Of all the controversies generated by rock and pop music over the last decade, the weirdest may be those by artists who aren’t weird or controversial at all. Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, Adele, George Ezra, Jess Glynne have all sold a phenomenal number of records and earned an equal amount of opprobrium. The collective terms for them are usually pejorative: the new boring, the ordinary boys, a beige pop wasteland. They’re held up as evidence that pop music is having a potentially fatal existential crisis: when did pop cease to suggest a life more glamorous or exciting than your own? When did it cease to be aspirational, strange and intriguing? Never mind David Bowie pointing down the lens at Top of the Pops – how did we go from Lady Gaga wearing the contents of a butcher’s counter to the 2010 MTV awards to nondescript artists who are only distinguished from their audience because they’re the ones on stage? When did pop become so boring?
It’s easy to overestimate the dominance of normality in modern pop, particularly if you’re a music hack writing a piece that suggests it has been in irreversible decline since your teens. If you want pop music that looks spectacular, glamorous and aspirational, or suggests an intriguing world outside the experience of its audience, or that terrifies parents, there’s plenty of it. Drugged-out face-tattooed rappers; DayGlo K-pop bands; Lana Del Rey’s LA femme-fatale shtick; Billie Eilish’s gothic sci-fi imagery; the Afro-futuristic fantasias of Janelle Monáe and FKA twigs.
Equally, you would struggle to describe it as anything other than a phenomenon. Between them, Sheeran and Adele have sold almost 300m records in the last decade; Glynne has had seven No 1 singles in the last five years; Capaldi is the biggest British artist of 2019, author of both the year’s bestselling single and its bestselling album. This sound’s appeal shows no signs of waning. You might have thought the wave of earnest, dressed-down, boy-next-door troubadours reached critical mass a few years ago, when the charts were packed with Sheeran-alikes and Mike Posner had a hit with I Took a Pill in Ibiza – a folky ballad that seemed like an Onion parody of self-obsessed millennial angst, Posner whining about, of all things, being given free drugs in a nightclub. But the success of Capaldi’s Divinely Inspired to a Hellish Extent (and George Ezra’s triple-platinum Staying at Tamara’s, the biggest-selling album of 2018) shows you couldn’t have been more wrong.
The question of whether it’s a new phenomenon is interesting. Just as people have a tendency to overplay the recent dominance of “ordinary” pop, so they have a tendency to overstate how spectacular pop was in the past. Watch any old episode of Top of the Pops, even from the two eras proclaimed as the show’s golden ages of eye-popping sensation – the glam-dominated early 70s and the post-punk new romantic explosion of the early 80s – and in between the glitter and platform boots, or the rouged-up, sexually ambiguous synth-prodders, you’ll see umpteen artists who look utterly normal and playing incredibly prosaic music. The difference may be that those artists were generally a reaction against the pop mainstream: MOR acts catering to an older audience unlikely to be taken with T Rex or Suzi Quatro; “serious” rock bands distinguishing themselves from the supposedly shallow image-consciousness of whoever was on the cover of Smash Hits that week. Now, they are the pop mainstream, or at least an important and influential part of it.
The roots of the current wave of ordinary pop date to the early 2000s, when most of the artists – and a vast tranche of their audience – were children. A succession of talent shows appeared and quickly dominated the TV schedules: Popstars and Pop Idol launched in 2001, the BBC’s forgotten rival Fame Academy in 2002, The X Factor in 2004. Their stars largely had very brief careers – Hear’Say, Leon Jackson, Michelle McManus – but one idea the shows propagated proved far more enduring. Their format was dependent on the notion that pop stars weren’t remote, otherworldly figures, but rather everyday people. You didn’t need such things as alluring charisma, originality, a striking image, feral sexual magnetism, or a willingness to shock to be a pop star. Indeed, those were drawbacks that would get you classified as “weird” – a term the judges used as if it was abusive – and booted out early on. All you needed was a decent voice, a backstory that connected with the public – to make you relatable – and the right break. While that represents a hopelessly reductive view of what a pop star is, it’s nevertheless extremely pervasive.
At the same time, Coldplay – a band then devoid of any identifiable image, whose live show culminated with the dizzying spectacle of Chris Martin turning off an illuminated globe that sat on the lid of his piano – commercially leapfrogged their post-Britpop peers and the image-heavy wave of new indie bands, and became arguably the biggest rock band in the world. Critics occasionally pit them against the TV talent show winners, “authentic” rock artists v the puppets of manufactured pop: in 2002, Coldplay’s In My Place battled Colourblind by Pop Idol runner-up Darius Danesh for No 1, a state of affairs excitedly reported on by Radio 1. In truth, they had more in common than the adversarial narrative suggested. The success of the TV talent-show winners was predicated on their fans knowing they were normal. Whether by default or design, Coldplay wore their “authenticity” on their sleeve. You could tell by looking at them they weren’t a record company confection, honed by stylists and media trainers, nor were they a style-over-substance NME hype band. The message was essentially the same: here was ordinariness, not as a sniffy reaction to pop’s excesses but as a saleable commodity in itself.
