A Few Thoughts On…

Pop music is thriving. It’s blooming and growing for what is hopefully a sustained moment. Then there is the alternative, rock, and indie part of the ecosystem that’s historically been the evolutionary and revolutionary side of the equation. So what is afflicting the mavericks? Why is the overarching trend in alternative music to appear as feeble as possible?

A few years back I wrote about the lethargic “smooth vibes” genre that had enveloped the alternative scene, a Mac DeMarco inspired sound that combined all the worst elements of early 80s new wave and yacht rock into a college zoomer’s afternoon soundtrack.

Slackers are not to be underestimated – a huge contingent of 90s alternative was made by the irreverent, the nihilistic and the bored. Kurt Cobain could easily have been labelled with those three adjectives.

But Cobain also had drive and urgency. As hard as he tried to not care about anything, there was a tangible nature to that not caring. There was still something resembling a message, a statement that Nirvana and Nirvana’s predecessors and peers were built upon.

The bands of the 2020s so far are built upon a different kind of nothing.

As we reach the halfway point of the decade the only noticeable stride that’s been made since January 1 2020 is the move toward occasional uptempo tracks – thanks not to alternative luminaries, mind you, but to artists like Olivia Rodrigo.

While mainstream alternative is still mining the output of the four horsemen of Mumford & Sons, Twenty One Pilots, The Black Keys and The Neighbourhood, the more underground contingent has seemingly coalesced around the anemic sound of indie band Real Estate.

At its core, the sound is a truly awful, unadorned slab of beige. A gaggle of bespectacled introverts plaintively singing about….nothing in particular. Sometimes they have mullets. Sometimes they have mustaches. Sometimes they wear t-shirts. Sometimes they add a little funk or punk to the mix. But it’s never something.

A band with a name like Winnetka Bowling League should have an eclectic sound to match. Instead they’re a midwest version of Hellogoodbye, power pop without the power. They sound virtually identical to another new artist named bob junior. Slight, non-committal, and just as forgettable.

Conversely you have Alfie Templeman, who looks and sounds exactly how you’d expect – a goofball making nondescript music for nondescript parties. A bit more energy, but no less forgettable.

Wallows. Dizzy. fanclubwallet. Field Guide. Husbands. Ekkstacy. Indigo Waves. These are the interchangeable artists that Spotify is pushing to centre stage, a place that neither they nor us as the audience want them to be.

Every era thus far has had filler music. This isn’t a new issue inherent to one generation. The problem is that the filler has become the main course. We are in 2024 and we cannot define 2024 musically. We are well past the due date of a fresh new sound and instead sorting through a hodgepodge of bland beige indie, 90s revivalism, and neverending nostalgia. The promise of the dark, innovative trap-pop introduced to us by Billie Eilish in 2019 was extinguished by Eilish herself in 2021 with her own sophomore record.

But again, the matter of genre is only a fraction of the problem. The overarching dilemma is to total and complete lack of uniqueness.

None of these artists have a defining philosophy.

You can point to Lana Del Rey and say she is the queen of slow motion Americana. You can point to the Black Keys and say they are the band most responsible for Ford truck sales. You can even point to Future Islands and say hey it’s raspy synth pop Dracula.

Who can you point to and define in 2020s alternative music? Better yet, who can you point to in 2020s alternative music? Pop music has recently begun to churn out some household names, and it appears that alternative has ceded the responsibility of being the vanguard to the mainstream. Noah Kahan and Glass Animals are shared assets, the latter on the brink of the follow-up fail.

There are thousands of problems in the world and none are being addressed through song. It has become an utterly passionless genre where singers only utter halfhearted observations about daily life.

Definition, clarity, and urgency. It doesn’t matter if you use distortion or not, how many keyboards you use, or who your influences are. The alternative world needs to start being an alternative once again.

Even the most miserly curmudgeon – also known as myself – cannot help but admit that music is back. Music itself has value again. Something has clicked in the collective consciousness and music is relevant in mainstream culture once more. Whether that’s because AI has secretly begun writing all pop hits or artists have stepped up their game in order to counter AI, well that’s a mystery. But we are halfway through the year and so far have four, yes four (??) mega hits.

