Pop Is Entering A New Golden Age, And There Are No Rules Anymore

There has been a shift at the top of the pop music pyramid. After 2020, a year that stalled progression for new artists, emerging artists have dominated the conversation in 2021.

Pop music works in cycles. As new sounds, apps, and trends develop so too do new superstars — artists that will come to define the next decade. 2021 was a landmark year for that, installing at the top a host of new popstars who blew the sounds, visuals, and values of pop music wide open.

Last year, the biggest songs of the year largely came from established artists from Harry Styles to The Weeknd but this year, the game looks remarkably different.  Olivia Rodrigo — a name barely known to the wider mainstream at the top of the year — had dropped her debut album SOUR with two number-one singles in the bag already. Lil Nas X had dominated the conversation with his chart-topping hit ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’.

Meanwhile, Doja Cat, who broke through in 2019, solidified her place as a superstar with another ubiquitous hit ‘Kiss Me More’. For the first time in a long time, there was drastic movement at the top of the pop pyramid.

You only have to look at the 2022 Grammy nominations for Best New Artist to see the hold the newcomers have had on the industry this year. More than ever, this year’s batch of nominees looks like a list of the most influential commercial artists of the year. Rodrigo, Glass Animals, and The Kid LAROI have all had top 10 US records while Baby Keem and Saweetie have climbed high into the Top 20. For comparison, last year’s nominees featured only two artists with top 20 hits — Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion.

While big releases from Adele, Justin Bieber, Drake and Kanye West pulled big numbers by year’s end, they’re sharing the charts with a diverse bunch of fresh-faced artists. As we close out the year, the global streaming charts reflect an industry being shaken up by diverse new sounds stemming from the app that’s shaken everything up — TikTok. From Afrobeat artist Ckay’s ‘love nwantiti (ah ah ah)’ to 17-year-old pop/rocker GAYLE’s ‘abcdefu’, the sound of 2021 is undefinable and unpredictable. And that’s really exciting.

The TikTok Effect

TikTok has been shifting the musical landscape for years, giving us its first true superstar in Lil Nas X with ‘Old Town Road’ in 2019 but this year it became even more of a force. TikTok reports that 430 songs surpassed 1 billion video views, three times the amount of the year before. The platform’s most used songs of the year basically mask the biggest global hits of 2021 with PinkPantheress, The Kid LAROI, Rauw Alejandro, Doja Cat, and Rodrigo all featured.

While the app can drag up old hits by artists like Boney M, Stromae, and Fleetwood Mac, TikTok’s viral hits skew heavily towards new artists. In fact, it’s rare now to watch a new artist breakthrough without the support of TikTok users.

That’s an interesting change in how new artists rise to prominence. MySpace was the last social media platform to really prioritise music discovery and it’s been well over a decade since it had any influence on commercial music. When you think of some of pop’s biggest names from the past decade — Lady Gaga, The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, Ariana Grande — their careers weren’t launched from viral moments. With a strong label backing, their careers were built by carefully collecting radio play and inserting themselves into mainstream conversation with meticulous marketing. Getting the music into ears was simply a longer process.

It’s rare now to watch a new artist breakthrough without the support of TikTok users.

There’s no doubt that labels play a part in prepping new artists for TikTok success but the ascent is rapid and unpredictable. Take GAYLE, for example. The Dallas songwriter was virtually unknown months ago and now she has the biggest streaming hit in the world right now, collecting close to five million plays a day. The idea for the song was formulated in July when a user asked her to create a breakup song using the alphabet.

For the last few years, it seemed as if artists were trying to crack the TikTok sound with sub-three-minute songs that encouraged dance challenges and the like. This year, however, the TikTok sound has become almost impossible to predict. If anything, it’s become more diverse, introducing sounds to the mainstream that have often struggled to find global audiences.

Nigerian artist Ckay went organically viral on the platform with his song ‘love nwantiti’. Afrobeats has been growing in global recognition for years thanks to the likes of Burna Boy and Wizkid, and Ckay accelerated this rise. Ckay became the first African artist to amass more than 20 million listeners a month on Spotify and his viral moment was followed by Wizkid’s ‘Essence’ and now Fireboy DML’s ‘Peru’ which has just received a remix by Ed Sheeran.

