A funny thing happened in music - and specifically in pop music - this year. Generational shifts don’t usually happen this quickly and clearly. Even when they do, the clarity is usually only in hindsight. But over the course of March through to August 2024, we saw one of the clearest ever examples of such a shift happen, and the place it occurred - that of the Main Pop Girlies - made the dynamics extra fascinating.
We began this year with hype building for two releases by two of the biggest stars not just of 2024 but of the entire century to date. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, released 29 March, had its hype building in essence since late 2022, when that year’s brilliant tribute to black and queer dance history Renaissance was announced to be Act I of a trilogy. The trilogy was pitched as intending to reclaim whitewashed but historically black genres, making country the perfect subject for the trilogy’s second part. Plus there was “Daddy Lessons”, the country-inflected standout from 2016’s instant classic Lemonade which Beyoncé performed as a collaboration later that year with The Chicks.
Alas, we got what might have been if not a flop - there are too many genuinely interesting and fun songs for that - her first truly disappointing record since 2008. Few songs reached the heights promised by “Daddy Lessons”, the second half was ambitious but scattershot, and it was plagued throughout by the most wasteful use of features I can remember hearing. Legendary names showed up not to contribute to a track or to bring their own flavour, but purely for the prestige of possessing that name as a feature on the tracklist (the DJ conceit doesn’t successfully justify the namedrops). The almost academic studiousness that made Lemonade a joy to dig into the historic and cultural references of here overtook the music. And most of all, while Renaissance was an hour that felt shorter due to great dance-mix sequencing and Lemonade a crisp 40 minutes (45 including “Formation”), Cowboy Carter stretches indulgently over two discs, exacerbating its issues. It wasn’t even the only record by a giant pop artist to fall victim to that trap in that season.
Three weeks later on April 19, we saw the mistakes of one of the biggest artists of the century repeated but arguably even worse by, according to most metrics, the biggest: Taylor Swift. I, now, months after the hype, release and backlash have all died down, find myself in an odd position regarding The Tortured Poets Department. I find myself more and more defending it, partly because it’s often hated for the wrong reasons1, and partly because there are more growers on this record than I was really expecting2. Across the more than two hours of music released, there’s a great - not career best, but genuinely great - single-LP length album in The Tortured Poets Department, plus either an alright album or great EP in The Anthology that could act as a sonic bridge between the folklore/evermore, Dessner production era and the Midnights/TTPD, Antonoff production era. There’s a case to be made that, with the world-conquering victory lap that was the Eras tour winding down after selling out literally millions of tickets that the world was ripe for the Taylor Swift backlash (the backlash, to paraphrase Paul Keating, that we had to have). A case that this record simply arrived at the right time to trigger it while lacking the transcendent quality of previous career highlights required to make the more casual fans stay home instead of getting out and defending it (metaphorically speaking). The record and its rollout have been criticised and re-litigated enough times to make previous backlash lowpoint Reputation (2017) seem warmly received, so I’ll keep it to the key points here.
Fans expecting a record about the breakup with Joe Alwyn (which, with the benefit of hindsight and close reading is really what Midnights [2022] was about) or the beginning of a relationship with Travis Kelce (relegated to a few tracks on the bonus disc) were instead given a record largely concerned with the blink-and-you-missed-it relationship but years-long semi-mutual obsession with Matty Healy. Healy himself alienated himself from Taylor’s fans during the most public era of their pseudo-relationship with an appearance on The Adam Friedland Show peppered with racist jokes3, a situation addressed by Taylor on the closest she’s ever come to a rejection of her fanbase, “But Daddy I Love Him”. Taylor began weaving in the fictional character study elements employed so brilliantly on 2020 folk diptych folklore and evermore to the diaristic style for which she’s better known in a way frustrating to fans of both. 44 minutes of Midnights was enough time for people to get sick of Jack Antonoff’s increasingly one-note, comfort zone production; the length of even the initial two discs of TTPD went beyond most fans’ tolerance for that style. The opening track and first single feature both of the previous faults, plus a pointless Post Malone feature and a video featuring Taylor in embarrassing fake-tattoo makeup resembling nothing so much as the embarrassing Jared Leto’s embarrassing take on the Joker in Suicide Squad (2016). And the title, intended as a sly dig at both the softboy insularity of Alwyn and the pretentiousness of Healy, was a great handful of breadcrumbs for the dedicated string-and-pinboard fans but read as the worst sort of self-indulgent self-pity to most people without that background. And for an artist of Taylor’s size - a level of monocultural ubiquity which shouldn’t be possible in the 20s - it’s those people without the background, not the dedicated Swifties, who make up the majority of the people aware of the record.
