Six Thoughts on the Powerpop Girls

Thinking queerly with 2024's Big Three

I was recently interviewed by Ohio State’s student newspaper on the topic of pop music in 2024, specifically concerning the seemingly sudden and simultaneous ascendance of Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, and Sabrina Carpenter. This gave me a nice opportunity to finally jot down some thoughts about them, which I had been ambiently puzzling over for months. In part this is because I saw a great grad student paper over the summer on the emergence of “sapphic pop” (“Red Wine Supernova” was the case study there); and in part it’s because I had just read an LA Times article whose headline seemed to promise an interpretation of what connected these three artists—beyond the fact that they were women dominating the conversation in pop music all at the same time.

In this, I was disappointed; the article asks the right question, I think (“why now?”) but basically suggests that what unifies the triumvirate¹ is their behind the scenes effort, the fact that all three musicians have been putting in the work required to make their unpredictable success even remotely possible, belying the sense many of us had that they came out of nowhere.²

That seems to me an important part of the story, to be sure. But I think we can largely take it as a precondition that these artists wouldn’t have taken off without first getting good at what they do, without developing their craft to an utterly professional, incredibly high level. So the explanation “it only seemed as if they came out of nowhere” isn’t really a satisfying answer in part because it’s also true of all good artists, even the ones whose talents might seem to us natural. More importantly, it also doesn’t address the question of resonance: lots of artists are good, but not all of them take off among a large group of listeners. What is it about this music that seemed to speak to the desires of a group of hungry listeners?

I follow the sort of stereotypical Frankfurt School line on a lot of issues³ but one that I don’t ascribe to is the idea that consumers basically imbibe what is manufactured for them by corporations, rather than seeking out culture based on their actual interests, as an expression of agency. Sometimes, of course, that’s the case, particularly when a market is monopolized: Mac or PC, iPhone or Android, Warner Brothers or MGM…we might like any of these options fine on their own, but we also can’t imagine what a world with more than a handful of options could look like. Particularly when many of these products are becoming little more than glorified advertisements for this or that godforsaken AI chatbot, it’s hard not to feel like culture isn’t simply being jammed down our throats.

But that being said, I think the situation is at least slightly different in negotiated categories like popular music, where there are actual agents—artists, producers, songwriters—who interact with a corporate music industry selectively and specifically in order to eek out a living. What they end up selling is a commodity (even if we’ve forgotten what it feels like to hold a CD); but it’s also more than that.

All of which is to say that I don’t believe Charli, Chappell, or Sabrina would have taken off individually—let alone collectively—if a large group of people wasn’t ready for them, didn’t want them and actively seek out their music. So what can their sudden success tell us about the priorities, values, and desires of their listeners? To get back to the beginning: why now? It’s an impossible question to fully answer⁴; but here’s what’s on my mind.

1. First of all, I think we need to be wary of anyone framing the dominance of three women at the top of the pop charts as if it represents something new, even relatively speaking. While it’s true that it’s been a minute since the last breakout star (Olivia Rodrigo, and we’ll come back to her), pop music has always been gendered feminine, and women have always been dominant in the genre. Another way of saying this is that pop—as a genre, as a style within a genre, or in my preferred parlance, as an affect—has always been associated with women and girls as far back as the 1960s.
   
   In those early days of rock and roll consolidation, rock critics, musicians, and cultural tastemakers were trying to shore up the validity of the music as something Serious and even Modernist, against attacks that it was so much crass consumer culture. To insulate themselves from that criticism, feminist media scholar Norma Coates shows how the white men who wrote music reviews “displaced” those critiques onto a group even lower in the cultural hierarchy than angry boys with guitars: women. By associating catchier and more commercialized bands—the ones who appeared on television, like The Monkees—with women, the press could characterize them as pandering to a mass of “teenybopper” fans, young girls who were overcome by their obsessions and who screamed their heads off around any mention of their idols, unable to think critically.
   
   As often happens with culture, this caricature has been both rejected by some and embraced by others. It’s refuted by the many feminist writers, musicians, and fans who rightly assert their own critical capacities for music performance and listening, revealing the stereotype as only so much misogyny. At the same time, the caricature has been embraced and doubled down on by folks who want to revalue those same, ostensibly feminine qualities that the press used to denigrate women in the first place.
   
   The latter is what happened in the 1980s, when indie pop bands who didn’t want to participate in the post-punk scene’s macho bullshit explicitly reprised the sounds of 60s pop in order to signal their championing of feminized attributes such as love, sentimentality, and tenderness.⁵ This helped continue the conflation between women and pop as a concept, a conflation that was solidified once and for all when the MTV era ushered in the genre of pop music, characterized by the synthesizer on the one hand, and stars like Madonna and Janet Jackson on the other.
   
