Pop Music
Story Stream
The Gamification of Pop Music January 07, 2025
On April 9, Billboard announced a new app called the Hot 100 Challenge. The publication, known for producing weekly music charts, offered “fantasy-sports-style gameplay” for pop music fans. In the app, players listened to songs and predicted the peak...
The Pop Girls Ruled 2024 January 02, 2025
The Year of the Pop Girl got started early. Between March and June, the roster of veteran pop artists who released albums included Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, and Kacey Musgraves. Around that time, ascen...
Is the Femininomenon Still Happening? November 11, 2024
Scrolling through the 2025 Grammy nominations this morning, I encountered the expected candidates: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX. At the very least, I recognized the names of almost every artist listed; I laughed seeing Khruang...
The Taylor Swift We Know Now Was Born on ‘1989’ October 29, 2024
This may come as something of a surprise, but there are really only two Taylor Swift eras. It’s OK—you can still do your group Halloween costume. And yes, there is the way in which Swift divides her 11-album discography into segments with their own d...
Landfill Indie Remembered October 15, 2024
People have often thought that pop music peaked in their youth. If you were born in 1950? Beatlemania. If you were born in 1960? Punk rock. If you were born in 1970? Take your pick. For those of us born in the early 1990s, though, this trend came to ...
Eligible Bachelors October 07, 2024
The English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was onto something when he observed in 1963 that “we are one of the world’s most homosexual races.” My own sense is not that the British are more prone to homosexuality than other peoples but rather that gay men ...
Kesha Freed Herself October 04, 2024
Before Kesha got The Call, she was frolicking naked with her friends off the coast of Zihuatanejo, Mexico—a sun-kissed Lady Godiva on a jet ski, cutting through the ocean waves. Her entourage of 12 friends followed her lead, shedding their beachwear ...
Chappell Roan Got Too Famous Too Fast October 02, 2024
On September 28, the summer of Chappell Roan began its inevitable turn to fall. In a “Weekend Update” segment on Saturday Night Live, Bowen Yang appeared as Moo Deng in a bit comparing the viral hippo’s plight to Roan’s own complaints about inappropr...
Katy Perry Is No Longer in on the Joke September 25, 2024
There are few things worse than an overly self-serious pop star—a singer so subsumed by fame and ego that she can no longer appreciate the glorious frivolity of the genre—but that’s never been Katy Perry’s problem. Perry, who is thirty-nine, first to...
Chappell Roan’s Fame Is a Drag September 20, 2024
“I feel like fame is just abusive,” Chappell Roan admits in a recent interview. “The vibe of this — stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public — is the vibe of an abusive ex-husband. That’s what it fee...
Kesha Has Earned the Right to Be Crazy September 11, 2024
For the first time in Kesha’s career, the only person she’s answering to is her own damn self. This summer, following a lengthy legal battle against her former producer Dr. Luke — whom she accused of sexual assault in 2013 — the singer-songwriter dro...
Chappell Roan Is a Pop Supernova September 11, 2024
Her joyful pop anthems have connected with a massive audience, but getting here involved long odds and a lot of heartache. And fame is freaking her out a bit....
The Sabrina Carpenter Effect September 04, 2024
What is Sabrina Carpenter, and why is she suddenly so popular? In our chauvinist past, women singers were automatically compared to other women singers, and this is worth reprising at a moment when the world is dominated by one of them. Carpenter sup...
Taylor-Made Bump September 03, 2024
The success of Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” may have earned the singer $14.7 million per show, but it hasn’t been bad for her support acts, either.Artists who have performed alongside the American singer-songwriter on various legs of the global 152-dat...
The Growing Gender Divide, Three Minutes at a Time September 02, 2024
My friends gave me a bit of grief for the headline of one of my recent articles: “The ‘Espresso’ Theory of Gender Relations.” The title, admittedly, was a bit heady for a story about a catchy song full of beverage-related puns. Was I overintellectual...
Sabrina Carpenter’s Funny, Feisty “Short n’ Sweet” August 29, 2024
As incubators of pop stardom go, the Disney corporation has, rather unexpectedly, outlasted around two decades of dramatic shifts in the music industry. While “The Mickey Mouse Club”—a show that helped prepare pop singers such as Britney Spears, Just...
Creature From the Brat Lagoon August 27, 2024
“I’m always like, More, more, more, more, more, more. Doing it overload,” says Charli XCX. “But this week has been … a lot.”It’s a Wednesday morning in late July, less than 72 hours after she offhandedly tweeted “kamala IS brat,” accidentally redefin...
Sabrina Carpenter, Poet Laureate of Sex August 27, 2024
There are three certified plateaus of Sabrina Carpenter consciousness, according to most gurus of pop-girl-ology.The level of Sabrina sentience held by most adults perceives this blond ball of radiance to have materialized out of the air this April w...
The Chappell Roan Formula for Success August 16, 2024
Back in December, when Switched on Pop first interviewed Chappell Roan, she was averaging 2 to 3 million streams per week as her 2023 album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, continued its slow burn. Since then, things are … different: That...
In Concert With the Transcendent August 15, 2024
Growing up, religion was more a matter of culture than faith for my family. My true spiritual formation was shaped by celebrity culture. My aunt dutifully took up my father’s request to be my godmother (despite rarely attending church), but her daugh...
Culture Froze in the Biden Era. Is It Finally Heating Up? August 15, 2024
Mapping pop culture trends onto US political administrations is not an exact science. It's a game of vibes. But since the advent of television, there have been clear cycles of American culture that roughly line up with the president in charge at the ...
The Best Albums of 2024 (So Far) August 02, 2024
Yeah, sure, brat summer, whatever. Through the slog of July heat, the pop girls have certainly held their spot on the charts—but with new releases from Stray Kids and Jimin, K-Pop started making its move, and from Shaboozey to the Twister soundtrack,...
What’s 2024’s “Song of the Summer”? August 01, 2024
A few weekends ago, I had the distinct pleasure of introducing my friends’ parents to Chappell Roan.It started when I had a few bars of “Good Luck, Babe” stuck in my head and couldn’t stop humming it. The next thing I knew, we were all learning the “...
The Summer of Girly Pop July 23, 2024
Katy Perry’s breakout moment, in the late two-thousands, had a type of frivolity and irreverence that feels difficult to summon now. Her début single, “I Kissed a Girl,” from 2008, is just what it sounds like, a giddy retelling of some lightly illici...
Please Exile Me from Katy Perry’s ‘Woman’s World’ July 19, 2024
Katy Perry recently released the song “Woman’s World” as a preview to her upcoming album that is scheduled for release in September. The lyrics — if they can be dignified with that word — are merely a collection of girl-power inspired catchphrases. H...
