When history remembers pop music in the 2010s, it might remember the decade’s technology—the continued decline of the CD and then the mp3, the rise of streaming, the small resurgence of vinyl—more than the recorded output. But there’s always been a symbiotic relationship between the technology of pop and the music’s content. The music of this decade was defined by how close we felt to the people making it—songs and albums were received as direct transmissions from artists to fans, and thanks to social media the distance between the two never felt shorter. Call it the new pop intimacy, where artists connected with our lives by being hyperspecific about their own.
In previous decades, many of the most acclaimed artists were celebrated for being untouchable and living lives on another plane (the Rolling Stones, Madonna ) or for being cryptic and inscrutable (REM, Radiohead). But in the 2010s, pop’s elite were praised for sharing their innermost thoughts. This led to records like Solange’s powerful 2016 release “A Seat at the Table,” an album-length exploration of identity both personal and collective that includes spoken interludes from her mother and father. It also gave us the dense and rewarding “Lemonade” by her sister, Beyoncé, a collection inspired by the unfaithfulness of Beyoncé’s husband, rapper Jay Z. And it gave us the R&B singer Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” which sometimes seemed like a diary entry set to homemade beats.
But this openness wasn’t confined to stars—an acclaimed release from the indie-rock project Mount Eerie, “A Crow Looked at Me,” dealt directly and in plain-spoken terms with the death of leader Phil Elverum’s wife, and indie-folk singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens wrote the touching song suite “Carrie & Lowell,” an album titled for his parents that explored his childhood and their troubled marriage in wrenching detail. And LPs by David Bowie (“Blackstar”), Leonard Cohen (“You Want It Darker”) and the self-titled effort from indie-rock singer-songwriter David Berman’s Purple Mountains were all released around the time of their creators’ deaths, and each was dissected for clues that its maker meant it as a farewell note.
The new pop intimacy, accelerated by the rush of social media, meant that rap, the most personal and direct pop genre of them all, owned the decade. And the 2010s will be remembered as the period when rap became the defining sound of pop, not just in terms of sales and streaming but also cultural impact. Drake, Kanye West, Vince Staples and Future made innovative records packed with referential details that only the most devoted fans could unpack.
The single greatest artist of the 2010s, who dominated much of the rap conversation, was an exception to the rule: Kendrick Lamar offered plenty of himself on albums like “Good Kid, M.A.A.D City” and “To Pimp a Butterfly,” but he also held a great deal back, and his work is focused on broader ideas in addition to personal expression. Not coincidentally, his music among all mentioned here was the most politically inspired. Mr. Lamar’s example, perhaps, will point the way to the best music of the 2020s.
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December 17, 2019 at 11:52PM
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The Decade in Music: Intimacy Delivered via Headphones - The Wall Street Journal
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