As is tradition, the beginning of the year gave us the requisite legacy artist hit single in Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em”. Not only was this Beyonce’s return to the spotlight after 8 years without a viral release, it also began a spirited discussion about her move into country music. What a twist – the public were actually talking about music itself.

But we have been fooled many times over the past decade with these early year hits. Last year Miley Cyrus gave us flowers. The flowers wilted within months and nothing grew to replace them, leaving the rest of the year bare.

To have three more songs reach stratospheric heights in the zeitgeist with half the year left is nothing short of a miracle. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”, Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” and Morgan Wallen + Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” are all actual, real hits. The songs themselves, without context or baggage, are the focal point and are succeeding on their own terms organically.

Sabrina Carpenter is particularly interesting in that she is developing as an artist in the most natural way we’ve seen in years. Touted to be a next big thing way back in 2020, she has slowly climbed her way to the top rather than being placed their by the shadowy executive committee. I could be cynical and say that this might simply be a more careful approach to foisting her upon the world and is in fact calculated, but even if so, it’s far more preferable to the forced “fame” of Rita Ora / Phoebe Bridgers / Skylar Grey.

Carpenter might very well be an industry plant, but her stardom has been built in a much more tolerable way than say, the daughter of rich and powerful industry insider JJ Abrams. Gracie Abrams is also a big music story in 2024, but in this case it’s more about the fact that she is the nepo-iest of nepo babies and gifted with Taylor Swift tours and features with zero work and all privilege.

Speaking of Swift – am I allowed to have a smug “I told you so” moment? Not only was her boyfriend’s championship run in the Super Bowl as scripted as any WWE showdown, but her latest album failed to launch a single hit. Oh, The Tortured Poets Department is absolutely a success. The week after its release gave us a frenzied dissection of every song title and lyric. And yet not one word online was written about the music itself. I couldn’t tell you what direction Swift took with this record, the hook of any of the songs, or even a quotable line from the album. I can tell you that thousands upon thousands of posts were made about it though, parsing every word for hints about Swift’s past relationships and what led to their respective ends. Swift is still the biggest artist on the planet, but I maintain my position that this is a marketing feat, not a musical one.

The same can be said for Charli XCX, who for the past decade or so has also been constantly pushed into the limelight without any content to back it up. There was a minor hit in that Boom Clap song but even that’s stretching it. 2024 brought her some fortune though, as millions of youths are having themselves a “brat summer”. The branding for her new record has been extremely on point, from the meme-able album art to the aforementioned appropriation of the album title to the supposed (and somewhat confusing) feud/feature with Lorde that’s also been fuel for discussion in mainstream circles.

The biggest discussion however, was gifted to us by Drake and Kendrick Lamar. A bitter rivalry that escalated into a volley of diss tracks, the beef between the two rappers has been the most talked-about music related story of the year. But like with Taylor Swift’s output since 2017, “Not Like Us” is not a #1 hit because it’s a memorable melody, but because of the furor surrounding it. Furor even rap veteran Eminem managed to capture with his ragebait comeback single. It might not reach the outrage of his prime, but to rile people up 25 years into his career is impressive.

There’s room for improvement among all the excitement though; not everyone’s writing superhits, and more often than not we’re getting the same flat, monotonous choruses we’ve been hearing since 2014. Only now they’re so tOtAlly 90s instead of so tOtAlLy 80s.

Ariana Grande’s latest flopped, as did Camila Cabello’s, both thanks to those one-note, unmemorable choruses. Charli XCX might have the best branded record of the year, but let’s be honest – there’s very little in the way of big hits on that record thus far. Nelly Furtado and Katy Perry are attempting to jump on the hype train with a comeback but both those campaigns are going about as well as Gwen Stefani’s botched grasp at a revival in the late 2010s (not well at all).

All in all, the scorecard is looking decent. New household names, earned success and a legacy comeback – even if nothing else happens in 2024 we have already surpassed the past 5 years combined.