2024 has been a pretty unhinged year for pop music. Maybe uncanny. Maybe so uncanny it is in fact canny. Specifically for turning not-quite-A-listers into bona-fide A-listers. Even more specifically, when we weren’t celebrating brat summer, we were wondering what “that’s that me espresso” meant. (Meanwhile, Chappell Roan, whose “Pink Pony Club” I recall encountering in the dark days of spring 2020, cantered into the public imagination on the single “Good Luck, Babe!”) People we’d been hearing—or hearing about—for years on the fringes suddenly had the charts in a chokehold. What’s the deal?
Sire Records titan Seymour Stein once said there isn’t a hit that isn’t bought, and this very publication has explored the myriad ways his words have held true even in the streaming age. Carpenter’s “Please Please Please,” the second single off the LP Short n’ Sweet, broke its own record for biggest streaming day at least once; and the color designated “brat green” was projected onto everything up to and including Kamala Harris when she entered the US presidential race.
But aside from the fact Spotify is known to foist pre-programmed bytes upon its listeners, there are perhaps more organic ways than ever to (re)discover music. TikTok has unearthed, among other gems, Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music” (a song I heard frequently as a youngster) and Melanie Martinez’s “Play Date” (which wasn’t even a single off 2015’s Cry Baby but became a retrospective highlight). Plenty of new artists have benefited from this at least ostensible leveling of the playing field: Tommy Richman’s “MILLION DOLLAR BABY” could capture the ears of a fanbase divided over the Kendrick/Drake beef and thereby lock down a coveted spot in the zeitgeist.
Richman’s single is a case of impeccable timing. And here, too, could be why Charli XCX and Sabrina Carpenter have found the front-and-center spotlight they’ve each been skirting for give or take a decade. Charli admits as much on “I might say something stupid”: “I’m famous, but not quite / But I’m perfect for the background.” She has been steadily producing solid pop fare, flaring up occasionally as a feature or, on her own, with that song from The Fault in Our Stars. As for albums, her 90s-desktop-Arial-font covers are nothing new either. The whole oeuvre won her enough fans to add pressure to dinner dates with other famouses. But the time was right this summer for an entire LP of hers to resonate, top of mind, with a large cross-section of listeners. When she said “I’m everywhere” on the well-seeded lead single “360,” she foretold her future.
Likewise for Carpenter, who released her debut album at fifteen and subsequently rose through the ranks of Disney Channel stardom. She gained attention—though probably not the type she was after—as the alleged third in the Olivia Rodrigo-Joshua Bassett love triangle, largely perceived to be “that blonde girl” from Rodrigo’s massive debut single “Drivers License.” It was an issue she eventually addressed directly, on “because i liked a boy” from 2022’s emails i can’t send. But she, too, had accrued people in her corner: that record contains what I still think is her best song, “Nonsense,” and comments on the music video expressed hope that she would soon hit it big. Those fans got their wish this summer, with “Espresso,” “Please Please Please,” and then the full LP taking over airwaves and AirPods worldwide. Ironically, we may have Charli to thank for this: Carpenter’s celebration/lamentation of relationships with boys (from the winking “Taste” to the mournful “Slim Pickins” to the detached “Lie to Girls”) makes an excellent foil for the 365-party-girl lifestyle which knows no commitment except to the dance floor. The company on the charts—even the spring’s Grammy triumph of young-women peers like SZA—set up her moment, and she made the most of it.
So what am I saying? Timing is everything? Old news! But news that bears repeating. Timing is how movements begin. Even movements in a realm as “unserious,” and undeniably culture-defining, as pop music.
It’s a bit misleading the way I’ve titled this post: “comeback” suggests a reinvigoration of a suffering genre when in fact it has withstood all the post-boy-band era’s efforts to kill it. What I mean is we’ve had a unique opportunity this year to see the people who have been consistently turning out the tunes get their due as they are, on their own terms. If that’s the energy we, the listening public, bring into the home stretch of the first quarter of the century, we must be doing something right.
