The past year brought with it intriguing musical movements, not least a sudden pivot towards country by a succession of mainstream pop stars. Heralded by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album and amplified by the release of Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion, the trend also brought huge hits for the hitherto-unknown Shaboozey and Dasha, while Zayn Malik called on the services of a Nashville producer and Lana Del Rey announced a country-influenced album.
2024 also brought with it new stars, most obviously Chappell Roan, who had spent the best part of a decade plugging away in obscurity, being signed then dropped by a major label, before releasing a debut album that slow-burned its way to the top of the charts: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess initially came out in 2023 to little response (one of its biggest hits, Pink Pony Club, was first released four years ago). As with Sabrina Carpenter – whose 2024 breakthrough Short N’ Sweet was her sixth album – Roan had clearly had the space to work out exactly what she wanted to do and how she wanted to present herself, with appealingly idiosyncratic and uncontrived results.
But the most striking thing about pop in 2024 was the way it was dominated by a handful of huge, monocultural stories, which spilled out of the music pages into the mainstream news agenda. Continuing from 2023, Taylor Swift’s Eras tour began the year being described as bigger than the Beatles and Thriller by support act Phoebe Bridgers and ended it officially the highest-grossing tour in history, making Swift a billionaire in the process. By the time it arrived in the UK this summer, the clamour made it impossible to avoid.
But it was superseded in the headlines by the release of Charli xcx’s Brat and the announcement we were living through a “Brat summer”: whatever the rather nebulous concept of being “brat” signified, the idea took dramatic hold, turning up everywhere from the US election campaign to the New Statesman’s posthumous appreciation of Edna O’Brien and the pages of National Geographic, which proclaimed Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia and 7th-century Chinese empress Wu Zetian were all “brat”.
Then Oasis announced their 2025 reunion tour. For weeks, it was unavoidable: loud and lengthy expressions of joy; equally loud and lengthy expressions of horror; controversy regarding ticket prices; rosy-hued 90s nostalgia; bitter recriminations regarding the failings of 90s pop culture; and explorations of the curious phenomenon of teenagers too young to remember Oasis’s 2009 split, let alone their golden years, yet apparently thrilled by their reappearance.
On the face of it, these three mega-stories were all quite different. The Eras tour had a sense of finality – it was difficult for even the most hysterical devotee to see how Swift could possibly top this career-summarising greatest hits show. The success of Brat, meanwhile, seemed to herald a new era in mainstream pop that was messier, brasher, wittier and wilfully trashier, a reaction to years of self-help platitudes, wellness culture and perfectly choreographed pop. (You could see something similar in Roan’s drag-inspired aesthetic – the cover of her single Good Luck, Babe! had her sporting a prosthetic pig’s snout – and in Carpenter’s gleefully acidic lyrics.)
At the risk of sounding like the writer trying to crowbar Charli xcx into a piece about Edna O’Brien, one could argue the V-flicking Gallaghers are, well, brat; if you’re looking for an alternative to wellness culture and self-care bromides, they’ve got a song called Cigarettes and Alcohol that’s very much in favour of both. But their reunion was still predicated on nostalgia, with even teenage fans buying into a myth of the 90s as a kind of prelapsarian age, before social media and smartphones, that was less fraught than the present day.
And yet, all three stories had something in common. For years now, pop has favoured the individual over the collective – this year groups such as Flo have continued to struggle, and some of the biggest global hits were from newly solo K-pop stars such as Jimin of BTS and Rosé and Lisa of Blackpink – and the way pop is consumed has also narrowed. Streaming’s algorithms serve up music ostensibly tailored to your own personal tastes. The price of tickets has turned gig-going into a special occasion you indulge in once or twice a year rather than enjoy on a regular basis. Fandoms have become weird, often troubling things that seem to exist as disembodied online entities firing pissy, anonymous social media messages to their idol’s rivals. The things music fans used to gather around – TV and radio shows, the music press, even the charts – are either fading in importance or essentially defunct.
Yet there remains an innate desire for collective experience, for music to provide a sense of community. You could see it in the burgeoning popularity of dance music: a DJ like Sammy Virji may have made little impact on the charts, but he can still sell out two nights at Brixton Academy; the nocturnal dance events at Glastonbury were so over-subscribed, some had to be closed down due to overcrowding. You could see it in the crowds that flocked to the Eras gigs, who seemed noticeably different from other pop audiences, and were big on intriguingly homespun rituals – it wasn’t as if Swift or her management had told them to come in costume, or trade friendship bracelets, or draw the number 13 on their hands, or develop a series of if-you-know-you-know responses to particular moments in certain songs. You could see it in a willingness to buy into the notion of Brat and Brat summer, a way of defining yourself, however nebulously, through music in a post-tribal era, when pop is supposed to have lost its ability to affect the way its audience defines itself.
And you could see it in the commotion caused by the return of Oasis. Whatever else you make of it, Oasis’s oeuvre is absolutely predicated on collective experience: their songs sound like songs written specifically for vast crowds of people to bellow along to en masse; they’re probably best experienced in the middle of said crowd, drunk, with your arms around your friends. Indeed, collective experience is so entrenched in Oasis’s appeal that their music has literally become a signifier of it. In recent years, advertisers have reached for Stand By Me and Round Are Way in commercials tagged, respectively “it’s a people thing” and “we can all do our bit for our community”.
So perhaps that’s the underlying message of pop in 2024: people still want to be part of something bigger than themselves, and they’ll still use pop to do it, even in an age when audiences are supposed to be atomised and individually sated by the algorithm. If it is, that’s a hopeful note to end a frequently hopeless year on.
Source: theguardian.com
