Pop music

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

With a deliberateness that did not escape critics and onlookers, the Carpenter-fed algorithm had suddenly decided to choke us on her sweet and frothy song "Espresso" in such a relentless fashion that we soon ended up drinking it down, begging for more. “Move it up, down, left, right, oh, switch it up like Nintendo,” I and plenty of other people too old for her dire Gen Z, Taylor Swiftian fare, found ourselves singing it anyway, day and night, on its release last year. “Say you can't sleep, baby, I know. That's that me espresso.” Sleep was certainly not improved by the earworm of the song.In fact, I thought at first that Carpenter was a bot because the songs are such calculated, algorithmic pop, from top to bottom.

I have lost hope in contemporary pop music. As someone who used to keep his finger on the pulse of new releases, and who went to gigs as often as I could, the absence of innovation has been one of the great disappointments of the past couple of decades. There really isn’t anything much out there, bar, of course, the sainted Taylor Swift. But ever since David Bowie’s death eight years ago (eight years...), the music industry seems to have been in a desperate downward spiral, where flair, originality and chutzpah are sorely missed. Surely it’s time that a new act could supply such things, complete with flute solos, songs sung in Albanian and an orchestral overture? No, I am not making it up.

After a long break, Lil Nas X announced he would be releasing a new single. As usual, the song would get hyped, the publicity would be multifaceted and designed to cause controversy — and it would climax with a hit music video that would turn the song platinum. It worked before, with the devil lap dance video for "Call Me By Your Name," and for "Industry Baby" and its prison video (tied to Nike’s legal action against his collaborative Mschf shoes). Why shouldn’t it now? His new single is titled "J Christ" — and the music video has over a million views on YouTube in under twenty-four hours. And yet, it feels empty. The music video is exactly what you’d think it would be, showing Lil Nas X dressing up as various Christian figures, from Moses to Jesus.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, there is a marvelous opportunity to bond with one’s children when you both conceive an interest, even an obsession, with the same musical act. Once upon a time, it might have been the Beatles, or Bowie or Madonna: now, it’s Taylor Swift, the all-conquering pop songstress who has not only taken over the world, but has made yet more untold millions with her concert film Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour. In practice, most of those seeing it will not have been able to get tickets to see her three-and-half-hour live show, so this slightly abbreviated version (a mere two and three quarter hours) will have to do. And my seven-year old daughter Rose is a Swiftie par excellence. We are going to have fun, I declare, and she rolls her eyes and says, “If you say so, Dad.

Grade: B+ Here we go again, then, I thought — another gobbet of self-referential, breast-beating respec’ me bro sputum against a backdrop of the usual overproduced r&b pop schlock. What used to be called ‘indie’ singer-songwriters are always moaning about how utterly useless they are, taking Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ as a kind of self-flagellating worldview. Chart singer-songwriters, meanwhile, can’t stop telling everyone how absolutely bloody marvellous they are, despite being traduced, which fits right in with the extraordinary narcissism of our current youth culture, its bovine #MeToo grandstanding and exquisite sensitivities. I don’t mind Allen, despite her irritating sub-adolescent Corbynista politics.