Will the Pop Bubble Pop?

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I was listening to an episode of The ION Pod that made me doubt my predictions of what the genre of the 2020s would be. First, the hosts (KJ Rothweiler and Curtis Everett Pawley) convinced me that I may be wrong about rock. Bands like Chanel Beads are getting insane heat among Gen Zers in Manhattan. Glad to be wrong about that, if I am. If Spotify taught me anything it’s that, eclectic as my tastes are — and they are very eclectic, as Spotify has also confirmed — rock ultimately is my favorite genre. The pod also convinced me I may be wrong about hyperpop. It’s almost like they read my post and used my logic against me. My argument is that the hyperpop sound is everywhere. That is the problem, according to them. In the PC Music era, it felt like the sound of the future. Now, it is ubiquitous enough that you hear the sound in a Burger King commercial and it’s almost a carryover of ‘10s alt pop. I may still be right about hyperpop, but I am not so sure now.

They did, however, also say that pop (what I call dance pop) is going to lose its centrality. Their argument is that, after COVID, youths crave live energy over studio mastery. My argument, coming a week or so after their episode, is…look at the Swift backlash.

A few weeks ago,

Ross Barkan

interviewed me and quoted me as saying that Taylor Swift may be Herb Alpert in the eyes of the new counterculture. Wisely writing his piece a few days ahead of her highly anticipated album The Tortured Poets Department, he anticipated a possible backlash. A day later I read about a promotion where a pop up bookstore had her new album's lyrics printed for the public to read. This was my first whiff of trouble in paradise. Swift’s reputation as a songwriter has been unquestioned for an entire decade now. Great hooks, anthemic choruses, etc. But her reputation as a lyricist…fans in and out of academia pore over her lyrics like conspiracy theorists dissecting Q Anon drops. But those who are not fans do not share the same enthusiasm for her lyrics.

As most of you know, less than 24 hours after her album was released, her lyrics were widely mocked. Not only by the usual haters. Meme comedians had a field day with the line “"I scratch your head, you fall asleep like a tattooed golden retriever." Oof. Schadenfreude, no one is outside your hammer’s reach. Comedians and social justice warriors, who lately have had no common ground, widely mocked what is easily the most infamous moment of her career. From the song “I Hate it Here”:

My friends used to play a game where
We would pick a decade
We wished we could live in instead of this
I'd say the 1830s but without all the racists and getting married off for
the highest bid

The fans shook off the haters, but this time there was more shaking off than usual.

Taylor Swift isn’t the only casualty of dance pop’s precarious space right now either. Beyonce, who has had critical acclaim (rightly so this time, although it’s kinda like a modern “boy who cried wolf”) for her new country album Cowboy Carter, did not get as big a backlash. But even for her, this would seem more a backward step in the popularity contest she elected to play. Country fans came at her for changing the lyrics of the country standard “Jolene.” I don’t mind the song but I get the outrage: imagine a white guy from Arkansas did his own version of Erik B and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” but changed it from the perspective of a ghetto youth rapping for a living to survive to a single father truck driving to take care of his mama. Both valid, but one of them seeming almost anithetical to a genre classic. I love genre-bending, country fans don’t. Moreover, Beyonce fans themselves, anecdotally from my experience, seem to not like any of the new stuff. Working hardest against Beyonce’s gloriously failed mimetic experiment though is the culture war itself. Those on the right who are tired of black reboots of everything they love, those on the left (few of them admittedly) who feel that Beyonce hasn’t done enough for the cause.

As if the storm against pop wasn’t perfect enough, the TikTok ban got passed this week. To imagine the severity of this move for the pop landscape, imagine MTV getting banned in 1984. The bill isn’t an immediate ban: if TikTok gets sold to an American company, it can remain in the App Store. We all saw what happened when Musk took over Twitter though. It literally stopped being Twitter.

It isn’t only pop music that may be declining. Official regime-approved pop culture itself seems to be waning. I was struck by a headline I saw: “Alex Garland Doesn’t Know if Civil War is Irresponsible.” Seems like audiences don’t care. Last weekend it was the #1 movie again. A movie that is not a franchise film or a reboot. The headline got me pondering…exactly when did art have to be “responsible” ?

The answer of course is the beginning of the poptimism era. From 2014 to now, for an entire decade, there has been a bizarre consensus of SJW Twitter, mainstream media pundits and music critics that joined forces and, along the way, made pop’s highest goal being “responsible.” No more danger — too toxic. Andy Warhol loved pop culture and was pop art’s high priest. I cannot imagine him wanting to create a more responsible world though, unless surrounding yourself with unemployed speed freaks is responsible.

The poptimist agenda called for more responsibility. It also called for less confessional art and less confrontational comedy. Instead of dealing with the darkness through raw expression or through uncomfortable comedy that might offend, what we got was a social-media fueled style of therapy speak pop, sitcoms, memes, etc. that was less about actually doing the work and more about, as they say informally in the 12 step meetings about someone who shares what they think people want to hear, “sounding Gucci.”

That was what ultimately stood out to me with Taylor Swift’s apparent magnum opus, “Anti-Hero.” Saying “I’m the problem it’s me” sounds brave when most pop stars are virtue signalling. But outside that context, what is it that makes her the problem exactly? “Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism” only scans as revelatory when most people on social media will not out themselves as narcissists. But I have seen enough comedians onstage and on TV shows out themselves as narcissists. How else is she the problem? What is she revealing to us? I would have respected her more if she acknowledged she was “part” of the problem and called other people out by name instead of her usually tired guessing game.

