For most of the last five years, my interest in mainstream music has hovered between apathy and strong distaste. I limited my exposure to anything on the top 40 charts or within the realm of ‘mainstream’ as much as possible. Popular music was plagued by bland repetitions of extremely simple phrases.
With the same synthetic chords and beats we’ve heard a million times throbbing in the background, this song made car rides with my younger sister acoustically painful. However, in the last year or so, the rise of artists and songwriters like brother-sister duo Billie and Finneas Eilish has influenced popular music to focus on more complex and meaningful lyrics. We’ve seen Noah Cyrus sell her tears (check it out here), the Eilish’s sweep the Grammys just last week, and Lorde’s “Liability” and Florence + the Machine’s “Hunger” become two of their most-streamed songs on Spotify respectively. Instead of using the term “pop” to describe the aforementioned artists, I’ll call them mainstream to avoid paralleling their music with the stereotype of pop music whilst highlighting that they are certainly widely popular. As anti-pop stars, like Florence Welch, who’s about as creatively authentic as it gets, become superstars in the music industry, it’s worth figuring out how music shapes our culture in the present, rather than relying on hindsight to tell us what music once did.
As the lyrically poetic intricacies of the contemporary music scene continuously develop, I want to explore a genreless realm of sad songs that make having the blues feel so good. Think: that feeling when you rest your forehead against a moving window that’s lightly chilled from the quintessential raindrops climbing down the glass, almost to the beat of the emotional ballad flowing through your earbuds. I want to unpack how an eighteen year old girl made Grammy history this year and why that same girl has gained an obsessive following to the point where her goth-hypebeast aesthetic has swept the country. I want to examine the wildfire of a cultural response to a new release as it grows separately from the way it slowly burns in my own mind.
Although my flair for teenage melodrama has somewhat relaxed, there’s still rarely a second–classes and conversations aside–when I’m not listening to music, especially on a pretty gray day like this one. Music is my best coping mechanism for whatever life throws at me in a day, and songs have connected me over and over again to the notion that I’m never alone in my struggles or my victories. My Spotify 2019 stats showed that my top artist for year was Novo Amor, who, I think, is best exemplified in the ethereal and soothing melodies of “State Lines” from his 2018 album Birthplace. While my favorite genres are indie folk and alternative, I’m also a fan of Sasha Sloan, Billie Eilish, Lil Peep, and other artists addressing struggles with mental health through their lyrics. My attraction to these artists is a particularly relevant product of the recent rise in campaigns to destigmatize mental illness in a new way. While celebrities are using their voices in the media to talk about their own mental health struggles, my generation is getting more comfortable with asking for help and accepting imperfection.
Speaking of some general trends of Gen-Z, I’ll be working throughout this process on reconciling that the popularity itself of a song or artist does not cheapen the quality of music, nor does the process of cultural digestion. It does, however, reveal that music exists in a sacred space between my ears while the same song’s public life that can become distorted through the myriad lenses through which people interpret lyrics and melodies. As I, along with many others in my generation, quest for authenticity in a world where I fear I’ll never have an original thought, the concept of tracking mainstream artists on social media and on popular charts seems like a step towards conformity. But in the name of research, I declare myself in pursuit of understanding what lands certain songs with the hallowed title of “an anthem” in our ever changing cultural climate.
So, what are the anthems of today and why? In this blog, I might break down a personal anthem that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for days, or the Billboard #1 hit of the week, if it’s worth discussing in terms of content or cultural impact. Each post will detail the song’s backstory from what the artist has to say, analyze the lyrics almost as a poetic work of literature, and then examine the way the song was received and potentially distorted by the widespread audience. Some of these artists you may never heard of, and some you may have heard far too much about. I’ll continue to consume music in the raw way I always have, devoid of pop culture news or obsessing over the personal lives of certain artists, but will now start to look at what this music is doing to the world around me. Ultimately, a close-reading of any song considered an anthem for some group of people, be it the global mainstream, a niche genre, or just for me, will get to the core of what makes music one of the most powerful cultural forces in history.
Read on,
Helen
Anthem 