More than any of that, though, the reaction was to the sheer indulgence of the rollout - and the way it was used in service of the same things Taylor built her reputation (lol) on opposing. Remember, this is the woman who in the mid 10s pulled her music from selected streaming services based on them not paying artists a fair share of the earnings from the music, positioning herself as a champion of working artists at the cost (however temporary) of her own earnings. So to see her partnering for the album’s rollout with Spotify, the worst of all streaming services from the artist (especially small artist) point of view, left a foul taste in the mouth. Then, less than a day later, came The Anthology. Depending on what advertising copy you read, it was a bonus disc, a companion piece, a separate album or something completely new - but what it was in the most straightforward reading was two more discs worth of music attached to what was an already far too long double album length record. And what it acted as was a way to ensure even more Taylor Swift songs dominated the upper levels of the singles charts, and that the record would sit, with the secure heft of a talented sumo wrestler, atop the album charts for as long as possible. The trickle release of special and expanded editions of the record, mostly using voicemail demos of songs, both furthered its chart-topping reign and drove more casual observers away from the Taylor Swift fandom in its capitalist cynicism - especially once people started to notice, with the same eye for attention used to discover the red-string hints in her lyrics, the timing of those drip-fed releases.
One such artist affected - and one who, due to lyrical breadcrumbs and actual relationships, read as an intentional slight - was Charli XCX, which brings us neatly to the next generation rising stars who would, during Brat Summer, take not just the single charts but the vibe zeitgeist from the 80s born millennials Beyoncé and Taylor who had dominated it for most of the preceding decade. Charli, of course, is also a millennial (as are a few of the artists discussed below) - but born in ‘92, and has both been aligned and aligned herself with the newer generation of pop girlies.
In June an image started circulating on social media featuring the titular protagonists of the turn-of-the-century Cartoon Network show The Powerpuff Girls, and a caption reading “this is just Sabrina, Chappell and Charli”. Not long after, a pop art (both in the sense of being done in the style of the 1950s art movement, and in the sense of being art about pop music) version of the image was posted by @slicksatan. Bubbles, the innocent, girly one was rendered as Sabrina Carpenter; Blossom, the bold central figure became Chappell Roan, and Charli XCX took the place of the more edgy, aggressive Buttercup. It’s an analogy that relies more on their signature colours (blue, pink/red and green respectively) than anything else, but it made for a really fun framing for the women who had come from various flavours of obscurity to become three of the main characters of mid-20s pop.
Sabrina feels both the least musically and aesthetically transgressive and the most aligned with traditional paths to pop dominance of the three. The Disney channel origin, the middling pop music as a teen that gave way to more interesting and idiosyncratic tunes starting with 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send (which she describes as her first “big girl” album, a Pantera-esque mid career pseudo-debut), and most of all, the boost to profile awarded by a support slot on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, where I saw her back in February of this year. It was really April single “Espresso” that sent her to the next level, though. It’s rare that a song is so well suited - scientifically crafted! - to being the song of the summer that the public collectively anoints it as such even when Billboard’s algorithms for crowning the “official” song of the summer disagree. Tightly packed with memorable earworms that straddle the line between a little silly and outright absurd (whomst amongst us has not told someone in the last few months that we were working late, then justified it by saying that it was because we were a singer?). The style of the video, paired with her runway appearances, made for a great signature, midcentury aesthetic; one image of her in a red and white striped dress with matching headscarf in particular was described as a “‘yoo-hoo boys!’ arse outfit” and “Bugs Bunny would’ve had this shit on”, which: fuck I’m glad we live in an era where people get to provide fashion commentary in those terms.