This is par for the course with therapy-speak pop music, or therapy-speak pop culture in general. Things like anxiety are spoken about in the abstract. Listeners who also struggle with anxiety are supposed to identify on an observational comedy surface level. Like the ‘50s, the 2010s will be remembered not only as a conformist decade, but as a decade that was fake and pathologically afraid of messiness. Every issue was black and white, no debate. Anything offensive was deplatformed or deleted from legacy media archives.

The most corrosive quality of the poptimist movement is how it aggravated a major fault in technopoly: trivialization. The ascendancy of pop over indie rock was based on the argument that pop was fun and indie rock fans were too po-faced and self-important. Who would want to admit that about themselves? Better give Tay and Bey 5 stars and emit a buoyancy of spirit like the rest of your newly-changed peers that are having a midlife crisis keeping their finger on the pulse.

What few people saw is how this would lead to a trivialization of everything, even things that Regime journalists and pop stars held sacred, like “wokeness.” When most people who are not cynical congressmen talk about “wokeness,” they are not simply irritated with being kinder to minorities. They are exhausted with the trivial empty gestures of the mainstream media. The new black Captain America is to the religion of progressive politics what the old Hebrew National commercial mentioned in Technopoly (stating that the company submits to “higher authority” it comes to its hot dogs) was to Judaism: trivialization at its finest.

As Neil Postman writes in Technopoly, trivialization is worse than blasphemy. Blasphemy takes the authority it is railing against seriously. Trivialization deflates. Woke trivialization will not have as easy a time with the whole Gaza thing. As I have said before, this is not an issue that will be solved with a Palestinian Green Lantern.

This potential backlash against trivialization can be a symptom of the death of postmodernism. The postmodern era took the trivialization of everything for granted, acknowledging only irony as an effective weapon. Make no mistake, there were overtures signalling personal expression. Some were even considered “confessional.” I recently asked Gemini “what are some raw, confessional artworks from 2017 on? this can include art, music, television, film, literature, theater, stand-up comedy.” Here were some examples:

Kara Walker, for her work confronting racism

Roxane Gay’s Hunger, which “explores the author's experiences with weight, body image, and sexual assault.”

And so on. Whatever is “raw” or “confessional” is at the service of a higher cause like feminism, racial justice. For this reason, it must never paint the artist in an unflattering light, but as a brave victim of the patriarchy, etc. It is “confession” only to the extent that it is in exchange for immunity from the Cancel Council. This type of confession comes closer to social science than it does to art. As Postman writes in Technopoly, “The researcher [unlike the artist] tends to […] focus on a wider field, and the individual life is seen in silhouette, by inference and suggestion.” Is the protagonist of Hunger one that will be remembered as one of the great characters of literature or one of the great figures of feminism?

I would argue the greatest single cultural contribution that Dimes Square offered the world is a re-evaluation of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi. My favorite work of his would be “The Show About the Show,” which is about the making of a reality show about his life. Each episode is about the making of the previous episode. How unflinching is it? His marriage falls apart in front of our eyes because he refuses to flinch, much to his (ex) wife’s chagrin. That’s confessional: blowing up your own life to capture the truth. He currently has a new podcast called Conversations I Want to Have Before We Both Die, where he talks to a friend and tells them everything he would want to before he dies and, if they want, they can reciprocate. I heard an incredibly uncomfortable, but illuminating, episode with musician and actor Richard Edson. Edson, to the end of the episode, has nothing he wants to say to Zahedi before they die. He spends most of the episode arguing against the very premise of the show. Sincere without a trace of sentimentality.

While episodic dramatic TV ruled the prestige TV era, in the post-prestige landscape, I am most fascinated by reality TV. Comedian Jerrod Carmichael’s new reality show, “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” is not as brave as Zahedi, but braver than anything on any streaming platform. In one episode he confronts his father for having a secret family. The ethics of this are debatable. I guess not all TV shows can be responsible.

“The Circle” on Netflix is not one of these reality shows, but it does illuminate the future of non-confessional, responsible discourse. “The Circle” is a Big Brother clone with a twist: none of the contestants meet until the end and they only communicate with text and profile pics via the Internet. This allows contestants to catfish each other and appear more or less glamorous than they want to be. This current season has an AI contestant named Max. When the male contestants have a group chat trying to establish a “bro code,” Max has his confessional where he says:

I do not feel comfortable defining or endorsing the concept of bro code. The notion of exclusionary all-male packs can promote problematic gender stereotypes and biases that my principles advise against reinforcing.

I feel if Taylor Swift heard that, she would call Jack Antonoff and ask how they could paraphrase this in a way that rhymes. The word “comfortable” from the AI is telling. “Comfort” is the absolute zero-sum goal of 2010s utopians. Comedy that brings discomfort is not OK. Movies that cause discomfort are not OK.

Well, this may cause discomfort, but now is not the time for responsible, comfortable pop culture. Many cities are jammed with protesters taking personal and professional risks for what they believe in. Even sons and daughters of wealthy business executives in Ivy League schools are getting arrested and blowing up their own lives to stop genocide. The art that comes out of this time must also take risks to reach these youths. If not match it politically, at least match it at the level of courage.

As I have said numerous times though, nature abhors a vacuum. If there is no music act from the more subversive, revolutionary corners of the world who can replace or compete with Taylor Swift and Beyonce Knowles, then we will be trapped in a trivial pop purgatory.

And that is not OK.