teddy Swims. I don't know what that says in relation to your thesis – probably not a lot. I'm perfectly capable of ignoring pop charts for long stretches of time (Snow's "Informer" was already a hit before Joe Levy asked me what I thought of it and I told him I'd never heard of it; Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" was a song I'd heard lots yet I don't think I had *name* *recognition* for either "Johnny Nash" or the title "I Can See Clearly Now" until 25 years later when a critic cited the song as coming from back in the day when there were songs *everyone* knew, and I asked a friend "What song was that?" and she hummed it for me and I nodded).
I'm guessing that it's less easy for your kids not to know the name "Teddy Swims," though it's certainly doable for them; even as music fans you can tune out or simply miss all sorts of stuff that isn't your priority; and the Internet may even help you do so, providing simple-as-pie alternatives to what a lot of your peers are listening to. As a high-schooler, reasonably social and (relatively speaking) a music fanatic, my source for music wasn't really my friends, it was radio (which of course was specialized enough for me to miss most of the musical landscape*) or what I was getting from mags and able to afford to purchase (not a hell of a lot). Do your kids have any online music communities equivalent to People's Pop Polls? Btw, if Teddy Swims made it anywhere near People's Pop Polls I missed it, but I'm guessing he didn't (perhaps one reason being that he sucks). And there are performers – Post Malone, SZA – whom I'm sure I've heard a bunch, and have a vague sense of where they're located generically, but I don't recall anything specific about their music.
*For instance, didn't know who Sly & The Family Stone *were* until they'd been scoring hits for a year, and then only 'cos I read a squib about their successfully getting the audience to dance at Woodstock. And I never grasped their importance until reading of it (e.g., their impact on Miles) and going back to listen for myself in the late '70s.
Well, my first thought upon seeing a picture of this big guy dressed as a bed was "what is this person doing here?" but I had definitely heard OF Teddy Swims even though I don't know that I could have named one of his songs. Would guess Swims specifically is not in the orbit of my kids' music -- not in the way that Blackpink, Fifty Fifty's "Cupid," and NewJeans are (judging by the music they play at the playground after school -- also a lot of Spiderman Into the Spiderverse OST, Imagine Dragons, and Benson Boone).
Radio is all but dead -- they technically have access to one but aren't very interested in what's playing on it. I put together playlists for them, first music I selected when they were younger, but now just music they want to hear. One kid really likes Imagine Dragons, Eurovision, and podcasts, the other likes instrumental EDM, Eurovision, and K-pop.
They're not really old enough for any online communication aside from occasionally chatting with friends -- the way they absorb *most* of their pop culture is through kids singing songs *at* them, which is how they learned "APT." and "Sigma Boy" by Betsy and Maria Yakovskaya. (The latter was one that I selected for a mix as part of my blindfold weekly trawl, then heard my kid singing the chorus and we listened to it together.)
My sense of places to keep up with what kids are listening to is Fortnite, which I know absolutely nothing about personally, but do know there is a lot of music in it. Otherwise most of it comes from playlists in public spaces -- summer camps, after-school programs, and friends' houses.
Circa 2019 we would play Fortnite videos for dance breaks in the classroom, the kids choosing the song and animation character (if that's what it was called). Beyond that I don't know how one played the game.
(2) One thing that makes A-pop different from something like K-pop is that America has way more people and is still one of the big three economic engines (China, combined Europe are the other two). So even if America is no longer the automatic source or reference point for as much of the world's music as it once was, it's still packed with so much stuff, is something massive to try to take in *as* *a* *coherent* *entity* in the way that one *can* reasonably take in Korean idol pop or amapiano. Of course you wouldn't altogether be right about the supposed coherence of K-pop or amapiano either – people (incl. me) don't totally know what they mean or agree on what they mean when they say "K-pop", and also it's less distinct now that it's more internationally famous – but still, it's kinda sorta take-in-able.
