An Era of "Eras"?
American Pop Culture and American Politics, In Conversation
Americans received a good deal of news the week of November 4. We learned that Trump will be serving another four years as President - further amplifying the fact that a political shift of tectonic proportions occurred in 2016, that a can of crazy worms cracked open and it’s becoming increasingly challenging to clean it up. The Democratic party acted self-righteously and fractured its following as a result. Many people will suffer material consequences from this election and the political violence that it’s incited, especially those living in red-majority states.
The darkness of the election results bled into the rest of the week - every woman I passed in Trader Joe’s on November 6 had a puffy face and avoided eye contact, myself included. I’m choosing to move forward with as much hope as I can. I don’t want to jinx myself by saying I’m cautiously optimistic that the DNC will learn something from this and have sufficient time to put together a thoughtful and legitimate campaign for 2028 - a presidential term during which I will turn 30. I know that a blue president will only do so much and that tangible change is often made on a smaller scale, by electing substantial candidates and policies in local communities and by forcing democrats to have a conscience through intentional organizing.
In addition to those horrors, we also received Grammy nominations that week - a needed treat. I found this news much more favorable, as the defining pop girls of 2024 were rightfully represented in major categories: Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter all landed nominations for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Album of the Year, and much more.
I don’t usually get too excited about the Grammys, or at least try to temper my excitement. Not unlike the presidential election, the process of the Grammy Awards is murky and - some might say - slightly corrupted. Similar to the imperfect electoral system which turns the presidential election into a race to win swing states, the Grammys are far from a fairly representative music awards show. Nominations are often heavily weighted towards a few big pop hitters who will contribute to favorable viewership numbers, making the ceremony more of a contest in charting than “objectively” merit-based.
But this year feels a little different, likely because it was an all-timer year for popular music. We got releases from seasoned vets like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and witnessed once-niche pop artists like Charli, Chappell, and Sabrina (as well as Troye, Tate, and Addison) enter (or re-enter) mainstream airwaves. It was a year for the tried and true pros, but more of a year for rising stars. And unlike most other years in pop culture, it feels like each woman artist could stand on her own two feet. The Charli-Chappell-Sabrina trifecta is an equilateral triangle - no single artist “owned” the year because each one offered something particular. As a result, and as I (wrongly) felt about the election, I’m cautiously optimistic about the Grammys. In a perfect world, each member of the 2024 Big Three will walk away with an award uniquely suited for the impact they had on the last year of pop music, and pop culture at large.
The simultaneous, supersonic ascent of Charli, Chappell, and Sabrina has largely worked because each artist possesses a distinct sonic and visual identity. Charli is a classic British party girl with a messy electronic sound that’s as vulnerable as it is danceable. Chappell has a similar brashness that’s queered and subverted with bold drag makeup, Kate Bush-esque synths, and paint-by-numbers dance moves via “HOT TO GO!” (the Gen Z version of “YMCA”). Sabrina, on the other hand, has the most classic pop look and sound with her perfect blonde locks, glittery leotards, and mix of radio hits and ballads. But her pun-filled, horny/corny lyrics, pastel-clad 60s aesthetic, and subtle Dolly twang give her an edge that cleanly sets her apart from her predecessors and contemporaries.
Each artist has a quite disparate profile, enabling them to succeed in concert with one another. Their distinctiveness also marks an important shift occurring in the pop landscape - a shift from a monocultural pop girl identity toward an era of “eras.”
The pop girls that dominated the late 90s/early 2000s possessed similar attributes. They could belt party anthems and croon love ballads, dance proficiently, and turn looks on red carpets. Their music videos and performances all contained similar themes - typically following a girl falling in or out of love, or bossing up after a heartbreak. Their sexiness or grittiness still has a clean, manufactured nature - a good girl could “go bad” in a specific, sanctioned manner. Their on and offstage appearance choices and song lyrics felt more interchangeable. Dazzling smiles, glossy hair, long legs, actor/singer boyfriends - there was a quite specific and quite perfect mold, and each star created their interpretation of it. The pop star was conceived as a wrinkle-free idol with a shrink-wrap identity - lustrous, aspirational, and fresh out of the box, like a Barbie. The cultural conceptions of a “perfect” young Western girl were similarly narrow and tidy - you daydream about your crush, you cry over your heartbreak, then dust yourself off to dance with your girls. Early Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Rihanna - all legends in their own right - each come to mind when I reflect on this period.
As the 2000s progressed, this perfect pop mold began to bend as kookier girls entered the limelight. Artists like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry retained their sexiness but imparted edge by experimenting with riskier ensembles and lyrics, playing around with queerness and more overt sexual expression, and adopting personas of sorts. This mold-bending set the stage for the more confessional, running-faucet pop that would come in the late 2010s and beyond - specifically from Gen Z darlings like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and other artists who have punctured the shrink wrap.
Alongside this progression, the young Western girl identity has similarly shifted, or rather, expanded in a sense - encompassing more than just the lovesick straight teenage girl listener that the 90s pop machine conceived. Politically, the landscape of gender and sexuality has shifted as well: gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. in 2015, and America has had several large-scale reckonings with gender- and race-based mistreatment within entertainment and criminal justice systems. Incidentally, these political-social developments have colored the pop world. Pop listeners - most of whom are young girls, women, and LGBTQ+ people - are being conceived as more multifaceted and dynamic than they previously were, and importantly, playing a larger role in their self-determination, wielding the internet as a teacher and a megaphone. Thus, it makes sense that the auteurs of the most popular music genre for girls would similarly be expected to be multifaceted. This leads us into the era of eras we’re now occupying.