When second single “Please Please Please” followed by cleverly titled, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin full-length Short n’ Sweet dropped, it turned out that, like with just about every pop record with a lead single you can dance to these days, that single was a misdirect. However, unlike with so many (looking at you, Ariana Grande; I’m still pissy at you as well, Tate McRae), that didn’t make the full-length a disappointment (although “Espresso” is still, I reckon, the strongest song on it). However, instead of downtempo algorithm bait designed to slip seamlessly into Spotify Daylists, what we got was playful, lighthearted and just a little bit country. You can hear a lot of Dolly Parton in the way Sabrina writes winks at the fourth wall into her lyrics. The flashes of funk and disco in the rhythms recalls Kacey Musgraves in her Golden Hour era. There’s a number of songs here that could have ended up on a Miley Cyrus record without any seams showing. But while Miley would absolutely belt a song like “Sharpest Tool” because belting is what Miley does, Sabrina - apart from a few lines she wants to emphasise in the quieter songs like “Dumb & Poetic” - coos her lyrics, adding to the soft and sensual aesthetic. As the album title says, she’s short - a nearly comical 4’11” - and fairy floss-style sweet. Plus, describing relationship desires as “come right on me / I mean camaraderie”? Fucking genius. Pulitzer for that girl.
Then there’s the only one of the trio who hasn’t released a record this year. Chappell Roan’s rise has been the odd one that’s both been a slow burn and completely meteoric, with songs that have only blown up in the last few months dating back to 2018. I must confess here to completely missing the boat. While I heard Chappell’s debut, the excellently titled The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, when it was released last September, drawn in by the art and concept, it didn’t really grab me. I remember writing in my notes at the time that it felt a little bit padded and like a gay girl take on Lana Del Rey’s music this decade. I put it at number 123 on my year-end list.
The magic took its time to take effect, but when it did, it was all-consuming. I started observing little moments happening more and more frequently. A gay bar full of women all howling out the chorus to “Red Wine Supernova”. A female footballer doing the “HOT TO GO” dance to attempt to distract an opponent taking a free kick. A car chucking mainies down High Street in Thornbury bumping not the expected European dance music or drill rap but “Pink Pony Club”. Increasingly common shots of increasingly gigantic crowds flocking to her at festival performances. Then came the big moments. The appearance on NPR Tiny Desk Concert, truly the 20s equivalent of what MTV Unplugged represented in the 90s. The statue of liberty drag at Governor’s Ball. The release of “Good Luck, Babe!” and its iconic TV performances. And finally, her being moved from a side stage of Lollapalooza to its main stage, drawing possibly the biggest crowd in the festival’s long and storied history.
The rise and rise of Chappell (a headline used a thousand times over the last six months or so) has been fascinating to watch. Her music isn’t doing anything groundbreaking - the styles are varied, especially on side A, but are all takes on things we’ve heard before. But in both what she represents and in how she approaches it, it’s rare indeed. Olivia Rodrigo - who in a dynamic similar to Taylor and Sabrina, took Chappell out on tour helping to build her profile in the lead up to this breakthrough period, and on whom more later - has shown that theatre kid energy is no longer a barrier to chart-topping success. But the specific marriage of that theatricality with explicitly queer, drag performance and presentation recalls nothing so much as breakthrough era late 00s-early 10s Lady Gaga. Chappell has leaned into this, advising fans of “category is:” theme nights ahead of performances so that the community can get into it, or bringing drag performers both local and international out on stage as parts of her sets.