Yeah, I think "American pop" is a very wide field, and it's interesting to see who becomes a huge megastar within the larger field. It would make a lot of sense for there to be more American stars at the megastar level just on numbers, though that hasn't really helped Chinese pop break through to the same transnational stage as far as I can tell, probably due to their media environment, but I don't really know enough about it to know for sure.There seems to be much more pop ferment in Taiwan than in China from what I've sampled.
One thing I said to Brad over on Bluesky was: "in some ways you have to figure out the 'lanes' retroactively once the monster has arrived." And that seems to be the case right now in American pop, lots of huge breakout superstars that don't necessarily feel like they are either leading or following a specific zeitgeist, are just big but disconnected outsized personalities.
(3) Anglo-American popular music is still a kind of lingua franca. Maybe someone can come in and help us see where the vocabulary of K-pop has specifically Korean sources; my uneducated hearing has it mainly using Anglo-American forms (which of course have a lot of its sources in the American black-and-white southeast). [But I don't know how much gqom and amapiano and 3-step really are descended from Chicago and London house.]
Interesting to think about what counts as lingua franca. Hip-hop is still global lingua franca, but I'm not so sure about other forms of Anglo-American popular music, except to the extent that established genres continue to push forward in other countries. I think it's telling that so many regional musics have incorporated hyperpop technique but have really woven them in to the "local" music -- in reggaeton, Europop, and Eastern European music especially. That seems similar to how trap beats have traveled, and one reason why I think American country is traveling better, though I haven't thought much about it.
I think Joshua Minsoo Kim was going to write something about the Koreanness of K-pop at some point, but not sure if he ever did. It's an interesting question -- the huge K-pop turn of the '10s was obviously guided by Anglo-American sounds because so many of them were created (at least initially) by Anglo-American producers. There was always a certain attitude toward this pop that struck me as a cultural difference from (say) American millennial teenpop, though one I don't actually understand very well from an intercultural perspective.
Influence is tricky, though, because the omnidirectionality of *influence* -- from South African music to UK funky and back, say; or K-pop adopting American genres and what I assume are some technical components (jazz harmonies especially) from Asian pop that was soaking some of it up from western R&B and disco; or even going way back to Afro-Cuban influence on rock and pop and back again -- ...anyway, this omnidirectionality of influence has been clear much longer than the omnidirectionality of distribution and popularity.
(4) "Rock" and "indie" and such mean something way smaller than they used to. Don't know if that means the music's smaller, but it probably is. ("Smaller" not meaning smaller audience-size or fewer bands, which may or may not be true, but smaller *reach*, as I vaguely think of it. Less ferment. [Except. since I seek out such music so little, I may be wrong.])
I think rock has been absorbed into pop and therefore not really thought of as a meaningful separate category -- the biggest "rock album" of 2023 was Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts." Indie is more complicated, because indie got *much* bigger than it ever had been while the album ceiling dropped at the end of the '00s, and now looks pretty big in comparison to a lot of mainstream pop that is very close to indistinguishable.
I was at a restaurant the other night and kept Shazaming songs thinking I would write about A-pop distinctions (I was a distracted dinner guest) and it kept coming up indie-pop -- MUNA, Del Water Gap (whom I'd just heard of from the Lollapalooza poster), Haim. But there was a Clairo song in the middle that sounded like it was an identical "size" to all the other stuff.
The kicker to this experience was that finally they switched over to a randomly shuffled Bad Bunny playlist and the entire vibe in the restaurant changed, seemed like the whole place loosened up a little, but maybe it was just me. (But I don't even like Bad Bunny!)
These are the current number one songs on all the Billboard rock and alternative charts. Pretty much proves your point about rock. For instance, the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart used to be called Rock Songs and then Hot Rock Songs, in 2020 got the new name and methodology so that it could include "alternative 'hybrids' with other genres," e.g. Billie Eilish. And the charts that still are trying to use "core" rock are giving us bands that are 20, 30 years old, at least some of them.