In the UK, British artist PinkPantheress has broken through on a mainstream level with a distinctively underground sound. With songs that rarely break the two-minute mark, her debut album To Hell With spotlights a scrapbook of underground club sounds from garage to jungle, weaved together through autobiographical, tender songwriting. Years ago, her sound would’ve been niche but in 2021 she sports 6 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

Unpredictable Sounds

The death of genre has been a conversation for years — often attributed to the rise of streaming and playlisting. It was once simple to track the dominant sounds in pop music and chart it methodically. Last year, Junkee tracked pop’s trends of the 2010s, revealing a fairly coherent flow from electro/pop to EDM to hip-hop to trap. This year, however, it’s almost impossible to tie a thread between the sounds of our new pop superstars.

Lil Nas X’s debut album MONTERO moves from rap to pop to country with ease. His guest list sees Elton John appear on the same record as Megan Thee Stallion and Jack Harlow. Doja Cat’s Planet Her is similarly all over the place. She sings and raps through a sonic backdrop of intergalactic rap, pop, afrobeat, and disco.

Rodrigo’s breakthrough hit ‘driver’s license’ had many predicting she’d stay in the realm of ballads but her first three releases threw out the rulebook. ‘Deja vu’ was wonky, experimental pop while ‘good 4 u’ took a rapid left turn into pop/punk. SOUR is a scrapbook of the sounds Rodrigo grew up listening to, combining Paramore, Taylor Swift, and Lorde.

The pop rulebook has been thrown out and it’s amounting to a pop music golden age. Each year, the MTV VMAs takes an accurate cultural pulse of where pop is at and where it’s going. It’s the awards show where Gaga wore a meat dress, Britney Spears wore a snake, and Kanye interrupted Swift’s win. In recent times, it’s been missing the theatrics and drama but this year, a certain energy returned.

The performance list was mostly made up of artists with just one album to their name and they were supercharged. Lil Nas X stole the show with an unashamedly queer performance, Normani brought star-power and precision and Doja Cat hosted with an absurdist manner Gaga would’ve been proud of. Pop music has been forcibly relatable for years but there’s finally an outlandish nature returning.

New Values

That’s not to say that it’s living on a totally different planet. Perhaps the most important legacy of this new wave of artists is the values they’re instilling. 2021 has been about breaking down doors and Nas X has been at the forefront of that. His display of his own queerness has been revolutionary, as he infiltrates hip-hop with visuals and themes that haven’t previously been accepted.

Without compromise, he’s become simultaneously one of the highest-selling and controversial artists of the year. He’s silenced critics along the way by exposing the industry’s reluctance to accept queerness that’s unabashed. “You don’t like me because I embrace my sexuality instead of hiding it and never speaking on it for your comfort,” he tweeted earlier in the year. At every turn, he’s exposed the hypocritical elements of the industry providing a perspective in mainstream culture that’s been desperately lacking. He’s made pop music provocative and powerful while also remaining wildly entertaining.

Elsewhere, new female artists have learnt from what past popstars have had to endure. Rodrigo has come under fire in a similar way Swift did for airing her relationships publicly in her music. In an interview with The Guardian, she clapped back at “sexist criticism of songwriters, like me being told that they only write songs about boys.” It’s criticism that Swift took early on in her career, gradually growing to defend herself. Rodrigo’s immediate denial is proof that perhaps this new generation of artists are entering an industry where the misogyny and injustice of the past won’t be accepted.

We watched this year as the darkest parts of the industry were exposed through Britney Spears’ fight to be freed from her conservatorship. Misogynistic, sexist and invasive interviews were dredged up to shine a light on the treatment of Spears throughout her career. The ending of the conservatorship coincides with a time in pop music where its past injustices are being questioned and critiqued by the current superstars.

As pop enters a new golden age, everything is blown wide open. The sounds, visuals, and values are liberated. The artists that have assumed the top of the pop pyramid are primed to condemn pop’s past while also forging its future.

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Sam Murphy is a music writer and Co-Editor of The Interns. He also co-hosts the podcast Flopstars. Follow him on Twitter.