musings on pop music and The Culture

I went to the pharmacy this afternoon and forgot my headphones, which is of course always when there's a 20+ minute wait to pick up my prescriptions. for a decent chunk of the wait, the store radio was playing a song that isn't familiar to me that turned out to Ordinary by a guy named Alex Warren. Some searching revealed that this song has been in the top 10 of the billboard hot 100 since February, which is shocking to me because it is the most boring and emotionally devoid song I've heard in recent memory. There's nothing to it except extremely middle-of-the-road vocals espousing uninspired wedding-worthy platitudes, generic if fine drum machine beats, and an obnoxiously repetitive harp loop. It's so unbelievably lethargic, creating one of the most agonizing 3 minutes in Walgreens-line history for me personally. Attempting to find information about this song led me down a rabbit hole of this year's pop charts, a topic I usually don't pay much attention to. 

I obviously hear the radio occasionally, I don't have a tiktok but enough people around me do that i have a general idea of what types of music are ubiquitous on that platform. I hear a lot of vaguely Christian-themed pop music with a superficially uplifting tone and an undertone of traditionalism. I assumed this was geographic more than anything, as I live in the bible belt of the US south and it's either this type of thing, the contemporary country station, or "classic rock" (which is an incredibly cherry-picked genre umbrella). What I didn't realize is how apparently ubiquitous this type of pop music is -- Jelly Roll is a household name and that terrifies me to my core. It's a very aesthetically conservative movement while doing its utmost to avoid seeming too tethered to any ideology, much like the wider socially conservative culture in which it thrives. It's beige, WASPy, and nonthreatening, until you peel back a few layers and then the Reagan-esque nuclear family messaging becomes overt and it's suddenly a fundamentalist thing. There is a difference between Christianity and the sort of universal non-denominational Christian fundamentalist Culture that has evolved out of the religious right. There's nothing inherently wrong with enjoying music like this, but it's fascinating to me that it's so ubiquitous and seemingly beloved amongst the lowest common denominator and it's interesting in a wider context. There's a very real stagnation in pop music, and that's been the case for almost every year this decade so far apart from summer of 2024.

This isn't a "new thing bad, old thing good" viewpoint. Incredible new music is coming out all of the time, both in and definitely outside of the pop scene. Nostalgia is a powerful tool because people generally don't focus on the bad or just plain forgettable parts of any movement or period in popular culture. For every subversive and sexually liberated 80s pop act like prince, madonna, or frankie goes to hollywood, there were a hundred generic arena rock acts that dominated airwaves. They were big but devoid of energy, over-produced, and just plain boring much like the traditionalist pop of the 2020s. The relatively-progressive 1990s were flooded by waves upon waves of adult contemporary. This is an inherently cyclical culture and it's very easy to forget that without some perspective. I fully expect to see a wave of 2020s nostalgia in 20 years (say that 5 times fast) focused entirely on brat summer and the colorful outfits surrounding the barbie movie (though I dislike how focused that ostensibly progressive movement was based around a corporate product with limited artistic statement, though that's its own post). Nobody is going to remember the monochrome clean minimalism and wedding music, though I do wonder what will end up representing the "subversive youth culture".