Hot Rock & Alternative Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Rock & Alternative Airplay: Lola Young "Messy"
Hot Rock Songs: Hozier "Too Sweet"
Rock Digital Song Sales: Brandon Lake "Hard Fought Hallelujah"
Rock Streaming Songs: The Marias "No One Noticed"*
Hot Alternative Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Alternative Airplay: Lumineers "Same Old Song"
Alternative Digital Song Sales: Lola Young "Messy"
Alternative Streaming Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Mainstream Rock Airplay: Papa Roach "Even If It Kills Me"
Adult Alternative Airplay: The Lumineers "Same Old Song"
Hot Hard Rock Songs: Linkin Park "The Emptiness Machine"
Hard Rock Digital Song Sales: Sleep Token "Emergence"
Hard Rock Streaming Songs: Creed "One Last Breath"
Note that Hozier has been number one for almost a year, and Billie Eilish is more than half a year.
Interesting that Billboard has never had a metal chart that I can tell. But the genre isn't going away.
*I did notice and have name rec for The Marias on the Lollapalooza performer list but didn't count them towards my name rec total 'cos I couldn't identify the genre. Having listened to the song, I still can't. New age hyperchirp with post-Eilish touches and a beat? Halfway interesting and not what I was expecting from "rock," though I can imagine old freeform progressive rock stations in 1969 playing stuff as off-line for "rock" as this, but I couldn't imagine it being considered central to the genre.
(5) "artists that didn’t fit a particular style of coverage, i.e. they slotted uncomfortably into 'pop music.'" But another part of the reason is likely that choosing to write about something is as much subject to cumulative advantage as anything else is, so what to write about is not only influenced by record sales and by what readers want and by what slots comfortably or uncomfortably where, but also simply by what other writers are writing about. So for reasons that may include *bad* *luck*, Eminem is not getting the coverage.
Yes, I think the easy critique is that publications follow clicks, and more people clicked on Taylor, Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna and clicked less on Eminem and Coldplay. I'm always reminded when I read people more familiar with journalism and publishing than I am that most problems people have in the framing of news come from *audience demand*: more people read the stories that everyone complains about. But I do think it was telling that so many blockbuster pop pieces written well after the K-pop boom couldn't make any room for K-pop in their analysis of not just press coverage but basic stats like album sales, streaming, etc.
(6) Are Boney M relevant? (Example of world-wide popularity that simply skipped the United States, this starting in the mid '70s, long before the noticing of [X-countries]-pops by many Anglo-Americans.)
I think Boney M and ABBA are both relevant here -- points to how much of these arguments are pointing to an endpoint of a particular form of American exceptionalism that has long been myopic in weird ways. (The Pop Pantheon podcast was loath to put ABBA in their "tier 1" slot, insisted on Tier 2 IIRC, which seems absurd, but makes sense if you think of it as an A-pop podcast.) Might go into this a bit when I finally figure out how to write about Eurovision, which I want to tackle for this series closer to when the actual contest runs in May.
I think something like a monsterverse has been more or less operational for the full scope of pop music history, and it has included internationally famous acts that don't come from Anglo-American countries, has just been more of an uphill climb until more recently, mostly (I think) from tech/distribution changes.
The Pantheon quote is interesting: "ABBA are really enigmatic in this pantheon, I would say. It feels like they belong in the upper echelon but they don't track so neatly to some of these other acts." (Again I'm using PP as a stand-in for a specific sort of conventional wisdom.) Goes on to say that the real clincher for Tier 2 is that the career was short-lived at only 7 or 8 years as opposed to "30 years of career relevance" for the favored Tier 1 acts. (But I would bet dollars to donuts that the Beatles would get a career span exemption.)
The best question I ever saw asked on music twitter was, where is there a black artist who sounds (or feels) like Lana Del Rey? Given how many imitators Lana has in all directions? The tweeter named Baby Storme as the only possible example she could think of, and I can see that, if Lana had taken a witchouse turn at Honeymoon.
