Music

Has 2018 Killed the Pop Star?

There are still pop stars, and there is still popular music—but they don’t overlap nearly as often as they used to.
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Clockwise from left, from DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection; by Kevin Mazur/WireImage, from Time Life Pictures/DMI/The LIFE Picture Collection; by Kevin Mazur, all from Getty Images.

For most of the last century, “pop music” has been a durable single phrase with two distinct meanings: a statement of fact about the most listened to music of the moment as well as a genre with specific traits. And for a majority of that time, the two definitions have neatly intersected. Pop songs from “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to “Umbrella” have also been the most popular songs of their day.

And especially since the 1980s, pop has been the domain of a particular type of entertainer: a virtuoso performer, visual artist, cultural maven, pop arbiter, and chart baron known as a pop star.

But thanks in part to the pluralizing forces of the Internet, pop—like so many other things—has splintered. In the last two years, the popular-music ecosystem has proven more hospitable to SoundCloud rappers, novelty E.D.M./country hybrids and a freestyle from Cardi B than it’s been to once-indomitable pop stars like Taylor Swift. Meanwhile, former and would-be pop stars like Kesha, Troye Sivan, and Carly Rae Jepsen have grown into artists with devoted cult followings as opposed to global superstars. While there are exceptions—Bruno Mars in particular mimics the established pop-star formula to massive success—something novel is clearly afoot: pop music is no longer the most popular music in 2018.

Pop as a genre is squishy. Since “popular” is in the name, it’s somewhat beholden to trends. There have, however, been some constants: big, broad emotions, a light touch driven by melody, and music and lyrics that are uncomplicated and familiar. Pop nicks elements from other genres—a guitar lick, a rap—but funnels everything through a tried-and-true structure, two verses and a bridge punctuated with an inescapable hook.

More pertinently, pop music is inextricably linked to the pop star, a brand of musical supernova usually associated with 80s titans like Michael Jackson and Madonna. These larger-than-life entertainers defined a well-worn—and perhaps now rundown— version of musical superstardom, trading in a mastery of visual mediums, untouchable virtuosity, and uber-polished live performance, usually incorporating dance. Mostly, though, their all-in take on pure pop music dominated the charts. In their decades-long careers, Jackson accumulated 13 No. 1 singles, Madonna, 12. Their contemporaries—Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Janet Jackson among them—followed that path to similar success.

And for the next four decades, a flood of descendants followed in their tracks. Britney, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Chris Brown, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga all built on the model set forth by Jackson and Madonna. While the elements were touched up to suit the moment, every successive generation took the same approach and filled the same general groove—and the chart positions—of their predecessors with scientific precision. As such, direct comparisons, for better or worse, were inescapable.

The last few years, however, has seen a huge disruption in this lineage. The idea of “the Flop” has traveled from movie blockbusters to pop albums, particularly those released by pop stars with woefully little impact. Both 2017 and 2018 played host to an utter litany of flops. Katy Perry, Kesha, Lorde, Fergie, Miley Cyrus, Timberlake, and Swift, all of whom recently owned the zeitgeist, have released notably underperforming albums; half of those albums failed to achieve a single top 10 hit. Even Beyoncé, a chronic cultural arbiter and megastar, has not reached the top 5 as a lead artist on the Hot 100 since 2013’s “Drunk in Love.” Her latest, Everything Is Love—a collaboration with her husband, Jay-Z—will be the latest test of her unique stature as a pop-cultural agenda-setter who endures without multi-format hit singles.

Meanwhile, the battalion of starlets who should be next in line—Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Camila Cabello, Dua Lipa, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, and Shawn Mendes—have struggled to convert a smattering of hits into sustained runs at the top of the charts, even several albums into their careers. Ariana Grande, one of the most successful New Gen pop starlets, now in her fourth album cycle, has yet to score a No. 1 single. Most others have been pushed to the fringe, sustained by rabid core fan bases consisting largely of gay men and hipsters, but not cultural sovereignty.

Meanwhile, a quick scan of the top Hot 100 over the last 12 months reveals a disparate smorgasbord, much of it once inconceivable as chart hits. SoundCloud rap oddities like Lil Pump’s “Gucci Gang” and XXXTentacion’s “Sad!,” as well as Migos’s Dadaist take on trap music, are top 10 staples. Toothless nu-rock acts like Imagine Dragons have launched numerous hits. So have E.D.M./country collaborations like Florida Georgia Line’s and Bebe Rexha’s “Meant to Be”and Zedd, Grey, and Maren Morris’s “The Middle,” artists most people couldn’t pick out of lineup.

There have been no fewer than 6 top 10 singles featuring Cardi B, an unpolished stripper-turned-Instagram-star-turned-rapper-turned-breakout sensation of the year whose fame is predicated on the opposite of virtuosity. Cardi exploded with her completely unguarded social-media persona and “Bodak Yellow,” a tough, loose rap song which is only “pop” in that it’s massively popular, not because it shares much DNA with “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” She says it herself, “I don’t dance now, I make money moves.”

And then of course there’s Drake, the paragon for a new brand of pop stardom that shifts markedly, but not fully, away from the Jacksonian model. Drake often sings but is primarily a rapper, emblematic of hip-hop’s firm grip on pop culture. He doesn’t dance either, at least not in a polished way, and much of his music—confessional, insular, idiosyncratic—is wildly hooky, but owes very little to the dance pop of Jackson, or the pop ballads of Whitney and Mariah (although one could argue he draws on Janet’s later, more intimate style of R&B).

Drake has, however, sustained a stranglehold on the charts once reserved for those artists, either redefining pop in his image or successfully nudging it from the center of the landscape. The success of his progeny like Post Malone proves this approach isn’t singular to him, either. Fittingly, this past week, Drake passed Jackson as the solo male artist with the most weeks at No. 1 on the singles charts.

There are many factors at work here. The kind of huge album sales which once served as the benchmark for pop stardom have been steadily disintegrating since the explosion of MP3s in the early 2000s. Additionally the public, as opposed to record labels, now has an unprecedented ability to choose hits by simply streaming them or creating a viral meme. And radio play, while still a huge factor in chart position, is just a piece of a bigger pie that includes downloads, social-media buzz, and, increasingly, streaming numbers. This egalitarian environment allows a longer tail of artists to sustain careers, but it’s also a reactive one where it’s hard for any single act not named Drake to maintain the omnipresence critical to stars like Jackson.

Bruno Mars is the most obvious, and singular, exception to this trend. Pop stars have always drawn on what came before them, but rarely have they pantomimed the past as cravenly as Mars has, expertly cribbing old styles from Jackson, the Police, the Time, and Boyz II Men without updating the formula. As with the ninth Jurassic Park movie, people may buy tickets to access an old feeling. But whether Mars is an exception to this trend as opposed to the desperate last gasp of a dying breed is an open question.

So is pop music still popular? It hasn’t completely receded. And it will be interesting to see what the next couple of years bring. In 2015, Justin Bieber was able to synthesize then-fashionable E.D.M. and trop-house sounds into three No. 1 singles. What will new Bieber music sound like in 2018 or ‘19? It’s not so hard to envision a world where Bieber’s new stuff sounds a lot like, well, Drake. Either way, something is shifting and perhaps we were overdue. There are only so many times something can be compared to Michael Jackson. And indeed, 40 years is a long trend for something as perennially mutable, and undefinable, as pop music.