Part of me agrees that pop is ripe for that sort of upheavel but my arguments that it won't happen are:
1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s.
2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category.
3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare.
In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.
1. Angst will probably always be the teenage condition but I don't think the distance between what's being recorded and what teens and young adults are feeling is as great as it was in the 90s.
2. Music listening is so much more fragmented now that even if some artist hooks into some underserved emotional need, it might just grab its group of followers and then sorta descend into its own little subculture, safely away from the mainstream. The third and fourth lines on any contemporary festival act list has a lot of acts that fall into this category.
3. Kurt Cobain was this unusual combination of wanting to be anti-authority, anti-establishment, alternative on one hand, but then very ambitious and seeking fame and record deals on the other. It's paradoxical but he was that and that combination of attributes is really good for changing the mainstream music scene but I don't think most people can live in that contradiction for that long and therefore people like that are rare.
In my view, we're in a sort of repeat of 00s R&B. Lot of substanceless tunes with honestly seriously vulgar lyrics but immensely catchy and fun. The main difference is this version is less danceable (but also more subject to dance routines on TikTok!). And I don't mean it in a pejorative way, not every good song need to be meaningful.