“One Dance” is afro-beat and dancehall, although filtered through the frosty minimalism of his primary producer, Noah “40” Shebib. It’s fitting, in a way, as “One Dance” illustrated poignantly just how completely he’d reimagined our expectations of what pop was. Yet somehow, after an indefatigable seven-year stream of era-defining hits, 2016’s “One Dance” was Drake’s first No. His sparse, genre-omnivorous palette set the tone for pop as we know it and his melodic rap-sung vocals did away, once and for all, with any delineation between rapper and pop star. Beginning with his breakthrough 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, Drake incinerated the rule book on genre. Lorde, Tove Lo, and Fetty Wap, to name just a scant few, were all forged in the fire of Drake’s oeuvre. To have made it this far in a discussion of pop in the 2010s without getting to Drake, the decade’s most influential musician, is frankly absurd. As the decade lurched toward greater unrest, “Stay High”’s minor-key melody, glacial pace, and sticky subject matter foreshadowed pop’s leap away from glittery escapism and into our troubled collective psyche. “I gotta stay high all the time, to keep you off my mind,” moaned Lo on the hook, “can’t go home alone again, need someone to numb the pain.” “Call Me Maybe” this is not-the song’s candid look at the dark side of drug use felt more Future than Carly Rae and stood in stark contrast to “TiK ToK”’s flippant, casual-drinking-as-self-empowerment ethos. Katy Perry had one of the biggest singles of the year with “Dark Horse,” an explicit homage to trap featuring genre pioneer Juicy J, while Beyoncé and Jay-Z scaled the charts with “Drunk in Love.”īut as much as it reflected trap’s move to the fore, “Habits” also doubled down on the stripped-back self-reflection of “Royals,” an indication of pop audiences’ further willingness to take on more ponderous subject matter. Tove Lo’s left-field hit “Habits (Stay High)” drew generously from the slow, grim drawl of trap music which, after gestating as a niche hip-hop genre during EDM’s rise, became mainstream pop’s newest touchstone in 2014.
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. “TiK ToK” emptomized the sound of pop of the early 2010s-straightforward, unencumbered dance music-which, in 2019, feels quite a bit more than a decade down the old town road. “I’m gonna take my horse to the old town road,” crooned another surreptitiously fatalistic smash from the past year, “I’m gonna ride ‘til I can’t no more.”Ĭould this ominous pop era be further from the one that ushered this decade in? The biggest hit of 2010 was “TiK ToK”-as in, “on the clock but the party don’t stop!-a debaucherous, dance-pop thrill ride rap-sung into a vocoder by Kesha, who brushed her teeth with Jack Daniels before leaving the house to take over the world. “Everything I Wanted,” though, is also emblematic of the pop’s disposition in these dwindling years of the 2010s: downtempo, sullen, genreless music reflective of the demolished cultural boundaries of the internet and a lurking sense of isolation and doom. “It might have been a nightmare.” Pretty harsh stuff from 2019’s teen idol! “I had a dream I got everything I wanted / Not what you’d think if I’m being honest,” whimpers Eilish. Mostly, with its muted palette and whispered vocals, “Everything I Wanted” sounds like it was recorded under a blanket, hiding from the world. Last month, pop superstar Billie Eilish released a single called “Everything I Wanted.” It draws on some obvious touchstones of pop’s last decade: Drake at his most inward-facing, Lorde at her most defeated, Lana’s morose murmur.
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