From Charli XCX to Sabrina Carpenter, today’s pop stars have nothing to say

A sharply witty coterie of female pop stars sing about modern dating etiquette and other romantic mores. Photo / Getty Images

THREE KEY FACTS

• The biggest global hit of 2024 was Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter, a song about sexual attraction and coffee.
• Digital streaming has shifted the music industry from bands to solo artists working in home studios.
• Musicians like Bob Dylan and Madonna used their platform for activism.

Opinions, attitude and punchy politics once went hand in hand with good music. Why does this generation have nothing to say?

If pop is the voice of youth, then why does this generation have so little to say? We live in fraught times of glaring political division, terrible wars, climate disasters and general existential gloom about the future, but you would never guess it from the hit parade. Watching today’s anointed pop elite singing and dancing for their supper at the recent Brit and Grammy awards, you would have a very hard time locating any awareness of life beyond dating apps and TikTok dance crazes.

At least socially conscious rocker Sam Fender gave us a blast of gritty northern realism, but he stuck out like a dirty old thumb among all the giddily choreographed ditties about love, sex and dancing. The Geordie Bruce Springsteen appears to represent a lone voice of passionate protest in the contemporary pop charts. You could scour the hit parade in vain for songs that stray too far from romantic templates established in more innocent, pre-rock and roll times, albeit with a touch more awareness of female perspectives and a heightened sensitivity towards mental health issues.

A sharply witty coterie of female pop singer-songwriters spearheaded by Taylor Swift lead the lyrical pack these days with songs forensically dissecting modern dating etiquette and other romantic mores. Noah Kahan, Benson Boone, Post Malone and a new wave of apolitical country songsmiths serenade the world with dated dreams of vanished small-town American values. Superstar rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar are too busy making nasty, bitchy diss tracks about each other to even question whether schoolyard bullying is a worthy use of their lyrical talents.

Meanwhile, Charli XCX was raised up as the saviour of British pop with a sapphic electro banger about the colour of her underwear (Guess). The biggest global hit of 2024 was Espresso, a song from former Disney star Sabrina Carpenter equating sexual attraction with the pleasure of drinking black coffee.

Now, I like sex and coffee as much as the next person. Since the dawn of recorded music, pop has primarily thrived in a realm of songs about love, sex and dancing. There is nothing wrong with that, it is the very oxygen of social interaction. But from the mid-1960s onwards, popular music also became a vital forum for youth and identity, rebellion and politics and sometimes just wild artistic flights of fancy.

The greatest and most venerated stars of pop and rock sang and spoke out on matters from the political to the personal, articulating and illuminating our times from alternative perspectives, and themselves being venerated and derogated for their lyrics and opinions. And I just don’t hear that any more. The modern pop charts are completely dominated by solo artists with nothing of consequence to say about the state of the world. How did this happen?

Earlier this year, Hollywood heartthrob Timothee Chalamet scored a major blockbuster movie hit playing the young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, with audiences of all ages flocking to see a story about the emergence of modern pop culture’s greatest lyricist. The film was based on Dylan Goes Electric! by American music journalist Elijah Wald, a sociological history examining a crux moment when the poetic values of folk bled into the pop mainstream, and a new “rock culture” emerged that valued lyrics as an expression of cultural identity, independence, idealism and counter-cultural separation from the mainstream adult “establishment” or “straight” world.

Rock (which as a cultural idea really included a whole panoply of singer-songwriters, soul and reggae artists) became the expressive voice of youth. So alongside all of the love and dance songs that continued to thrive post Tin Pan Alley, a new pop discourse emerged, covering every subject under the sun. Such iconoclastic and lyrically bold superstars as Dylan, John Lennon, David Bowie, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Marley were viewed as spokespeople for their generation. To be a singer-songwriter of the calibre of Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon came with expectations that you had something interesting to say about the world we live in.

Timothee Chalamet scored a major blockbuster movie hit playing the young Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. Photo / Searchlight Pictures

Punk, new wave and early hip hop further pushed that idea that opinions and attitude mattered. I’m not suggesting it was all highbrow seriousness, far from it. There continued to be boy bands and girl bands, dance divas and plastic pop wonders, all the joyous froth of pop itself, but the biggest stars of popular music culture were bold enough to articulate ideas. In the 1980s, Madonna was a mainstream dance idol but also a motormouth confrontational cultural trailblazer who saw no conflict between her role as entertainer and actually having things to say. U2 became the biggest band in the world, blazing away about social injustice.

That held true through the 1990s, when grunge, Britpop, trip hop and some of the bolder hip hop artists regularly took songs of social comment and generational angst to the upper reaches of the charts. But that kind of messaging has been fading throughout the 21st century. Of course there are still bands who feed on notions of rock rebellion, but they barely trouble the singles charts and carry little weight in pop cultural discourse.

Plenty of singer-songwriters address the poetic complexities of existence, but they are drowned out by a chart stampede to emulate Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift with witty songs about dating. The most distinctive lyricists in the charts now tend to focus on romantic staples, albeit with modern twists of inclusive identity politics. Artists of the calibre of Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan certainly have things to say, but it is as if relationship advice has become the only safe forum in which to express them.

Chappell Roan certainly has things to say, yet her lyrics remain relationship-based. Photo / Getty Images

So how did this happen? A lot of factors have coalesced to push pop back into the realm of the trivial, all ultimately emanating from changes in mass communication with the rise of the internet. The demise of the music press has played a part, those punchily opinionated rags that provided a forum for mouthy music makers and elevated idealised notions of what pop might aspire to be. There has been a simultaneous rise in subjective critical notions of equivalence, so that it has become just as respectable to be an airbrushed commercial pop singer as it is to be an angsty artist.

Digital streaming has driven an economic shift from bands of like-minded youngsters competing in lively local scenes to solo artists beavering away in solitude in home studios. An insidious fear of cancellation fuelled by social media trolling has been a disproportionately intimidating force in every arena of artistic expression, when one throwaway remark can destroy careers.

That has combined oddly with a rise in a brand of identity politics that makes it a sin to offend against anyone else’s opinion. A general atmosphere of insecurity throughout the music profession contributes to people at all levels from artists to the business itself playing it safe and following trends.

Maybe pop just got old and tired and is no longer considered a valuable forum for youth to express itself. The internet has atomised culture, offering an infinite space with something for everyone, young and old and every age, gender, taste and lifestyle choice in between, each of us with our own little channels broadcasting to whoever might pay attention, where music has faded to a background commodity, a mood board for individual lives in an age of cultural narcissism. Perhaps a homogenised mainstream of shared global hits is just what is left when all the fringes are burned off, a core of songs with enough hooks and inoffensive messaging to get people humming all around the world.

Have younger generations stopped paying much more than superficial attention to pop music? It is not as if the busy marketplace of social media is lacking in opinions but perhaps pop itself is no longer considered a robust forum in which to express them.

The trouble is that when people tell me pop doesn’t really matter any more, I wonder what, if anything, could replace it? In our overcrowded attention economy, young people may have myriad other outlets for self-expression, but there is little opportunity for communal, collective, shared expression in the quick hits of viral memes, or overlong pontifications of podcasts. You’re not going to unite the world playing a video game. When it comes to communal shared expression, it is hard to beat the power of song.

I find it fascinating that so many young people flocked to see Chalamet playing Bob Dylan, reminding the world of how poetic self-expression first took hold of pop music culture in fraught times of political and social change. But that was sixty years ago. Where is the new Bob Dylan when we really need them?