iâm going to start calling american music a-pop. for no reason
I meeeeeeeean
Part 1: Introducing A-pop

No title available
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
sheepfilms
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
taylor price

titsay

shark vs the universe
cherry valley forever
art blog(derogatory)
trying on a metaphor
wallacepolsom

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Discoholic đȘ©
I'd rather be in outer space đž
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Jules of Nature

oozey mess

⣠Chile in a Photography âŁ
RMH

Kaledo Art

seen from South Africa
seen from Poland

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia

seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany

seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from India
seen from United States
seen from Greece

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Finland
seen from Brazil
@cureforbedbugs
iâm going to start calling american music a-pop. for no reason
I meeeeeeeean
Part 1: Introducing A-pop
This is not the best one, but it was the funniest one to make
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
I clearly had more mashup energy in me so decided to do something I'd thought about when Tortured Poets Department came out, which was to treat it as a mixtape that used unauthorized samples rather than Antonoff (or Dessner) production.
So I have done this! This is The Tortured Poets Mixtape, every song on TTPD (not Anthology) given a very much not authorized new beat. Does "Fortnight" sound good with "Rather Be?" Should Taylor Swift collaborate with Dan the Automator (if only to complete my thought from a long time ago that LDR sounded like Lovage)? Does the not-big-enough artist Charlie Puth make an appearance? (Spoiler alert: yes.)
It is somehow even more cursed than the rap mixtape, but unlike that one you can just skip around until you find something that you like (or hate).
Remix mashups of every song from TTPD
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
Unfortunately I can't stop making these even though the project is over :/
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
This is cursed but I listened to the whole thing. Enjoy!
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
A reminder to give this full-length album treatment of the Jay-Z head bob gif a try!
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
Taylor Swift Is a Rapper -- the album!
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
Will probably reblog this a few times to see if any mutuals see it. It's been 13 years since the last DJ Bedbugs drop on Tumblr (see what I did there)
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
13EATS: A MIXTAYPE
I've been writing about Taylor Swift's melodic strategies for a long time now. I compared her to a melodic rapping style that I call "modal rap" back in 2023, but I always wondered what would happen if you actually combined her (mostly major key) melodies with (mostly minor key) production from rap of the past decade.
This is the result -- my attempt to dabble in Swiftological experimental physics after spending so much time as a theoretician. This is the first mash-up album I've made in 15 years, after my TEENPOP, LOCK, AND DROP series (which you can still find if you click through to the SoundCloud). Enjoy!
Taylor Swift and Zedd â it needs to happen
The Rise (or Fall) of A-Pop Series
Hello! Some of you might be interested in my now-completed series called The Rise (or Fall) of A-pop, which argues that we've entered an era of post-hegemonic American music culture where regional scenes from all over the world are not only influences on, but directly competing with American (and other western and English-language) pop music.
Part 1 lays out the concept of "A-pop."
Part 2 describes the new global attentional landscape, a "monsterverse" where music competes ruthlessly from different regional scenes (or "no" scenes, seemingly at random)
Part 3 goes into the decline of mainstream music sales in the '00s and associated rise of indie music changing from a "sidestream" to something more like a "middlestream," a blended semi-mainstream format. Coins the term "windowpane" to describe the glut of this music.
Part 4 is a diversion into Eurovision as an alternative to American centrality -- could a federation of nations take on the global project of broadcasting pop's cutting edge(s) to the world?
Part 5 goes deep on the '10s as a transitional period in which the last gasp of American blockbuster pop superstars (especially Taylor Swift and Drake) get locked in as incumbents while their competition struggles.
Part 6 is an epilogue about the slow realization of the "celestial jukebox," and how the utopic (or dystopian) visions of connected global music came true just in time for everyone to fret about the concerns of a previous era.
You can also read the full series in one place (and off of Substack) at a Wordpress site.
I think these are much more important lines of inquiry into contemporary pop than most of the arguments centered on American pop, including the annoying return of "poptimism" discourse.
If you enjoy, please share!
Trap Daniels and global country
Will keep cross-posting my newsletter stuff here when it seems worthwhile. This is about Morgan Wallen and country meeting global sounds halfway.
From Mix 22