This was underlined a few years later when Adele commercially outstripped Amy Winehouse. Initially, this seemed unlikely. Adele’s output was too obviously created in Winehouse’s shadow: big-voiced, London-accented retro-soul styling; Mark Ronson production credit; even a Scouse indie cover in the repertoire, the Coral’s Dreaming of You standing in for the Zutons’ Valerie. As it turned out, predictability was among Adele’s greatest assets. She flourished in the void created when it became apparent that Winehouse was incapable of meeting public demand for more of the same by following up the 16m-selling Back to Black. Adele was a talented artist offering something similar to Winehouse, but one less likely to blow out gigs, or to punch someone in the front row, or to be photographed staggering wild-eyed around London. She cut a more relatable figure: a bright, gobby, unstyled north London girl, her brand of heartbreak dealt in moist-eyed stoicism and passive aggression rather than howling disconsolately on the bathroom floor and revealing you could only climax if you thought of your ex.
Journalist Peter Robinson suggested that the eureka moment of what he called “the new boring” came when Adele performed Someone Like You at the 2011 Brit awards, an event otherwise packed with explosive spectacle. “Wow,” host James Corden nodded approvingly at its conclusion, “you can have all the dancers, pyrotechnics, laser shows you want, but if you sound like that all you need is a piano.” As if to prove Corden’s point, Adele’s 21 became the biggest-selling album of the 21st century. Six months later, Sheeran broke through, touting an even more austere version of Coldplay’s dressed-down authenticity: one unassuming man, his guitar and a loop pedal. He released his major-label debut to widespread critical opprobrium, yet became not just one of the most successful artists of the decade but one of the most influential, writing for everyone from Justin Bieber to One Direction to Eminem, and spawning endless imitators.
The most prosaic reason for Adele and Sheeran’s success is that their songs connected with people: even Sheeran’s most implacable critic would have a hard time arguing that Thinking Out Loud doesn’t sound like the kind of song that’s going to soundtrack first dances for the rest of eternity. But the time was also right for artists like them. An audience who’d grown up on TV talent shows and Coldplay, with their intrinsic messages about normality and authenticity, had reached maturity. Social media had brought a new set of ideas about pop artists’ proximity to their fans. It was no longer held to be a good thing to be remote or aloof or mysterious; what people apparently wanted was availability and dialogue. Moreover, it didn’t do to be too outrageous or excessive because someone would record you and post the footage online, where it would live for ever.
Social media also supplied a new set of stars: influencers, YouTubers, vloggers. Their appeal is invariably baffling to anyone over the age of 25, but the general takeaway is that kids want to watch people who look a bit like nice older siblings doing everyday things, being a little wacky and sharing makeup tips. Their appeal is not dissimilar, then, to that of Sheeran, who – 150m record sales, an estimated £170m fortune and an MBE later – still gives off the air of a mate’s brother just back from a gap year with tales of how sick Goa is. Or, indeed, of Jess Glynne, who’s more glamorous – no record label has yet allowed a female pop artist to take the stage in quite such a dressed-down state as Sheeran or Lewis Capaldi – but still gives off a resolutely ordinary air. At 23, Capaldi is too young to remember a world before social media, and seems like a hybrid of pop artist and social media star: nearly as famous for his extremely funny videos as he is for his music.
Whenever the why-oh-why-ing starts about these artists’ success, it’s usually accompanied by a side-order of hand-wringing about the decline of youth rebellion, citing figures about the rise in youth teetotalism, drawing attention to the disappearance of visually-arresting subcultural youth tribes. A cartoon emerges of parents who grew up in the hedonistic 80s and 90s raising a generation of prissily self-obsessed conformists, interested only in seeing their own lives reflected back at them.
Another way of looking at it would be to note that the last decade has been one of uncertainty and disorder: financial chaos, austerity, political upheaval, division. The future looks less certain still. Perhaps what people want from pop culture isn’t the thrill of the unknown but reassurance and stability. It’s telling that 25, Adele’s multimillion-selling followup to 21, offered more of the same – raking over the relationship that had inspired its predecessor, her collaborators having rejected an album full of songs about her life as a new mother. If Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi et al seem like aspirational figures – they’re just like me – they also offer affirmation. Sheeran’s last album, No 6 Collaborations Project, is filled with songs depicting the now rich and famous singer globetrotting, attending swish parties and hanging around with “the beautiful people” while informing his listeners that he feels out of place and would rather be back at home with his partner. Its overall message appears to be: I was happier when I was more like you; be thankful for what you’ve got and careful what you wish for.
If its audience wants reassurance about the future, at least the future of this particular subgenre of pop seems secure. There are more artists waiting in the wings: among the major labels’ priorities for 2020 lurks JC Stewart, a dressed-down acoustic guitar-toting Irish singer-songwriter who co-wrote Capaldi’s song Hollywood. If the music industry seems loth to let female pop stars be as visually unremarkable as their male counterparts, then outside of it – in the bedroom pop that’s huge with teens and tweens, its hits propagated not by radio play, but by viral videos and TikTok crazes – lurk female artists who aren’t bound by their rules: just watch Beach Bunny’s Prom Queen, a massive social media hit in 2019 thanks to TikTok. At least one area of pop appears to be intent on going back to normal, over and over again.
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