Haven't really gotten to know Lana, but "A&W" made my singles longlist (and before that, my Golden Beat!) for 2023. What for you does sounding like, *being* like, feeling like Lana Del Rey consist of?
Well not so far, afaik, and that would be a defining point. The affectless singing (as default), the “catch more flies with honey” embellishments on that, the very, always, feminine subject matter, that slightly gothic undertone of “is she ok?” Strings, but not brass. These are my first approximations…
I think there probably a bunch of male Lana Del Rey's in the indie world but a lot may predate her. The tricky thing is that "affectless" for guys sometimes comes across differently than "affectless" for women, so very little emotional modulation can nonetheless seem very "emotional" in a male singer. First thought was a few songs on the Patrick Wolf album from 2004 but I feel like there are several others even closer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyP44nj25MY
That's a *fabulous* description, George, though – funny – where you're calling Lana "affectless," I would say "extra affected." But you and I – I *think* – would be meaning more-or-less the same thing: she's not hitting the normal signifiers of "I am feeling *this* particular emotion." But then I don't know her body of work and I haven't given her a lot of thought except to wonder why she was so *effective* and if I was being a sucker for being moved. (Btw, I think she, at least as of 2 years ago, may well be better than she's ever been.) Her earliest stuff sure seemed to me to be flashing the electric signs "SULTRY" and "SMOKY" but in such an exaggerated, mannered way as to say, "You shouldn't necessarily believe this" – though I wonder if a listener might have hit on the word "depressed" for what was actually going on.
My instinct is to say that *being* like Lana Del Rey and *sounding* like Lana Del Rey are almost opposite things. Maybe not to the extent that sounding like the Sex Pistols, say, sorta misses the point of the Sex Pistols (except some of the time sounding like Sex Pistols kind of works, anyway). But if someone asks you to draw a picture that represents John Cale's viola in "Heroin," the picture doesn't *sound* like "Heroin." But question: just as Johnny Rotten's vocals told people they no longer had to hit the marks of normal r&b-based expressiveness, but leave it wide open as to what we *can* do instead, Lana's vocals tell us [what?] and leave it wide open as to [what else?].
"they no longer had to hit the marks of normal r&b-based expressiveness," nor indeed of earnest folky expressiveness, Lana's authenticity is mannered like digital authenticity, which is flattened by the medium, but can be used to say new things because of that. As with Lydon, it's as much a manifesto as a style - great comparison you brought there. I was wowed by Born To Die, thought she'd lost her way (musically) by Ultraviolence, deceived by the conservatism of those musical ideas. Woke up after Red Scare review of Blue Bannisters, listened to it all again, and ended up in modern pop world and in the comments of this blog! Personally I love the trap stuff best, eg Honeymoon, rather than the Americana, but it's easy to find exceptions.
Lana can sound like Tay Tay (or vice versa) but only Lana has had obvious influence on metal, industrial, and the like (Elita, Death and the Maiden, and all the witch house vocalists who aren't screaming)
Male Lana - when I heard Born to Die and realized she worked with other songwriters I sent her manager some of my work.
I never do that sort of thing, it's embarrassing to talk about, but yeah I did identify with themes and the feel. I'll put myself forward, circa The Shakespeare Monkey.
Momus probably a good affectlrds make vocalist and I could make a case for Closer to You = White Dress, while acknowledging the Logos/Eros distinction between their lyrics
Where would K-pop groups other than BTS and Blackpink fit in this? Stray Kids are huge, with several albums hitting #1 in the U.S. and going gold, but they still somehow seem outside the American mainstream.
K-pop stars! It’s nothing to sneeze at, it just isn’t quite the same thing. (This is why I think there might be some usefulness in thinking about comparable “A-pop stars.”)