Morgan Wallen briefly alit on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 last week, only to be dethroned by Alex Warren on the following weekâs chart. This added to the crescendo of fretting from music critics in my orbit, who have been putting out increasingly urgent hand-wringing treatises about Wallen and What It All Means. Personally, I think the Warren success is much weirder than the Wallen success. Iâm no country scholar, but Wallen seems to me like the obvious beneficiary of leading the first wave of country music to sound globally contemporary in many years.
Wallenâs success makes sense to me because heâs the country star who âwonâ the sound Iâve jokingly dubbed Trap Daniels (after Eric Harveyâs PBR&B). As Iâve written about before, once you take off in your own lane in the monsterverse, itâs very hard to shift the inertia. As soon as I listened to âLast Nightâ I understood that country music had finally arrived as the last genre on earth to join pop musicâs broad adoption of â10s trap beats. Once it did this, more of it traveled, no right-wing global heel turn necessary. (That may also have happened, but Iâm dubious.)
This posed a few questions for me. What accounts for the long delay between the introduction of what weâd recognize as todayâs trap beats and their total global takeover? When did the rest of (non-country) pop music absorb trap beats and why? And then, why did it take country so longâand, given how long it took, why did this actually work rather than sounding hopelessly passĂ©?
Trap beats have a long history, but a relevant endpoint (to be reductive about it) is the standardization of rap production conventions that eventually took the scrappy drum machine sample beats of Dirty South rap in the â90s and, over time, ironed out all of the bounceâeither literally, in the sense of the New Orleans genre, or figuratively, in the sense of a more rigid and less syncopated feel. By the â10s, trap beats, especially those influenced by Chicago drill, moved at a menacing plod and featured some specific sonic elements, like the persistent hiss of random hi-hat rolls.
I think of this development as the emergence of hard trap. If youâre annoyed with my many neologisms, you could refer to it simply as âdrill,â but I think itâs important to separate the conventions and palettes that transferred over to pop music from the specific development of Chicago drill as a genre. âHard trapâ gets across how rap music abandoned the rubbery and inviting feel of previous trap beats and started lurching in lockstep.
I suspect that stiffening and slowing the beats down in this way made them more suitable for other pop forms entering the streaming âvibes era.â The almost militaristic regularity, with off-kilter ratatat hi-hats throwing in random textures, could more easily adorn ponderous, sadder, or dreamier music without accidentally turning it into dance music. You could write a real downer and still thread a relatively hip beat through it, which happened with emo-adjacent Soundcloud rap but also with pop and singer-songwriter material using some of the same beats.
Hard trap was in full swing in rap music by 2012, but in 2013, you still hear pop stars struggling to incorporate these elements. I immediately think of Katy Perryâs âDark Horse,â which switches awkwardly to a trap beat for its Juicy J feature, or Miley Cyrusâs âWe Canât Stop,â a colossal mess of a song whose Mike WiLL Made-It beat forces sloppy, almost indie-ish drumming into something like a trap pattern.
It isnât until about 2015 that you really get the full complement of hard trap tropes showing up all over the place. There are the obvious candidates who seem like a natural fit, like Rihanna with âBitch Better Have My Money,â and also non-obvious ones like Lana Del Rey on âHigh by the Beach.â
What this gradual adoption of hard trap in the pop mainstream reminds me of is the explosion of keyboard technology following low-budget prosumer innovations in the early â80s. By 1983, analog keyboards that required programming were rapidly being supplanted in pop music by digital synthesizer models with presets made possible through FM synthesis (Holly Boson has a good rundown of this technology in a Pop Could Never Save Us episode about the 1985 charts). This led to popular, and often overbearingly cheesy, sounds from synths like the Yamaha DX7 flooding the pop charts, giving much mid-80s pop its uniquely plasticky character.
The âYamaha DX7 momentâ isnât as obvious to me in the wider adoption of trap beats (there might be one, but I donât know what it is). My semi-educated guess is that there is probably a confluence of technologies: (1) cheap DAWs being used in increasingly formulaic ways by producers without other studio experience, (2) cheap bluetooth headphones connecting to new smartphone technology (the signature hi-hat hiss sounds awful, but its oppressive flatness fits the playback), and (3) popular sample packs and production templates becoming more widely available. Trap was only one product of this technology confluence, which also led to the explosion of dubstep and pop-EDM.
Itâs not surprising that hard trap didnât transfer to country music for a long timeâmost of the styles from this era didnât, including dubstep and EDM.4 There was the rise of so-called âbro countryâ in the mid-â10s, which mimics the braggadocio and cadence of rap, but without many actual trap beats. The overriding bro country production norm at the time was hideously chipper sunshine snap, a lightly hip-hop-indebted beat built on very loud, reverbed snaps that âhook youâ like a wedgie might. Itâs overbearing to the point of being didactic, like instructions for clapping properly on the 2 and the 4 for people suffering from rhythmic congenital amusia.5