Then there’s the themes. Chappell is a lesbian, and not only does she not hide that, she makes it very explicit to the point of unavoidable in her lyrics. Queer people of any variety have been rare in popular music historically and, while mercifully less so than in the past, still are today. Queer women are much rarer still. A queer woman who makes her queerness textual in her music is near unheard of, and I can’t think of any4 who has done that in the top tiers of the pop charts. A lot of girls are being seen in a way they’ve never had the opportunity to before, whether middle aged women like me feeling melancholy over a youth denied to us, or teens coming to terms with their own sexuality and being offered stories which reflect their desires and terms to express who they are. She’s not shied away from the radical queerness of it either, rejecting invites to perform government-sponsored events that could be seen as endorsements of the US government.
The Chappell story is fucken beautiful, is what I’m saying. God bless Chappell Roan.
When I started brainstorming this piece, liberals had started turning on her in the way that liberals love to because she’s willing to speak out against the genocide and anti-queer policies of the Democrats who are actually in power as well as of the more obviously cartoonish villains of the Republican party. By the time I finished writing it (it took longer than I’d planned because of me making decisions that have made my life a bit ridiculous, for reasons) she had begun having to cancel shows, because attempting to create a line between her personal and professional lives and saying that while she would, due to the broken nature of the US electoral system, vote for a right-wing, pro-genocide anti-queer politician, she would not endorse her as liberals were demanding, were apparently steps too far for many and she had begun to face tremendous backlash putting her health at hazard.
Entitled parasocial liberal fans are demons, is what I’m saying. Fuck entitled liberals.
Finally, the one who has harnessed the intersection of memes and pop culture more successfully than any other person this year is Charli XCX. Like the others, Charli has been around for a minute without breaking through on this level; unlike the others, Charli’s profile has been shall we say “indie big”. She wrote - and left her guide vocals on the chorus of - “I Love It”, the 2012 top 10 hit by Swedish group Icona Pop. She again wrote and did chorus vocals for the 2014 number 1 hit “Fancy” by blaccented MC Iggy Azalea, the woman who made people from Mullumbimby grateful that their town was now known for something other than being the antivax capital of Australia right up until the point when they realised their town was now know for something much worse, Iggy Azalea. And later in 2014 her song “Boom Clap” from the soundtrack of YA author John Green adaptation The Fault in Our Stars became her first solo top 10 hit. But it had started to seem like despite being your favourite artist’s favourite artist and beloved by music nerds, the lack of mainstream pop success was starting to frustrate her. Charli (2019) and Crash (2022) in particular seemed like increasingly deliberate tilts at a mainstream breakthrough after the critical acclaim of relative preceding releases Pop 2 (2017) and how i’m feeling now (2020). So there’s a beautiful bit of justice in the way that her true breakthrough came in the form of her most abrasive and uncompromising record in years.
brat arrived with a sense of identity and self-aware cleverness nearly unparalleled in recent pop. Its cover, featuring a stretched and pixelated rendering of the title in all-lowercase, sans serif font on a plain lime green background, was designed to invite the “brat album art generators” that appeared across the internet in droves after less than a day. Leaning into it, Charli replaced the album art of all her preceding releases on spotify with boldly coloured and deep fried brat-style images. Just three days later, a deluxe version was released with brand new art: this time, that lettering on a white background reading brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs but it’s not. This the kind of shit makes meme-poisoned online queers go off chops; trust and believe, I count myself among their number. Let me get the brat latte from that Carolina Cafe in Brunswick East tyvm.
I’m not naive enough to claim that this would count for nothing if not for the music - but the music for sure plays a part. Loud, high-contrast beats from a murderer’s row of hyperpop producers. Anthem-arse anthems like “360” and “Von Dutch”. Tiktok bait like “Apple”. Deserved self aggrandisement like “Club Classics”. Yet also, poignancy. A reflection on dreams of motherhood the power of the biological clock in “I think about it all the time”. A tribute to fallen comrade SOPHIE that sends its barbs and judgement inwards on one of my personal favourites, “So I”.