   All of this points to the fact that women have been at the top of the pop game from the beginning, so much so that they define the category. While it might feel historically notable to have the Big Three break out at the same time, any serious or even casual look at popular music history shows that whatever novelty we’re ascribing to this moment has more to do with forgetting women’s history than it does anything unprecedented at the top of the charts.⁶

2. Yes. Insofar as the timing of these three is notable, part of that is about the work they’ve all been putting in for years, which made this explosion possible. Moving on.

3. There’s also something about momentum here: success begets success, and the more these three seemed like they were taking off together, the more they got grouped into a cohort, talked about as reflective of something new: a Femininomenon. This got a final kick in the pants when brat summer and the Harris campaign synchronized as if intentional; but there were plenty of other viral, “song of the summer” moments that kept these three current in popular music discourse, single after single.

4. Here I’m just thinking with that LA Times article, which points out the relative lack of breakout stars in general over the past four years. On this logic, we were due some good pop—or else, we were that much hungrier for it. This kind of bottlenecking is partly a COVID problem and partly a streaming one. During lockdowns, the music industry did slow down and back up, just like everything else. At the same time, with Spotify de-monetizing upwards of 80% of its music, there’s less and less room for anyone but the absolute stars to gain visibility, make a living wage, or simply subsist as a working musician. Chappell Roan’s album sat around for a full year before making a splash, and arguably only did so when an already-established breakout (Rodrigo) was able to pull her along for the ride.⁷ These days, you almost need virality to break through, or at at least a contact who’s already made it. In this way, the music industry is getting more quintessentially American in its radical imbalance: 99 vs 1%.

5. One of the most critical and distinguishing features of the moment represented by these artists is the general distribution of queer and specifically femme aesthetics into mainstream popular culture. Pop music has always been feminized and therefore by extension queered; from indie pop’s explicit discussions of queerness in Margaret Thatcher’s England to Britney Spears and Lady Gaga’s loyal queer listeners, femininity and queerness have been associated in no small part because they are similarly rendered abject under patriarchal capitalism. What’s different here is a specific performance of femmeness, which has been given a kind of critical permission structure by a younger generation that is asserting a place for expanded gender presentations in nearly every genre of popular music. Chappell Roan’s campy, working-class drag; Charli XCX’s portrayal of girlhood as damage; and Sabrina Carpenter’s juxtaposition of button-cute visuals with eviscerating lyrics about the “tragedy of heterosexuality” are all different ways of using performances of femininity as a critique of normative womanhood, rather than just a celebration of it. That’s a direct debt owed to femme cultures, and that’s what’s new.⁸

6. One explanation that hadn’t occurred to me before writing this is that the dynamic I’m sketching directly parallels the one I’m talking about in Big Feelings with regard to indie rock: What boygenius and Jay Som are doing with 90s alternative, the Powerpop Girls are doing with all manner of pop. In both cases, it’s about a new generation taking what they loved in a genre they heard as kids and fixing it, in this case, by tweaking how femininity is centered in the music. For all its transgressive power, the femininity on offer from Madonna up through Katy Perry was only white beauty norms and neoliberal resilience, harder and harder to justify when the world keeps getting worse. Chappell, Charli, and Sabrina might look like they’re doing this, but they’re not. Not one of them is singing about overcoming obstacles or growing up and finding their true, authentic voices, not one of them is pushing sexuality defined by the male gaze as empowerment. What they’re doing is radically rendering the dread and damage, the joy and intimacy of navigating the present as women askance from models of the “normal.” As that model now assumes more formalized, hard power, pop music’s responses are due to shift again.

Cry hard.

1. On the topic of power trios, I don’t know who made the incredible meme at top, but it’s too good for words. And since I put “big three” in the subtitle, there’s got to be room to speculate about the Powerpuff Girls here, right? What I’m trying to say is that even though they were all technically born on the same day, they famously have very different energies. Blossom is obviously an Aries, and I guess Pisces for Bubbles. Buttercup is tougher. I tend to think Taurus for reasons of balance, but I could also see Scorpio. She’s like, waiting to be a goth, you know?

2. Carl Wilson recently wrote about this in regard to Carpenter, if you want to get caught up to speed.

3. I may do a post on this line of thinking, but for now, if you’re unfamiliar, you could do worse than starting with this explainer.

4. Hey! What am I missing here? Drop your thoughts below?

5. I’ll probably post more about this, as I’m writing about it for the Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, currently in process. If you’ll be at Pop Con/IASPM in the spring, there will hopefully be a roundtable discussion with some of the contributors, myself included.

6. And if you’re falling prey to that particular impulse, can I recommend a new book?

7. Roan was Rodrigo’s opening act on tours beginning in 2022.

8. Lady Gaga didn’t quite do this because she still used metaphor, drawing on variously “monstrous” figures to speak to queer experiences, which itself is a part of a much longer tradition.