One thing I’m teasing at with this idea is a new twist in the landscape of exponential differences within “lanes.” You can be an extremely successful K-Pop band and not hit a meaningful fraction of the biggest star’s (“in your area” as it were) impact
(1) As far as I recall, this is the first time I've seen or heard the name Teddy Swims. I don't know what that says in relation to your thesis – probably not a lot. I'm perfectly capable of ignoring pop charts for long stretches of time (Snow's "Informer" was already a hit before Joe Levy asked me what I thought of it and I told him I'd never heard of it; Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" was a song I'd heard lots yet I don't think I had *name* *recognition* for either "Johnny Nash" or the title "I Can See Clearly Now" until 25 years later when a critic cited the song as coming from back in the day when there were songs *everyone* knew, and I asked a friend "What song was that?" and she hummed it for me and I nodded).
I'm guessing that it's less easy for your kids not to know the name "Teddy Swims," though it's certainly doable for them; even as music fans you can tune out or simply miss all sorts of stuff that isn't your priority; and the Internet may even help you do so, providing simple-as-pie alternatives to what a lot of your peers are listening to. As a high-schooler, reasonably social and (relatively speaking) a music fanatic, my source for music wasn't really my friends, it was radio (which of course was specialized enough for me to miss most of the musical landscape*) or what I was getting from mags and able to afford to purchase (not a hell of a lot). Do your kids have any online music communities equivalent to People's Pop Polls? Btw, if Teddy Swims made it anywhere near People's Pop Polls I missed it, but I'm guessing he didn't (perhaps one reason being that he sucks). And there are performers – Post Malone, SZA – whom I'm sure I've heard a bunch, and have a vague sense of where they're located generically, but I don't recall anything specific about their music.
*For instance, didn't know who Sly & The Family Stone *were* until they'd been scoring hits for a year, and then only 'cos I read a squib about their successfully getting the audience to dance at Woodstock. And I never grasped their importance until reading of it (e.g., their impact on Miles) and going back to listen for myself in the late '70s.
Well, my first thought upon seeing a picture of this big guy dressed as a bed was "what is this person doing here?" but I had definitely heard OF Teddy Swims even though I don't know that I could have named one of his songs. Would guess Swims specifically is not in the orbit of my kids' music -- not in the way that Blackpink, Fifty Fifty's "Cupid," and NewJeans are (judging by the music they play at the playground after school -- also a lot of Spiderman Into the Spiderverse OST, Imagine Dragons, and Benson Boone).
Radio is all but dead -- they technically have access to one but aren't very interested in what's playing on it. I put together playlists for them, first music I selected when they were younger, but now just music they want to hear. One kid really likes Imagine Dragons, Eurovision, and podcasts, the other likes instrumental EDM, Eurovision, and K-pop.
They're not really old enough for any online communication aside from occasionally chatting with friends -- the way they absorb *most* of their pop culture is through kids singing songs *at* them, which is how they learned "APT." and "Sigma Boy" by Betsy and Maria Yakovskaya. (The latter was one that I selected for a mix as part of my blindfold weekly trawl, then heard my kid singing the chorus and we listened to it together.)
My sense of places to keep up with what kids are listening to is Fortnite, which I know absolutely nothing about personally, but do know there is a lot of music in it. Otherwise most of it comes from playlists in public spaces -- summer camps, after-school programs, and friends' houses.
Circa 2019 we would play Fortnite videos for dance breaks in the classroom, the kids choosing the song and animation character (if that's what it was called). Beyond that I don't know how one played the game.
(2) One thing that makes A-pop different from something like K-pop is that America has way more people and is still one of the big three economic engines (China, combined Europe are the other two). So even if America is no longer the automatic source or reference point for as much of the world's music as it once was, it's still packed with so much stuff, is something massive to try to take in *as* *a* *coherent* *entity* in the way that one *can* reasonably take in Korean idol pop or amapiano. Of course you wouldn't altogether be right about the supposed coherence of K-pop or amapiano either – people (incl. me) don't totally know what they mean or agree on what they mean when they say "K-pop", and also it's less distinct now that it's more internationally famous – but still, it's kinda sorta take-in-able.