What you find in 2013 country are the same growing pains crossover attempts that were happening in pop music: the âCruiseâ remix with Nelly by Florida Georgia Line has a few trap sound elements, but itâs still very much of the sort of uneasy hip-hop/country Frankenstein that has been a feature of country for decades.
My inner Occamâs Razor says that the success of âOld Town Roadâ in 2019 was, despite the songâs fraught relationship with country radio, still a proof of concept for how completely you could let trap beats take over the production of a country songâthe guitar twang even gets you some bounce back in the picture. (Some of the music that followed was likely being recorded around the same time, though, so itâs hard to know for sure.) Whatever the reason, by 2020, you see dozens of country songs importing hard trap seamlessly after lots of prototype fits and starts, like Sam Huntâs âBody Like a Backroadâ in 2017. That song is still built on sunshine snap, whereas almost everything else on the eventual album it appeared on, Southside in 2020, is more directly trap-influenced.
Country was late to the party by five years compared to other American pop, but globally, hard trap beats were also finding their way into K-pop and other non-US pop scenes at the same time. So the template finally clickedâWallen joins the monsterverse as the representative of the newest sound of modern country music, which, even though it is technically pretty âoldâ at that point, still signifies around the world.
It may be that country is also signifying something other than basic pop interoperability, but Iâm skeptical. If I were to make a more political judgment of why it traveled when it did, I would tie it to A-pop theory: a more comfortably hip-hop-oriented country music may have been the sonic Trojan horse for newfound American regionalism abroad, with the cowboy being something close to the default costume of the US in global imagination. This has long been true, but the sounds of 21st century country have sometimes seemed stubbornly difficult to absorb in other countries. Trap Daniels meets the rest of the world halfway, maybe for the first time sinceâŠShania Twain? (This is where Iâm out over my skis. Spurs?)
And hey, speaking of cowboy costumes, I did get that new A-pop installment up, about Eurovision and the impending(?) vacuum(?) of American pop centrality. Itâs a weird one, still working a bunch of ideas out, but if you havenât read enough words from me yet, thereâs a few more for you.
The Rise (or Fall) of A-Pop, Part 1
Hello, Tumblr -- I don't really post here anymore but thought that it would be easier to put the actual text of my A-pop series on Tumblr instead of just linking to it. There are three installments so far. This is the introductory post.
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Pop Pantheon is a lively and engaging weekly pop music podcast in which geeky enthusiast host DJ Louie XIV invites guests from the wider world of music criticism to assess the stature and impact of various stars in a pantheon of historical significance. They chat about inside-baseball music nerd topics like imperial phases and Billboard chart statistics, and give fair consideration to acts that have never gained much critical traction. It is one of the most astute and generous ongoing attempts to evaluate and categorize the current pop landscape.
But Pop Pantheon has a Shakira problem.
The question of the hour, posed back in May of 2023, was what pop star tier Shakira fits into. Pop Pantheonâs tier system, the showâs conceit for freewheeling debates about the careers of major (and occasionally minor) artists, feels intuitive but can be contentious. Some acts sail through to the top of the pyramid: the rarefied icon status, which tells you that any book on the past 100 years of pop history must at least include an inset photo of them. Down at the bottom in Tier 5, you have âhad to be thereâ also-rans. Most of the haggling happens in between.
Louie, ultimately the final tier authority, claims that Shakira is stuck in Tier 3, mere superstardom. In what is a common pattern in the show, the guest critic, Rolling Stoneâs Julyssa Lopez, is more effusive and offers a placement higher than Louie is prepared to go. He clarifies: in America Shakira is Tier 3, and in Latin America sheâs Tier 1. Should they split the difference?
The evaluation criteria that comes up in Louieâs mind to help them sort things out is âthinking about her music in the most globalized sense: youâre at a bar mitzvah in, fuckinâ, Des Moines, IowaâŠwhat Shakira songs are enduring to that group of people?â They settle on Tier 2, with Louie arguing that the ranking should go: Tier 1 in Latin America, Tier 2 globally, Tier 3 in America.
What does it mean to be an icon in Latin America and a megastar globally, but only a mere superstar in America? Who do these mythical Jewish Iowan teenagers represent, and why are they a sign of globalized scope rather than being localized to the United States? Why should the opinions of some major plurality of Americans be the ones to dictate what counts as pop in todayâs pantheon? That is to sayâwhose pantheon is it?