Once used to refer to a significant period of time in history - like a geological time period - in pop culture, an “era” now refers to the specific look and sound of an artist during a particular period of their career. Taylor Swift has undoubtedly caused “eras” verbiage to recirculate in mainstream dialogues due to The Eras Tour, a concert tour in which she neatly revisits the distinct sound and style of every album in her library. But eras are nothing new for artists. For Elle, Tyler McCall dubs Madonna as the queen of eras, as she’s remained committed to reinventing her look and sound for each album cycle throughout her decades-long career, “as if [she’s playing] characters.”
Eras work well for pop artists for many reasons. They help author a kind of future nostalgia - cleanly and cohesively capturing the feeling and energy of a particular period in culture and portion of an artist’s career. Eras create a story that will be referential for future listeners and artists and fodder for reminiscence among old fans. They also help audiences feel more engaged with the artists they admire, encouraging them to search for Easter eggs across their work, and providing a distinctive, branded “stamp” for fans to play with via Halloween costumes, Twitter layouts, and concert fits. And importantly, while eras are potentially exhausting to subscribe to, they offer artists the opportunity to play around with expression choices and offer audiences a more comprehensive picture of who the artists are. People contain many parts and subscribing to artistic eras allows pop stars to appear similarly multidimensional, and simultaneously, more down-to-earth and musically dynamic.
While the main pop girls of the moment - Charli, Chappell, and Sabrina - each have distinctive styles and sounds, their identities feel dynamic, and as a result, potentially transient. In addition to constantly changing up her visual look concert-to-concert, Chappell is beginning to foray into a more country-like sound with her latest song “The Giver,” which she premiered November 2 on Saturday Night Live. Charli, while offering new iterations of Brat via remixes, has made allusions to the era being an era (summer 2024 was dubbed “Brat Summer” and summer must inevitably end). Sabrina has a rather distinct brand, but that too will inevitably shift - also in a country-like direction, I’m predicting.
Life imitates art, as they say, and fittingly, many young people have co-opted the language of “eras” to describe periods of their own lives. I was in my delusional era. I’m in my lover girl era. I’m in my studious era. It’s not uncommon to hear a Gen Z person describe a period of their life as such, even if the “era” is as brief as a day or so. Eras aren’t so distant from “aesthetics” or “cores” which young people have been apt to conceive for themselves via social media profiles since the early days of MySpace and Tumblr.
Beyond the recent significance of “eras” in pop music, people clearly find comfort in temporary states of being. We’ve all experienced the missteps of a great TV show running for too long and losing its plot. A romantic relationship running its course, the pair merely going through the motions, absent of passion. Eating your favorite meal too many days in a row and developing a taste for something new. Therapy speak, digital mindfulness culture - it’s all taught us that “feelings are fleeting,” to imagine thoughts passing through us like clouds in the sky or cars on the street. I just have to get through this day, through this hour, through this meeting. Thumb scrolling, searching for the right hit of dopamine so you can finally put your phone down and move on with your day. Next, next, next. I’m just going through a rough patch, I’m in my sad girl era, I’ll be better tomorrow. There’s always tomorrow, or next week, or next year, or four years from now.
Nowadays, it feels as though the world - and more specifically, the United States - is entering and exiting eras with brevity. We are constantly discussing time in terms of what’s behind us - a post-COVID world, a post-Trump world, a post-Roe v. Wade world. Ever since 2016, ever since 2020. There is comfort in conceiving our current conditions as mere moments in history that we’ll look back on with scrutiny and even humor - a blip in an otherwise well-enough functioning country. But what made the 2024 election even more frightening than the 2016 one is the confirmation that none of this was an accident or a few bad apples poking their heads out of the sand and retreating to their posts on the fringes of society. It’s the result of a national consensus that had perhaps been a longer time coming than many Democrats might have conceived. It’s not inextricable from our country’s history - leaving a fat stain on a national record containing a nasty collage of countless stains. We shouldn’t consider it a momentary flub that we can easily stamp out - I don’t know how we could possibly consider it that any longer. It requires a more genuine reckoning now.
I know that the two spheres lack a direct, mainline connection and that I live in an insulated coastal bubble and that none of this is truly new, but I just have to laugh at how incompatible the popular media landscape feels with popular politics in America. Proudly queer and openly self-assured women artists can be pedestaled at the same time as an administration that seeks to roll back federal protections for women. The eras have collapsed, time feels warbled. Cognitive dissonance abounds and this country feels like fourteen countries.
At least for now, young Americans are united under one Charli-Chappell-Sabrina. Is that anything?
For more thoughts on pop music, check out my articles on co-opting the aesthetics of pop’s “middle class,” rising pop stars getting “woman’d”, and a reflection on Brat Summer.
YES! It also really felt like the pop girlies were in their "political" era this summer... like, after Trump won I was thinking about how wild it is that Kamala got so many pop girlies to endorse her, and how ultimately it did absolutely nothing to win her the ticket. I thought it would at least push the needle... I'd love to see a survey of how influential, if at all, those endorsements were...
So powerful Madison “Proudly queer and openly self-assured women artists can be pedestaled at the same time as an administration that seeks to roll back federal protections for women. “. Profound piece ! Well done !