He can’t hear you, he has airpods in. Graphic by Anna Gritzenbach.
SILAS OWENS | OPINION COLUMNIST | szowens@butler.edu
As a kid, I never loved pop music. Over the past few years though, I started to appreciate it more without really knowing why. I thought maybe it was because AirPods were invented. Or maybe it was because I decided to be a music major and couldn’t just listen to jazz and classical all the time. Maybe I was just getting older, less pretentious and more willing to like the genre that everyone likes.
On a recent car trip I discovered the true reason for my former dislike of pop music. I put on a 2010s pop playlist, featuring artists like Justin Bieber and Maroon 5, in pursuit of energy and was bored out of my mind. I tried to enjoy each song for up to a minute and a half before I desperately wanted to skip it. The music just wasn’t as interesting as the pop of today.
What about this 2010s music was so irritating to me? The synthy electronic beats, manufactured for the club, were cool at the beginning of each song until I realized they were going to repeat until either the song ends or I hit skip; the next song would have the same repetitive nature, with similar production that could have been by the same person. Or maybe the issue was the artificial happiness of it all. A positive or empowering song here or there is not a bad thing at all, but Katy Perry’s music could have used a dose of TikTok, COVID-19, climate change and politics induced Gen Z depression.
Sophomore health sciences major Michelle Jackson described what her least favorite music is.
“Anything that’s really, really happy,” Jackson said. “The song ‘Happy’ could be an example. Stuff like that I just can’t listen to for some reason. Is it fun? Maybe, but for some reason it just annoys me to no end.”
Gen Z grew up with social media, climate change, Covid, the political environment of the past 10 years and now AI. As a whole, we are depressed, anxious and never going to buy houses, but the fact that aggressive Millennial optimism is less common in pop music is a win.
Music that brings the energy without sacrificing creativity and lyrical and emotional depth, like “BRAT”, can be really good. But it needs to have some personality beyond happiness and the club, it can’t be mercilessly repetitive.
AJ Dorton, a senior music education and performance major, and Music Director and beatboxer for the Out of the Dawg House a capella group, described the sound of 2010s pop music beyond the lyrical content.
“It’s definitely electronic, like EDM music,” Dorton said. “You can hear a lot of kick and bass together and that’s like every single pop song in the 2010s that was popular. And it’s definitely the same four chords every song.”
The sound and lyrical content of pop music has changed and diversified over the past few years for a number of tangible reasons, including COVID-19 and social media like TikTok.
Senior arts administration major Alex Peters explained the impact of social media on pop music.
“The rise of social media, especially TikTok, has really changed [pop music] where there’s a much deeper saturation in the market and there’s just so much more music,” Peters said. “A lot of popular music in the 2010s was backed by record labels, and very thought out and intentional, which I think was good in its own time, but I feel like so many people can relate to pop music more now because there’s so many more niches and they can see themselves in the artist.”
Because record labels, the middle man in distributing music, have become less important, artists are able to reach consumers directly. To create hits, record labels tried to push songs that would be catchy and enjoyable to the most people, which led pop to be more generic. Now, with social media, consumers are more easily able to decide for themselves what is relatable or sounds good.
The algorithmic side of social media has also led more niches and sounds within pop music to be created because it can reach people who are interested in those sounds without having to focus on appealing to everybody as much. Artists can take more risks and push more boundaries without having to please as many people. Contemporary stars like Sabrina Carpenter are here because their music and lyrics caught people’s interest in the attention economy.
“[Pop] has been changing over the course of the popularity of the internet, but during COVID-19 it jump started a little bit because more people were chronically online,” Dorton said. “People realized, ‘Oh, there’s more music out there than just what is being shoved down my throat from the radio.’”
As much as TikTok and social media have been harmful for society, driving people apart from each other, it may have democratized and improved pop music. Paradoxically, because of TikTok pop music became good enough that it is worth listening to while alone.