To be clear, Iâm not asking these questions as a smug rhetorical opportunity to insist on global cosmopolitanism. These are serious questions worth thinking about. Iâm an American who loves pop music, but my ears are increasingly and consistently drawn to whatâs popular outside the US.
That said, I also enjoy Pop Pantheon and I understand their rationale for covering what they cover. I have no interest in the show branching out into global music scenes that they donât follow and donât have any particular expertise in any more than I want them to cover jazz.
This is because Pop Pantheon is not, despite its title, really just a pop podcast. It is an A-pop podcast.
Iâve started thinking about American pop music (the âAâ in A-pop) competing seriously, maybe for the first time in generations, as an equal regional competitor in a global pop landscape. The regional scene is hyphenated the same way you would describe South Korean K-pop or Japanese J-pop.
There arenât any hard and fast rules of what makes something A-pop. The term merely points to an increasingly self-defeating provincialism in ignoring the global pop landscape at a time when ideas, sounds, and scenes originating outside of a long-dominant western music sphere have more global reach than ever before, and are increasingly finding their way to American fanbases.
At the most basic level, âA-popâ is just the banal observation that America is not now, and has in fact never been, the only country in the world. But this is a fact that was easy to ignore for a long time especially if, like me, you were an American who happened to like globally popular music. For a long time, American popular music has been so dominant in global charts that American pop has felt like a synecdoche for global pop. Itâs just pop.
A regional understanding of American pop, one frequently caught on the back foot against ascendant pop scenes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, perhaps better matches todayâs fractured cultural landscape of American pop below the vanishing icon tier. (Tier 1 really only seems to unquestionably have room for one celebrity who debuted in the 21st century: Taylor Swift.)
This fracturing is largely systemic: music is easier than ever to make and share, and we have frictionless access to all of it in a streaming environment that, despite its seedy machinations and terrible treatment of artists, has made it possible to engage in popular music that originates outside of western pop scenes without the aid of a tour guide.
But in the same way that there is Japanese music that is not J-pop and South Korean music that is not K-pop, not all American pop music is what I would call A-pop. Our rap, country, and even remaining rock music, including metal and indie, are all more or less operating parallel to the A-pop phenomenon.
You can distinguish the A-pop from the non-A-pop by thinking about how comfortable the Pop Pantheon podcast would be in taking on a popular act. The Black Eyed Peas have a better chance at even-handed critical assessment than Future. Some day there will be a crackerjack Kacey Musgraves Pop Pantheon episode, but Morgan Wallen would probably feel like a slog.
But most of the â20s breakthrough âpop girliesâ (to use one of the podcastâs favorite terms) fit the bill: Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan. Second-stringers like Ava Max, Bebe Rexha, and Addison Rae are peak A-pop. Charli XCX is maybe too distinctively British to count, but Dua Lipa is probably A-pop, if you allow the âAâ to encompass the occasional Albanian. (You could also expand the âAâ to stand in for Anglophone, which gets you Canadian crossover stars like Tate McRae.)
One could imagine a more coordinated pop industry, like K-popâs idol system, shaping this pop environment. Indeed, many of its stars come from childrenâs television, like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo, who follow in the footsteps of A-pop antecedents Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus (who themselves followed in the footsteps of â90s child stars of millennial pop like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Fergie).
There is a cottage industry of pop breakthroughs who have opened for Taylor Swift, the monolith to whose scale all A-pop aspires but usually falls far short: Beabadoobee, Gayle, Norwegian pop star Girl in Red, Gracie Abrams. And as usual, there is a talented cabal of songwriters and superproducers guiding the current sounds: Jack Antonoff, Dan Nigro, Amy Allen.
Alternatively, what about a competitive regional proving ground, like Eurovision? NBC attempted an interstate Eurovision-style competition in 2022, the American Song Contest, but the project was short-lived and only lasted one season. The showâs winner, AleXa, was an Oklahoma native of Korean heritage who began her music career competing in K-pop auditions organized by two major Korean labels behind many successful K-pop groups, JYP Entertainment and Cube.
A-pop is not coordinated by anything like a formal system necessary to strategize the launch of new pop stars in a globally competitive environment. After all, launching globally successful pop stars has traditionally just been what America does without much obvious rhyme or reason. Everyone who makes it big in America has historically had a decent chance at being big just about everywhere else, too, seemingly by default.
