Where once the biggest acts were outlandish and explosive, now they trade on their relatability. Is ordinary the new normal?
Of all the controversies generated by rock and pop
music over the last decade, the weirdest may be those by artists who aren’t weird or controversial at all. Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, Adele, George Ezra, Jess Glynne have all sold a phenomenal number of records and earned an equal amount of opprobrium. The collective terms for them are usually pejorative: the new boring, the ordinary boys, a beige pop wasteland. They’re held up as evidence that pop music is having a potentially fatal existential crisis: when did pop cease to suggest a life more glamorous or exciting than your own? When did it cease to be aspirational, strange and intriguing? Never mind David Bowie pointing down the lens at Top of the Pops – how did we go from
Lady Gaga wearing the contents of a butcher’s counter to the 2010
MTV awards to nondescript artists who are only distinguished from their audience because they’re the ones on stage? When did pop become so boring?
It’s easy to overestimate the dominance of normality in modern pop, particularly if you’re a music hack writing a piece that suggests it has been in irreversible decline since your teens. If you want pop music that looks spectacular, glamorous and aspirational, or suggests an intriguing world outside the experience of its audience, or that terrifies parents, there’s plenty of it. Drugged-out face-tattooed rappers; DayGlo K-pop bands; Lana Del Rey’s LA femme-fatale shtick; Billie Eilish’s gothic sci-fi imagery; the Afro-futuristic fantasias of Janelle Monáe and FKA twigs.