Pop music, like the rest of American society, has reached the exhausted endpoint of the taboo-litigation mania that’s marred the past decade of our national life. Having reckoned with racism, sexism, and a host of other identitarian crimes, and then having decided the reckoning was too embarrassing in its overreach for us to continue or even to acknowledge, artists and fans have moved on to pedophilia as the final great faultline. Kendrick Lamar used February’s Super Bowl halftime show to accuse Drake, a rival hip-hop megastar, of “lik[ing] them young.” Like most rap diss tracks, “Not Like Us,” Lamar’s anti-Drake scorcher from the spring of 2024, contained not a single word of truth. It also had three long stints atop the Billboard Hot 100. Lamar’s performance of his slanderous mambo was the only real moment of drama and tension amid the Philadelphia Eagles’ unaesthetic beatdown of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Thank God for sex panics. “Not Like Us” is a colossal banger. But then a strange thing happened in the 18 months after its debut: nothing. Drake, at 81.5 million monthly Spotify listeners compared to Kendrick’s 80.5, has retained almost all of his pre-feud stature. The Toronto croon-rapper’s recent “What Did I Miss?” is now the No. 2 song in America. It seems the listening public enjoyed Lamar’s thunderous insult anthem without accepting its dubious truth-claims. Earlier this summer, Sean Combs, one of the wealthiest and least talented of hip-hop’s late ’90s exploiters, beat a federal sex trafficking charge, becoming the last major alleged criminal to be prosecuted by former FBI Director James Comey’s daughter.
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The American mind-state, our moral assumptions and our basic relationship with ever-destabilizing reality, is encoded in the music we create and consume en masse. The Billboard Hot 100 contains vital information about who we are at a given moment. Reports are hardly encouraging these days. At a moment when the monsters appear less monstrous, and sometimes even look like victims, it would be natural for popular tastes to reflect a new sense of liberation. Perhaps the airwaves would sound freer and more transgressive as the scolds and censors lost their grip on society. Instead, our confusion grows ever deeper. Libidinal hip-hop has vanished from the charts, now the province of artists who narrate their mental health struggles rather than their superhuman urges or tastes. Florida rapper Doecchi’s “Anxiety” became the sonic wallpaper of the early summer ride-hailing app experience, each whiny and dour bar producing guilty moments of “WAP” nostalgia, while on his latest album, Justin Bieber followed Lamar’s lead in including therapy session-like skitwork between songs. Often, it seems that no one, with the notable exception of the Puerto Rican pop savant Bad Bunny, has any confident idea of what they’re supposed to be doing now.
Brat Summer, last year’s abortive attempt to turn the screechy Charli XCX album of that name into a culture-spanning event, has given way to a season without name or form. The currently most ubiquitous pop star, 26-year-old Sabrina Carpenter, is the musical equivalent of a sex robot, more a sequence of AI-generated moans than a real human being, much less an artist. No one is convinced by her, including her — none of the feelings are real, none of the flings or boyfriends sound like they happened or exist. She’s transcribing algorithmically generated imitations of passion into sounds and language incapable of rousing a single blood cell.
The same chill has descended upon the unimpeachably sincere end of the musical creative spectrum. Arcade Fire became the defining indie rock band of the late 2000s through hyperearnestness — the Texas-born Win Butler could access the walled-off fears and feelings of adolescence, even of childhood, and blow them up to arena size. The feelings outstripped all available language in his best numbers, quasi-orchestral works that often dissolved into wordless sing-alongs.
In August 2022, Pitchfork, the review website-turned-self-appointed music industry sex police, and the site that vaulted Arcade Fire to prominence nearly 20 years earlier, attempted a Me Too-type destruction of Butler, who was alleged to have gone on a handful of sad-sounding dates with fans who later decided their hero was an awkward and unstable creep. In Pink Elephant, the band’s full-length from May, you can sense how the ordeal has drained him. Lead single “The Year of the Snake” plods atop a funereal bass drum while Butler shrugs that it’s the season of change, meaning it’s probably fine to be confused by it all. Elsewhere on the album, he fantasizes about never having been a rock star and gives an uneasy instrumental track the unsubtle title of “Beyond Salvation.” By the time Butler creates a real, vintage Arcade Fire moment, nearing a primal scream-like assessment of his own sundered life during a long buildup in “Stuck In My Head,” the record is just minutes away from being over. This is the first Arcade Fire album free of all ecstasy, or even a countdown to it, and it comes in a time when defiant confidence would be just revenge against everything that tried to destroy the band. Instead, Butler has been beaten. He’s a whimpering captive to forces he can barely understand. If his inner teenager still screams, he can no longer hear him behind the wall, and neither can we.
Butler is a victim of a sinister moral panic, one in which small and jealous spirits tore down the highest targets their stubby little souls could reach. He came into the summer at a huge disadvantage and with a shrunken fanbase — a couple of months ago, the Pink Elephant tour stopped at the Brooklyn Paramount, a 5,000-capacity room down the street from Arcade Fire’s previous local headlining venue, the Barclays Center, which seats 18,000 people. Pink Elephant, a major label release, was the first Arcade Fire record to completely miss the Billboard 200. Wet Leg, the cheeky girl group from the Isle of Wight, had no such loss of momentum when it released moisturizer, its second album, in early July. It came into its sophomore effort as one of the most lauded and hyped rock bands of recent vintage, and the two official members are women with as-yet unexcavated romantic histories.
