by Alex Wells
Have you listened to pop music lately? Maybe you haven’t because you’re okay with being irrelevant. Lyrically, a great deal of what is in the air now is a paean to its own relevance: I am impressive, I am famous. This is no longer just the subtext of modern pop music, it is now simply text. No more mere displays of Mariah Carey melismatic virtuosity to sing about Christmas, we are are now firmly in an age where the meaning of the pop star’s song is that the pop star is popular. Charli XCX is even releasing songs about frankly admitting she wishes she were more famous despite the fact that to everyone cool and queer she is famous already and it’s hard to think of anything she cannot buy or anywhere she can’t fly.
To judge by stan twitter, Taylor Swift’s power to be Taylor Swift is the content of Taylor Swift. She can create traffic. If we wanted to talk about what was actually in her songs it would be a list of what she lacks that other pop divas have: experience, curves, melanin, videos where she shows off those things. Swift’s appeal is power. Power and the ability to manipulate power.
I recall at the beginning of poptimism, back in the aughts, someone defending Lady Gaga’s polished and recycled ideas on an arty website by saying “She is in it to win it.” It sounds good! Shouldn’t women be winning? But why should we as listeners care? Do we want to hear ambition instead of any other emotion art might reflect?
It is much like a conversation I had with an Uber driver deliberating over who to vote for: “Trump,” he said “is rich! He’s a businessman!” This was good. The Uber driver would like more money. There’s this concept that proximity to power will rub off on us. Get the power and the specifics don’t matter.
One would not be amiss to see religion here—Jesus on his throne will guide us in all things—with our careers, gardens, outfits. He’s just there ok? And it is good.
And then there’s AI—a technology whose entire pitch is its inevitability. The whole world seems in thrall to arguments that the meaning we want delivered to us via our various systems is the message that the deliverer is great at exploiting those systems.
Whose fault is this? Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons—men whose work was bragging about their ability to get any old thing into the museum.
You could have said perhaps at one time that the idea that the system was so exploitable was a message we needed to have. I don’t know—this is how it happened long before I was born. Even if it was true it seems like a quantum of content that could fit in a telegram.
Maybe the feeling of irrelevance finally sunsetting around white, cis Jeff Koons and his balloons is due to the awareness that Donald Trump has proved that success-as-content has gone about as far as it can go—and it was going to the obviously fascistic place anyone smart would have noticed it was going to begin with.
IMAGE: Jeff Koons Tulips photographed by Dalbéra, Jean-Pierre. Copyright: ©dalbera