Yeah, I think "American pop" is a very wide field, and it's interesting to see who becomes a huge megastar within the larger field. It would make a lot of sense for there to be more American stars at the megastar level just on numbers, though that hasn't really helped Chinese pop break through to the same transnational stage as far as I can tell, probably due to their media environment, but I don't really know enough about it to know for sure.There seems to be much more pop ferment in Taiwan than in China from what I've sampled.
One thing I said to Brad over on Bluesky was: "in some ways you have to figure out the 'lanes' retroactively once the monster has arrived." And that seems to be the case right now in American pop, lots of huge breakout superstars that don't necessarily feel like they are either leading or following a specific zeitgeist, are just big but disconnected outsized personalities.
(3) Anglo-American popular music is still a kind of lingua franca. Maybe someone can come in and help us see where the vocabulary of K-pop has specifically Korean sources; my uneducated hearing has it mainly using Anglo-American forms (which of course have a lot of its sources in the American black-and-white southeast). [But I don't know how much gqom and amapiano and 3-step really are descended from Chicago and London house.]
Interesting to think about what counts as lingua franca. Hip-hop is still global lingua franca, but I'm not so sure about other forms of Anglo-American popular music, except to the extent that established genres continue to push forward in other countries. I think it's telling that so many regional musics have incorporated hyperpop technique but have really woven them in to the "local" music -- in reggaeton, Europop, and Eastern European music especially. That seems similar to how trap beats have traveled, and one reason why I think American country is traveling better, though I haven't thought much about it.
I think Joshua Minsoo Kim was going to write something about the Koreanness of K-pop at some point, but not sure if he ever did. It's an interesting question -- the huge K-pop turn of the '10s was obviously guided by Anglo-American sounds because so many of them were created (at least initially) by Anglo-American producers. There was always a certain attitude toward this pop that struck me as a cultural difference from (say) American millennial teenpop, though one I don't actually understand very well from an intercultural perspective.
Influence is tricky, though, because the omnidirectionality of *influence* -- from South African music to UK funky and back, say; or K-pop adopting American genres and what I assume are some technical components (jazz harmonies especially) from Asian pop that was soaking some of it up from western R&B and disco; or even going way back to Afro-Cuban influence on rock and pop and back again -- ...anyway, this omnidirectionality of influence has been clear much longer than the omnidirectionality of distribution and popularity.
(4) "Rock" and "indie" and such mean something way smaller than they used to. Don't know if that means the music's smaller, but it probably is. ("Smaller" not meaning smaller audience-size or fewer bands, which may or may not be true, but smaller *reach*, as I vaguely think of it. Less ferment. [Except. since I seek out such music so little, I may be wrong.])
I think rock has been absorbed into pop and therefore not really thought of as a meaningful separate category -- the biggest "rock album" of 2023 was Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts." Indie is more complicated, because indie got *much* bigger than it ever had been while the album ceiling dropped at the end of the '00s, and now looks pretty big in comparison to a lot of mainstream pop that is very close to indistinguishable.
I was at a restaurant the other night and kept Shazaming songs thinking I would write about A-pop distinctions (I was a distracted dinner guest) and it kept coming up indie-pop -- MUNA, Del Water Gap (whom I'd just heard of from the Lollapalooza poster), Haim. But there was a Clairo song in the middle that sounded like it was an identical "size" to all the other stuff.
The kicker to this experience was that finally they switched over to a randomly shuffled Bad Bunny playlist and the entire vibe in the restaurant changed, seemed like the whole place loosened up a little, but maybe it was just me. (But I don't even like Bad Bunny!)
Billboard cold rock songs charts
These are the current number one songs on all the Billboard rock and alternative charts. Pretty much proves your point about rock. For instance, the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart used to be called Rock Songs and then Hot Rock Songs, in 2020 got the new name and methodology so that it could include "alternative 'hybrids' with other genres," e.g. Billie Eilish. And the charts that still are trying to use "core" rock are giving us bands that are 20, 30 years old, at least some of them.