Then there’s “Girl, so confusing”. While it wasn’t necessarily head-and-shoulders above the pack, it was definitely a memorable track for a number of people on the initial release of brat. Charli’s experiences with impostor syndrome are well documented, and existing in a realm where your friends and contemporaries are themselves famous people in their field to whom you look up can only exacerbate that. It didn’t take Swiftian levels of breadcrumb-following to detect that the lyrics about being told “we’re alike / they say we’ve got the same hair” referred to Aotearoa phenom Lorde, with whom Charli was once infamously confused by a reporter. Lorde could have taken it the wrong way, as the narrative demanded - but instead reached out to Charli with an offer of collaboration, then a text message with the lyrics to a draft verse which earned the stunned reply “Fucking hell” from Charli. The line “let’s work it out on the remix” immediately entered pop culture canon, with the drily retitled “Girl, so confusing remix with lorde” immediately shooting its way to the top of many critics and commentators’ song of the year shortlists.
Not to be all “Charlie Brown had hoes” in an age when everything gets called a cultural reset, but this song was a fair dinkum cultural reset. Whomst amongst us hasn’t, like Charli, feared that our friends don’t actually like us when they haven’t been available to hang out? Whomst amongst us hasn’t, like Lorde, felt bad because we upset a friend by being flaky when in fact we were simply too anxious to go out or dysmorphic and uncomfortable at being perceived? Yet all that would have counted for nothing had it not created both a statement and an act of solidarity. Pop, we are told, isn’t supposed to be like this. The internet pits the pop girlies and their stan armies against each other, with bigger name artists doing a seventh variant release of their juggernaut record and blocking smaller ones from reaching a milestone. To hear two of them behave in such a way felt special and like an explicit rejection of what had come before.
Signs of the emerging generation gap continued to proliferate. Billie Eilish, who released her own third album this same northern hemisphere summer, joined Charli for a remix of “Guess” which centred Billie’s queerness. Olivia Rodrigo, whose Guts record continues to rise in my estimation as one of the finest records of last year and had first helped Chappell to emerge into the mainstream by taking her as support on the tour for that album5, brought Chappell out for victory lap duets of “HOT TO GO” on her subsequent, even larger tour. And perhaps most emblematic of all, when Chappell spoke out about the exhausting and disgusting treatment she had received for being in the public eye, the first person to reach out was, according to Chappell, Charli herself.
I don’t know if this means a genuine break in how pop works, but Christ I hope so. The competitive narratives at this point aren’t just tired and boring, they’re actively hurting the people - especially the women - involved. There’s beauty in community and solidarity and mutual uplift. And - as is evidenced by the reception of the work of the up and coming generation compared to the work just a few months earlier by the consensus two most titanic figures in 21st century pop - it just makes the tunes plain better to listen to.
Brat Summer might have ended (RIP brat summer 2024-2024), but the spirit which made it one of the most exciting times to be a fan of pop music in years can and should live on.
Much missed video game critic Bob “MrBTongue” Case’s theory of the necessity of “reverse complaining” comes to mind. I miss your videos, Bob. And your written work on Shamus Young’s (RIP) site, too.
The hosts of the podcast Sentimental Garbage, who didn’t record or publish their commentary on the record until June despite previously being very across Taylor-related coverage, came to a similar conclusion and their take on the record is worth listening to although I disagree with a few of their analyses.
Did anybody at all have a Taylor Swift / Cum Town crossover like this on their 2023 bingo card?
No, we are absolutely NOT counting “I Kissed A Girl” style queerbaiting here. It’s a sign of how hard Katy Perry has fallen off that she doesn’t even merit mention in the section about established millennial pop stars in their flop eras.
And who, reportedly, has had her own issues with Taylor feeling threatened by her rise.