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Music|Pop Musicians, Please Spare Me the Back Stories
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/arts/music/pop-songs-metanarratives-back-stories.html
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Critic’s Notebook
The power of a lasting song is that it breaks free of its origins. Hits should be more than celebrity narratives.
Dec. 28, 2024, 5:01 a.m. ET
The megahits of 2024 were inseparable from their back stories. And that was exhausting.
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which racked up hundreds of millions of streams and helped propel him to the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, was the ferocious culmination of his battle, via quickly released singles, with Drake. With a title that flaunts tribalism, “Not Like Us” slings the most venomous accusations — including pedophilia — in a sneering, microtargeted barrage.
Taylor Swift’s album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which smashed streaming records, had fans clamoring to identify just which of a long list of ex-lovers Swift was referring to in songs like “So Long, London,” “The Black Dog” and “But Daddy I Love Him.” It also tied her romantic travails to her all-conquering Eras Tour in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
Charli XCX made the leap from striver to headliner with her album “Brat.” In the song “Girl, So Confusing” she sang about an uncertain relationship — detached politesse? fellowship? competition? — with an unnamed songwriter she’d been constantly compared to: “People say we’re alike / They say we’ve got the same hair.” Four months later, on Charli’s guest-filled set of remakes, “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat,” someone stepped forward: Lorde, a fellow brunette, who added candid verses about her own insecurities to the track. Connection made, but enigma dispelled.
It has been a long time since a song simply arrived as a head-turning surprise from a radio playlist or a cranked-up chorus from a passing car. Now that social media has engulfed culture, pop songs are teased as snippets, mined for the briefest hooks and effects, choreographed for vertical screens and pitched as the latest plot twist in a performer’s continuing, open-ended reality series, otherwise known as a career.
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In the studio, musicians and producers still work hard on the audio particulars of songs: beat, melody, arrangement, texture, vocals, ideas, emotions. But it seems that’s barely enough. An extra layer of drama needs to be called into play. Songs are seeded beforehand with social-media posts and coyly placed clues in lyrics, and then the drama is stoked by clout-seeking fan, gossip and reaction sites. Conflict gets clicks; attention leads to streams.
