INTRODUCTION
People may talk about generations as though they proceed in some orderly parade, but it’s really more like a tug of war: Whichever age group outnumbers the others gets to pull an entire society deep into its own habits, neuroses and preoccupations. As a result, one of the best ways to understand popular culture is simply to consult a chart tracking the number of Americans born each year. Most prominent will be the huge swell of people born after World War II, who have dominated the national psyche for as long as any living person can recall. Then comes a 1970s trough, a tiny cohort of poor souls who will never dominate anything and are best known for being sardonic about it. Then comes a rally, and another peak: American adults, at the moment, have a pronounced tendency to have been born around 1990. A lot of our cultural noise these days is just the sound of a nation’s center of gravity shifting, all at once, across four entire decades — and landing on a group of people who, whether they realize it or not, can now manhandle the world the same way their elders did.
Except, of course, when it comes to pop music, the subject of this special issue. When it comes to pop, “people born around 1990” are already done for. They are approaching 30! It is a testament to their influence that popular music has already spent a decade doggedly attached to the same stars who took over the charts during this group’s teen years: Taylor Swift, Drake, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Beyoncé (as an object of worship and not just a good R.&B. singer), Kanye West (as a regal personality and not just a determined rapper). It has been an impressive run.
Now it feels as if that run is ending. Millennial pop was a ball of earnest confidence and self-assertion; it even managed to make Katy Perry, who hit it big dressing like an elaborate dessert and singing about parties, turn woke. But a certain skepticism has collected around its pantheon of stars: One false step, and the world is more than ready to roast them online and laugh them back to irrelevance. The artists emerging to replace them seem interested in darker things — doubt, depression, failure.
Then there’s the really fascinating part. People in their 20s are having a new experience: They are, for the first time, noticing some of the things actual teenagers enjoy and are being completely appalled, both morally and aesthetically. A flood of young rappers is scoring hits with music that baffles grown rap fans with its slurry boneheadedness — plus they’re as alarmingly devoted to pharmaceuticals as rock stars once were to heroin. Various bits of viral jackassery (Jake Paul’s hit YouTube channel, Danielle Bregoli’s troubled-teen appearance on “Dr. Phil”) turn nonmusicians into pop forces, too. While 20-somethings were earnestly debating the intersectional politics of Beyoncé videos, some number of their younger counterparts were trawling the internet wilds, fixating on kids with face tattoos eating Xanax like popcorn and setting things on fire.
If the last version of pop was driven by people who desperately wanted everyone to care and everything to matter, it’s only natural for the next wave to be interested in what it looks like when you don’t care, and nothing matters. There are areas of pop that could use a yank back toward wrestling with the stranger, murkier parts of human experience. Not that any adult can tell you whether that’s in the cards: Keep scanning along that birth chart, and it will emerge that the highest number of births in American history seems to have come around 2007. If you want to know where music is going, ask an 11-year-old. ♦
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