When other countries, like South Korea or Japan, develop their hyphenated â-popâ designations, it has been a sign of arrival on the world stage. Michael Bourdaghs, author of Japanese rock history primer Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, tracks the prehistory of J-pop, claiming that the postwar pop music of Japan needs to be understood as being constantly in the comparative shadow of American pop.
Bordaghs reminisces about knowing nothing about Japanese pop while studying abroad, while everyone he knew also knew as much or more about American and British pop as he did. By 1990, he argues, Japanâs regional pop music could stand on its own two feet: âit names a new kind of map.â J-pop was not free of western influence, per se, but it also was not so chained to the western pop market that it would make sense to compare it to, say, American or British counterparts.
Similarly, I remember watching K-popâs American âdebutâ moment in 2011 on the Late Show with David Letterman, when Letterman, seated next to Bill Murray and Regis Philbin in Super Bowl gear, announced Girlsâ Generation in their first US late night performance, and then afterward proclaimed: âThe Girls are here, everybody!â This was a music scene diverging from American and other western pop music, often with the help of many of its hottest producers, charting out yet another new kind of map.
The Billboard Global 200 Charts, published since 2020, provide a glimpse at the widening impact of non-American acts to listeners around the world. 2023 was a banner year for non-western and not-in-English music. Remaâs Afrobeats hit âCalm Down,â several songs from regional Mexican music stars Grupa Frontera and Peso Pluma, J-pop from Yaosobi, K-pop from BTS and solo member Jung Kook (among others), and Colombian pop from Karol G and Shakira all went to #1 on the global charts.
These charts also show what was popular everywhere except for the US. While Taylor Swift hit number one on the global charts with her re-released âCruel Summerâ on the heels of her Eras tour juggernaut if you include the American charts, without those charts, the #1 spot in the rest of the world was held by a global TikTok smash from Spain, âSi No EstĂĄsâ by Ăñigo Quintero.
All told, non-American or broader Anglosphere acts were #1 for 22 weeks of the year in 2023 when you do include the American charts, and for 30 weeks if you donât. (Thatâs functionally out of fewer weeks than 52, because December belongs to Mariah Carey now.) Many global scenes have now had a decade or more of maturity even in the US where these regional pop styles have durable American fandoms. To ignore them in an accounting of popâs present or future icons seems short-sighted.
Granting American pop its hyphen with âA-popâ suggests that âarrivalâ to global competition can happen in both directions, one on the way up and the other on the way down. But is it even true that Americaâs pop is in decline from a former height? Or is it just that the rise of other regions helps us to understand what was always true, that America has always had a regional pop scene?
To some extent this is a moot distinction, because for generations, American and Anglophone pop has feltâto Americans perhaps unthinkingly, but maybe also even to non-Americans living comparatively in the shadow of American music and culture whether they liked it or notâlike the pantheon against which to judge all new entrants.
What does it mean for American and western Anglosphere artists to have to think of themselves in a comparative lens against the rising forms of well-established pop scenes from Japan and South Korea; Spanish-language behemoths from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and South America; or globally avant-garde dance music from Brazilian funk, Nigerian Afrobeats, or South African house and amapiano? All of these scenes are not merely elbowing for a place among the royalty of the pop pantheon. They can be enjoyed without comparison, while western pop struggles to integrate the scenesâ advances.
If you buy that American pop is facing serious competition, it may be tempting to follow any perceived contraction of American pop musicâs influence straight to doomerism along with everything else in the USâs global role. In his year-end analysis of 2024 in pop, Robert Christgau wondered if âAmericaâs greatest gift to world culture is going out of style,â along with our democracy.
But I donât think itâs helpful to get Americaâs newfound global competition tangled up in questions of the end of Pax Americana. The erosion of American popâs power as stand-in for global pop has more to do with structural changes in music listening. Itâs easier to listen to everyone, to see what everyone else is listening to, and to stumble onto worlds that would have come with steep import fees half a generation ago. It would be weirder for the global pop landscape not to change in response.
And change it has. The pantheons of the 2020s and beyond will need to be more radically ambivalent to who and what winds up where: world-beating pop music could come from anyone, and from anywhere in the world. The discussions wonât just be about which tier someone belongs in, but about how we can even keep track of all of the icons hiding in plain sight.
The Rise (or Fall) of A-pop
Oh, hello! I should hop on to promote some pieces I've been writing on my blog about A-pop -- my term to describe the current landscape of American pop music as a regional competitor against rising global scenes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
