The Pop Brain Complex

Recently, I appeared on the podcast Foreign Invader – a show about the non-American entities shaping American culture – to discuss the career of Canada’s own Drake. During my conversation with host, Conrado Falco III, I described Drake as someone with the mind of a pop songwriter, but the artillery of a rapper. This is the central tension surrounding Drake’s dominance in hip-hop: that his presentation has always had more in common with Taylor Swift than with Jay Z.

Like Drake, many subjects of The Skip Button have crossed over from their original sound to one that has more mainstream appeal. Our instinct is to attribute this crossover to external forces (namely: capitalism). We do this because it’s difficult for us to wrap our heads around the idea that one can authentically be both a pop artist and a rapper/rocker/country girl/etc. We tend to categorize hip-hop and pop as “genres” in the same sense of the word, and thus to have elements of the latter must be a rebuke of the former. It’s in part why artists like Mumford and Sons make music we love to hate; it felt a little too easy for them to take folk and Americana music and twist and deform it to their advantage. However, the reason Drake has so much fun and success toying with the definitions of “elite MC” and “pop artist” is because he’s equipped with a key understanding: “hip-hop” is a culture, “pop” is a skill. Drake has never “sold out” or “lost touch”. The truth is closer to how I described it to Conrado: while an artist’s upbringing may have been in a culture like hip-hop, rock, or country, their brain may be geared towards skills like concision, catchiness, and relatability. In other words: pop. 

Coldplay - often accused of creating music that is solely made to sell out arenas, recently released a kaleidoscopic 10-minute track.

During my episode on Coldplay, it became clear that people’s issue with the band is that they walk a dangerous line between indie rock and pop music. However, this is a matter of perception rather than of anything the band is actively doing. Take, for example, the common complaint that Coldplay is not Radiohead. This always seemed like a wild complaint to me, seeing as there’s only one band that isn’t not Radiohead. Yet it came up unprompted all the time during my discussions about Coldplay. “Radiohead” was a name that was dropped frequently following Parachutes, Coldplay’s 2000 debut album. For some reason, Coldplay was looked at as a band positioned to carry the torch that Radiohead lit with their 1997 magnum opus, OK Computer. In retrospect, I have no idea why. Knowing what we know now about Chris Martin, it’s hard to think of songs like “Spies” as a descendant of OK Computer and not as a predecessor to their more mainstream sound. The people who hate albums like Mylo Xyloto­ ­– the album that gave us arena-pop songs like “Paradise” and “Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall” – hear it as an “indie-rock band” deciding they’re too good/rich for that label. However, it seems clear to me that the truth is similar to that of Drake: Chris Martin’s main skill as a bandleader is his ear for infectious melodies and riffs, the kinds that urge people to learn the songs and sing along with him. For people who wanted him to be Thom York II, this shift to pop sounds makes him duplicitous; to me, it makes him multi-faceted, having an upbringing in alt and indie but a brain with a penchant for Brit-pop.

Perhaps the wariness people have about these transitions into a more mainstream sound is that they were made too slowly. Maybe listeners feel like albums such as Views or Mylo Xyloto were too much of a compromise between pop and genre-specific music, attempts to have their cake and eat it too.

Which brings us to Taylor.

Let’s be clear: Taylor Swift has always been a pop artist. This is not a judgment on her authenticity or her legitimacy and nuance as a songwriter. It’s an acknowledgment that we still can’t wait to shout along to the chorus when “Our Song” comes on. Taylor Swift has always been a pop artist. 

By wiping the slate clean and laying plain her skills as a pop songwriter on her album Red, she was able to accomplish two things: 1. fully integrate her talents as a relatable yet detail-oriented story-teller without being encumbered by the tenets of country music 2. do so without trying to wean people off of her steel guitars and southern twang - without trying to have her cake and eat it too. Despite continuing to support and work with country artists, she doesn’t receive the type of scrutiny someone like Drake or Chris Martin gets for trying to have her foot in both doors. (I should say, as someone who’s woefully out of touch with the country community, that sentence might not be entirely true. It could be that there’s a cohort of people who think she’s little more than a watered-down country artist profiting off of the genre she used to make her name off of. However, if that’s the case, it doesn’t seem to be a giant and ugly scar like the one Drake proudly picks at when he makes a song called “Popstar”).  My theory is that because she ripped the bandage off with “I Knew You Were Trouble” – Red’s lead single – she never asked her fans to get philosophical about what “pop” really is. She played right into everyone’s conception of both country and pop, and so no one felt like they had to compromise.

But why does pop feel like a compromise to so many people? Where does that instinct come from, the one that says “if people who aren’t like me can understand this, something’s gone wrong”? The fact that pop music can reach so many people is why we all grew up listening to pop music in the back of the car, which is in turn why Drake, Martin, and Swift can all be become pop artists despite only sharing a few sonic signifiers. It’s why, in any culture, there’s going to be someone who takes the lessons from the pop music they listened to and makes it their own. That’s not a betrayal of a genre, it’s a contribution to it.

I’m writing a bunch of long paragraphs with a bunch of heady sentences, but Schoolboy Q, who’s made some of the most vivid gangster rap music of the last decade put it best when he said:

“A lot of people say ‘oh you went pop, you sold out’. No n***a! I grew listening to pop music with my fuckin’ momma you stupid ass.”