Music conjures spaces: churches, theaters, roadhouses, arenas, pubs, dance halls, living rooms, festival tents, and all sorts of clubs, from tenement basements to cabarets to giant warehouses. Those are social spaces, where musicians perform together and audiences gather to share the sounds—and to flirt, dance, get high, sing along. To somehow connect.
On live recordings, those spaces may have been real; with studio recordings, they have long been a crafty, inviting illusion.
Yet through the 2010s, many of pop’s sonic spaces grew more isolated, barren and claustrophobic. They were places where a moan or a whisper was all a singer chose to project. Where the idea of a stable, long-running band has been all but supplanted by a songwriting gig economy of temporary hookups; how many hits “feature” someone the lead singer hasn’t actually met?
Music’s implied spaces have shrunk to the size of a bedroom, or a pair of laptop speakers, or a set of earbuds. Those are private places, intimate places, often lonely places. In the internet era, they are also places that can be solitary workshops for sounds and images. There are cameras and microphones in those digital bunkers, and musical starter kits online; anti-social collaborators don’t have to interact at all. And SoundCloud and YouTube are wide open to the results; the loner’s laptop can be both a recording studio and a broadcast booth.
Atomised, solitary music-making reflects broader cultural currents: a ruthlessly individualistic winner-take-all economy; the troll onslaught of social media; siloed and tribalised politics. It’s no wonder so many singers and rappers sound mournful, defensive or belligerent, even when they’re boasting. Pop has hollowed itself out, responding to both artistic instincts and more prosaic incentives. As the decade ends, countless songs boil down to little more than a singer, a programmed beat and just one more instrument, which might itself come from a sample library—no personal interaction required.
The all-conquering hit song of 2019, “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X, was first released in 2018 but gathered plays, remixes and assorted collaborators throughout the year. Behind Lil Nas X’s singsong voice, the backup switches from a handful of plucked notes taken from a Nine Inch Nails song to a slouchy bass line and the ratchety twitch of a drum machine—and little more.
Bare-bones songs suit a pop economy increasingly defined by lean recording budgets and music that’s streamed rather than purchased. Streaming rewards instant legibility; the details that might reward a more committed listener are irrelevant, and maybe counterproductive. Who has time to parse the dense layers of musical and verbal allusions that went into peak 1990s hip-hop? And who needs the rich overtones of a well-recorded drum kit—live or sampled—when the standardised ticks and thumps of the Roland TR-808 drum machine are familiar and functional enough?
Streaming algorithms may be narrowing the sonic palette further, as automated playlists steer listeners toward similar-sounding tracks. Even international phenomena like Puerto Rican reggaeton, Jamaican dembow, Nigerian Afrobeats and pan-Caribbean urbano and Latin trap feature the same tinny, limited drum machine tones. Streaming-era blockbusters can sound like flat digital blueprints of what their music might have been. At a time when vastly more sounds—acoustic, electric, synthetic, processed—are available than at any time in history, such a narrow palette feels like a musical hunger strike.
But maybe—just maybe—we’ve bottomed out. As the decade ends, perhaps the pendulum has started to swing back a little closer to abundance, nuance, sensuality, solidarity, and even a glimpse of optimism.
On a cursory listen, pop that reached millions of listeners in 2019 still comes across as sparse, insular and alienated. Billie Eilish, the teenage songwriter whose debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was No. 1 on Billboard’s year-end Top 200 albums chart, recorded most of the songs with her brother and producer, Finneas O’Connell, at their parents’ home. She keeps her voice deliberately small and whispery—bedroom-scale—in tracks that draw lessons from the low-fi, home-recorded nightmares of SoundCloud rap. The No. 2 album, Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next, often accompanies her voice with drum machines and little else.
Khalid, whose album Free Spirit was No. 13 for the year, often croons about his romantic diffidence over strictly skeletal tracks. Clairo (Claire Cottrill), now 21, went viral in 2018 on YouTube with bedroom-recorded tracks, and her 2019 debut album, Immunity, remains determinedly subdued as she deadpans her way through songs that touch on self-harm and deeply unsettled relationships.
But they’re all just toying with shallowness. Eilish’s songs are actually miniature sonic fun houses, anything but drab or monotonous, with playful melodies, meticulously varied instrumentation and a theatrical spectrum of attitudes, from taunting to suicidal. Grande orchestrates her songs with all that her voice can do, from solo acrobatics to massed harmonies; her stripped-down instrumentation is a matter of self-sufficient bravado that fully underscores her lyrics.
Khalid, for all his lovelorn protestations, fully trusts the power of his imploring voice, which warms even his most brittle tracks. And he’s not content to be hemmed in; now and then, he deploys a rock band. Clairo’s Immunity, produced by Rostam Batmanglij (formerly of Vampire Weekend), tucks baroque subtleties behind its modest vocals, giving the songs a complex inner life. On all four albums, pop’s urge for inclusion prevails, and in concert—Eilish and Grande fill arenas—they spur fervent singalongs.
There’s more. The songs on Lana Del Rey’s latest album, Norman _______ Rockwell! carry the hand-played, acoustic-flavored foundations of California’s Laurel Canyon pop toward surreal, 21st-century extrapolations of that sound. Harry Styles—atoning, perhaps, for the boy-band confections he sang as a member of One Direction—has made himself a dedicated student of pre-computerized rock and pop, and his album “Fine Line” immerses itself in the sounds of both late-psychedelic California and glam-era Britain, simulating the lavish studio soundscapes of the 1970s.
Selena Gomez had her first No. 1 single with Lose You to Love Me, which begins in solitude—just her voice and a piano—but quickly swells to cathedral size, using instruments and electronics to create a cavernous expanse. And it’s not far-fetched to suggest that the American breakthrough of K-pop acts like BTS has something to do with their willingness to bring back the plush, roomy, all but abandoned sounds of 1980s and ’90s R&B and pop.
Then there’s Lizzo. Her debut album was released six years ago; she persevered through years of journeywoman work. Her single “Truth Hurts”—minimally backed by those standard drum-machine sounds and a piano riff—was initially released in 2017. But it took until 2019 for her lung power, euphorically sassy songwriting, body positivity and relentless gleeful arrogance to suddenly align with a mass audience.
On her 2019 album, Cuz I Love You, Lizzo lets loose with virtuoso gospel-rooted singing that can be fervent or wildly campy. She writes songs that reach back to old-school soul and funk when she’s not rapping; she plays flute solos. She can laugh at herself and brag about herself at exactly the same moment; she’s hardheaded and bawdy. She’s got a perfectly controlled scream. In the studio, her music constantly blurs boundaries between hip-hop sampling and live musicians; onstage, she turns concerts into communal dance parties. Her songs constantly proclaim how unique she is, yet she’s anything but isolated.
Her music invites everyone into her space.
© 2019 The New York Times