Wet Leg often seemed too lauded and too hyped. It’s never been clear where exactly they came from. “Chaise Longue,” an immaculately produced statement of jarringly clear artistic purpose, showed up on Spotify one day in June 2021, courtesy of Domino Records. Suddenly, everybody loved Wet Leg, both the band and its self-titled debut EP. They must be some kind of a psyop: Are we really to believe that Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers decided to form a band while riding a Ferris wheel? The population of the Isle of Wight is 140,000. How often do label goons even make it out there? But then pop music is really just endless cycles of unseen corporate overseers field-testing their hunches and schemes on a willing and unwitting public. The whole world-engine of American music consumption is one grand psyop, and it is churlish to complain about the existence of a lesser trans-Atlantic version of the game we all know.
The first Wet Leg album showcased a deliciously English clash of bawdiness and ambivalence, the same tug of lust and shame that gave the best work of the ’90s Britpop rebels Pulp, the most obvious of Wet Leg’s influences, an element of real, human complexity. From the tossed-off-sounding, sing-spoken vocals to the surrealist sex talk and the whipping sense of humor, Wet Leg set the pair up as the great modern inheritors of the simultaneously diffident and self-aware British alternative rock tradition. Girls could be horny and guilty too, and they could be fun enough for you to miss both attributes under the thumping bass and disco guitars.
Wetleg’s sophomore effort, moisturizer, could be called a more human version of what Carpenter offers. “Mangetout” finds them sneering at the unevolved modern male with the same pity and scorn Carpenter tries to capture on “Manchild,” her recent chart-topper, except that the Wet Leg-style swing from a half-rapped, fully stoned delivery on their verses to high-flying rock choruses goes beyond anything Carpenter is likely to ever even try. Alas, the rest of moisturizer is serious, almost subdued, at least compared with its rollicking predecessor. The literary-quality mockery of frustrated male urges is much scarcer this time out — “Just take me shopping, buy me a rabbit, yeah?” is about as far as the taunts go. There’s nothing nearly as good as “Chaise Longue,” a song about the intricate psychic interplay between boredom and sex. Our girls have grown up too fast. They’re now too evolved to see the possibilities of boredom or even of sex. Maybe expectations have rendered them timid, and they’ve become less interesting now that they think they’re expected to represent something — women, rock musicians, the ever-shrinking Isle of Wight — other than themselves.
If we are an era where the mores, economic systems, and basic ethos of pop music is in a state of identity-effacing flux, rescue lies in those artists who have a strong connection to the former world, ones old enough to have lived and worked in the final days of the monoculture but young enough to still be creatively restless. Perhaps it is the millennials who will rekindle the ashes left in the wake of the early 2020s kulturkampf: Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lana Del Ray, Lamar, Drake, and Tyler, the Creator all stand for something. They have a sound and an ethos that forms a discrete chapter in the creative life of humanity, but that is also identifiably theirs. The music they produce is not always very good, but at least it can carry the weight of things greater than itself, and it is part of a culture rather than a mere product or a pose.
The millennial luminary best positioned to thrive in the current vacuum is 32-year-old Miley Cyrus, the daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and former star of Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. She is fabricated enough to soothe the algorithm gods but has the ineffable star power needed to vault beyond the mental and creative limits they impose on mortals such as Carpenter. She has a lower, raspier, more gravelly singing voice than her peers, one that could go in seemingly any direction she chooses to take it — she has celebrated covers of both Dolly Parton and The Cranberries. A country album or a straightforward rock record wouldn’t be a huge shock by now. Something Beautiful, released in May, is a genuine departure for her, an attempt to see how far into disco, funk, and noise she can go without asking too much of a fanbase raised on “Party in the USA.”
There is no wild leap into genius on Something Beautiful. What we hear is an artistic sensibility wondering how far and how high it’s really capable of going. Cyrus either picked or approved the right roster of collaborators for this adventure: Cole Haden of the beloved indie noise band Model/Actriz contributes to the album’s opening track, and two members of Alvvays, the best of the weepy millennial pop-rock bands, get songwriting credits on album highlight “The End of the World,” maybe the best mass-market song of the entire summer. Something Beautiful is an album of soaring regret and fantasy, a pivot into the themes of late youth. “The End of the World” isn’t jaded but immediate and enormous, bigger than any crying jag, a song that no bedroom can contain. Let’s pretend it’s not all over and destroyed, Cyrus booms over a straight-marching bassline and clarion synths. She can make the psychic churn of confidence and doom sound true to a real feeling and time, like an announcement of awesome possibility rather than of resignation and fatigue.
If we pretend along with her, we can get to whatever better things are in store.
Armin Rosen is a New York-based reporter at large for Tablet.