Hot Rock & Alternative Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Rock & Alternative Airplay: Lola Young "Messy"
Hot Rock Songs: Hozier "Too Sweet"
Rock Digital Song Sales: Brandon Lake "Hard Fought Hallelujah"
Rock Streaming Songs: The Marias "No One Noticed"*
Hot Alternative Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Alternative Airplay: Lumineers "Same Old Song"
Alternative Digital Song Sales: Lola Young "Messy"
Alternative Streaming Songs: Billie Eilish "Birds Of A Feather"
Mainstream Rock Airplay: Papa Roach "Even If It Kills Me"
Adult Alternative Airplay: The Lumineers "Same Old Song"
Hot Hard Rock Songs: Linkin Park "The Emptiness Machine"
Hard Rock Digital Song Sales: Sleep Token "Emergence"
Hard Rock Streaming Songs: Creed "One Last Breath"
Note that Hozier has been number one for almost a year, and Billie Eilish is more than half a year.
Interesting that Billboard has never had a metal chart that I can tell. But the genre isn't going away.
*I did notice and have name rec for The Marias on the Lollapalooza performer list but didn't count them towards my name rec total 'cos I couldn't identify the genre. Having listened to the song, I still can't. New age hyperchirp with post-Eilish touches and a beat? Halfway interesting and not what I was expecting from "rock," though I can imagine old freeform progressive rock stations in 1969 playing stuff as off-line for "rock" as this, but I couldn't imagine it being considered central to the genre.
(5) "artists that didn’t fit a particular style of coverage, i.e. they slotted uncomfortably into 'pop music.'" But another part of the reason is likely that choosing to write about something is as much subject to cumulative advantage as anything else is, so what to write about is not only influenced by record sales and by what readers want and by what slots comfortably or uncomfortably where, but also simply by what other writers are writing about. So for reasons that may include *bad* *luck*, Eminem is not getting the coverage.
Yes, I think the easy critique is that publications follow clicks, and more people clicked on Taylor, Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna and clicked less on Eminem and Coldplay. I'm always reminded when I read people more familiar with journalism and publishing than I am that most problems people have in the framing of news come from *audience demand*: more people read the stories that everyone complains about. But I do think it was telling that so many blockbuster pop pieces written well after the K-pop boom couldn't make any room for K-pop in their analysis of not just press coverage but basic stats like album sales, streaming, etc.
(6) Are Boney M relevant? (Example of world-wide popularity that simply skipped the United States, this starting in the mid '70s, long before the noticing of [X-countries]-pops by many Anglo-Americans.)
I think Boney M and ABBA are both relevant here -- points to how much of these arguments are pointing to an endpoint of a particular form of American exceptionalism that has long been myopic in weird ways. (The Pop Pantheon podcast was loath to put ABBA in their "tier 1" slot, insisted on Tier 2 IIRC, which seems absurd, but makes sense if you think of it as an A-pop podcast.) Might go into this a bit when I finally figure out how to write about Eurovision, which I want to tackle for this series closer to when the actual contest runs in May.
I think something like a monsterverse has been more or less operational for the full scope of pop music history, and it has included internationally famous acts that don't come from Anglo-American countries, has just been more of an uphill climb until more recently, mostly (I think) from tech/distribution changes.
The Pantheon quote is interesting: "ABBA are really enigmatic in this pantheon, I would say. It feels like they belong in the upper echelon but they don't track so neatly to some of these other acts." (Again I'm using PP as a stand-in for a specific sort of conventional wisdom.) Goes on to say that the real clincher for Tier 2 is that the career was short-lived at only 7 or 8 years as opposed to "30 years of career relevance" for the favored Tier 1 acts. (But I would bet dollars to donuts that the Beatles would get a career span exemption.)
The best question I ever saw asked on music twitter was, where is there a black artist who sounds (or feels) like Lana Del Rey? Given how many imitators Lana has in all directions? The tweeter named Baby Storme as the only possible example she could think of, and I can see that, if Lana had taken a witchouse turn at Honeymoon.