In Part 1, I lay out the concept of A-pop by comparing it to the Pop Pantheon podcast's uneasy (but important) role in exploring and perhaps solidifying conventional wisdom about American pop.
"A-pop points to a self-defeating provincialism in ignoring the global pop landscape at a time when ideas, sounds, and scenes originating outside of a long-dominant western music sphere have more global reach than ever before."
Part 1: Introducing A-pop
In Part 2, I explore how the globalized streaming environment that has made American pop as a field seem smaller has empowered an unpredictable global roster of pop stars to become unfathomably huge -- I call this environment the monsterverse.
"Lots of American pop music ends up seeming smaller, while other regional music forms seem comparatively bigger. The stuff that plays at bigness but seems small is definitely A-pop; the stuff that actually hits big might be characterized as something else."
Part 2: Into the Monsterverse
In Part 3, I focus on how a shifting (and maybe shrinking) American pop landscape and formerly huge mainstream has made what was once a sidestream of pop -- indie music -- seem bigger, to the point that these streams have converged into lots of music caught in an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.
"The transition to a global streaming era has also accelerated the blurring of lines between indie and pop. The end result of this process is not really a new mainstream or a larger separate sidestream, but a sort of 'middlestream.'"
Part 3: Mainstreams, sidestreams, and middlestreams
The Rise (or Fall) of A-pop
Oh, hello! I should hop on to promote some pieces I've been writing on my blog about A-pop -- my term to describe the current landscape of American pop music as a regional competitor against rising global scenes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
In Part 1, I lay out the concept of A-pop by comparing it to the Pop Pantheon podcast's uneasy (but important) role in exploring and perhaps solidifying conventional wisdom about American pop.
"A-pop points to a self-defeating provincialism in ignoring the global pop landscape at a time when ideas, sounds, and scenes originating outside of a long-dominant western music sphere have more global reach than ever before."
Part 1: Introducing A-pop
In Part 2, I explore how the globalized streaming environment that has made American pop as a field seem smaller has empowered an unpredictable global roster of pop stars to become unfathomably huge -- I call this environment the monsterverse.
"Lots of American pop music ends up seeming smaller, while other regional music forms seem comparatively bigger. The stuff that plays at bigness but seems small is definitely A-pop; the stuff that actually hits big might be characterized as something else."
Part 2: Into the Monsterverse
In Part 3, I focus on how a shifting (and maybe shrinking) American pop landscape and formerly huge mainstream has made what was once a sidestream of pop -- indie music -- seem bigger, to the point that these streams have converged into lots of music caught in an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.
"The transition to a global streaming era has also accelerated the blurring of lines between indie and pop. The end result of this process is not really a new mainstream or a larger separate sidestream, but a sort of 'middlestream.'"
Part 3: Mainstreams, sidestreams, and middlestreams
The Rise (or Fall) of A-pop
Oh, hello! I should hop on to promote some pieces I've been writing on my blog about A-pop -- my term to describe the current landscape of American pop music as a regional competitor against rising global scenes in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
In Part 1, I lay out the concept of A-pop by comparing it to the Pop Pantheon podcast's uneasy (but important) role in exploring and perhaps solidifying conventional wisdom about American pop.
"A-pop points to a self-defeating provincialism in ignoring the global pop landscape at a time when ideas, sounds, and scenes originating outside of a long-dominant western music sphere have more global reach than ever before."
Part 1: Introducing A-pop
In Part 2, I explore how the globalized streaming environment that has made American pop as a field seem smaller has empowered an unpredictable global roster of pop stars to become unfathomably huge -- I call this environment the monsterverse.
"Lots of American pop music ends up seeming smaller, while other regional music forms seem comparatively bigger. The stuff that plays at bigness but seems small is definitely A-pop; the stuff that actually hits big might be characterized as something else."
Part 2: Into the Monsterverse
In Part 3, I focus on how a shifting (and maybe shrinking) American pop landscape and formerly huge mainstream has made what was once a sidestream of pop -- indie music -- seem bigger, to the point that these streams have converged into lots of music caught in an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.
"The transition to a global streaming era has also accelerated the blurring of lines between indie and pop. The end result of this process is not really a new mainstream or a larger separate sidestream, but a sort of 'middlestream.'"
Part 3: Mainstreams, sidestreams, and middlestreams