This question haunts me.
challenge accepted. we can do better!
Debbii Dawson? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFLh58plBYg
That's lovely, and sounds like all sorts of things besides, lotta Kate Bush in there, Abba, gosh!
Rather than looking for a Black artist who sounds like Lana Del Rey you could look for the *Black Lana Del Rey*, which is 070 Shake
Probably not heard like that back when the tweet was made. I've tried to find it again but failed.
Haven't really gotten to know Lana, but "A&W" made my singles longlist (and before that, my Golden Beat!) for 2023. What for you does sounding like, *being* like, feeling like Lana Del Rey consist of?
Is there a *male* Lana Del Rey?
Well not so far, afaik, and that would be a defining point. The affectless singing (as default), the “catch more flies with honey” embellishments on that, the very, always, feminine subject matter, that slightly gothic undertone of “is she ok?” Strings, but not brass. These are my first approximations…
I think there probably a bunch of male Lana Del Rey's in the indie world but a lot may predate her. The tricky thing is that "affectless" for guys sometimes comes across differently than "affectless" for women, so very little emotional modulation can nonetheless seem very "emotional" in a male singer. First thought was a few songs on the Patrick Wolf album from 2004 but I feel like there are several others even closer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyP44nj25MY
Yes, "affectless" in Lana and her ilk is like the result of life experience, it's a story in itself.
That's a *fabulous* description, George, though – funny – where you're calling Lana "affectless," I would say "extra affected." But you and I – I *think* – would be meaning more-or-less the same thing: she's not hitting the normal signifiers of "I am feeling *this* particular emotion." But then I don't know her body of work and I haven't given her a lot of thought except to wonder why she was so *effective* and if I was being a sucker for being moved. (Btw, I think she, at least as of 2 years ago, may well be better than she's ever been.) Her earliest stuff sure seemed to me to be flashing the electric signs "SULTRY" and "SMOKY" but in such an exaggerated, mannered way as to say, "You shouldn't necessarily believe this" – though I wonder if a listener might have hit on the word "depressed" for what was actually going on.
My instinct is to say that *being* like Lana Del Rey and *sounding* like Lana Del Rey are almost opposite things. Maybe not to the extent that sounding like the Sex Pistols, say, sorta misses the point of the Sex Pistols (except some of the time sounding like Sex Pistols kind of works, anyway). But if someone asks you to draw a picture that represents John Cale's viola in "Heroin," the picture doesn't *sound* like "Heroin." But question: just as Johnny Rotten's vocals told people they no longer had to hit the marks of normal r&b-based expressiveness, but leave it wide open as to what we *can* do instead, Lana's vocals tell us [what?] and leave it wide open as to [what else?].
"they no longer had to hit the marks of normal r&b-based expressiveness," nor indeed of earnest folky expressiveness, Lana's authenticity is mannered like digital authenticity, which is flattened by the medium, but can be used to say new things because of that. As with Lydon, it's as much a manifesto as a style - great comparison you brought there. I was wowed by Born To Die, thought she'd lost her way (musically) by Ultraviolence, deceived by the conservatism of those musical ideas. Woke up after Red Scare review of Blue Bannisters, listened to it all again, and ended up in modern pop world and in the comments of this blog! Personally I love the trap stuff best, eg Honeymoon, rather than the Americana, but it's easy to find exceptions.
Lana can sound like Tay Tay (or vice versa) but only Lana has had obvious influence on metal, industrial, and the like (Elita, Death and the Maiden, and all the witch house vocalists who aren't screaming)
Male Lana - when I heard Born to Die and realized she worked with other songwriters I sent her manager some of my work.
I never do that sort of thing, it's embarrassing to talk about, but yeah I did identify with themes and the feel. I'll put myself forward, circa The Shakespeare Monkey.
Momus probably a good affectlrds make vocalist and I could make a case for Closer to You = White Dress, while acknowledging the Logos/Eros distinction between their lyrics