![]() ![]() Looking back, it’s almost scary how much viewers obsessed over such a cruel show, but 2013 was a different time. Down the back, of course, but who cares? Still the Louvre. ![]() She’s the patron saint of youthful angst, opening doors for the Billie Eilishes and Alessia Caras to come, and the type of artist whose work deserves a place in the Louvre. Along with her tightly controlled, breathy-breathless vocals, Lorde proves herself the lyrical poet laureate of the 2010s. Given the amount of times I’ve hit the replay button on “ Supercut,” I debated whether to spotlight only a single track, but in truth, Melodrama’s scope as an album-from the furious ecstasy of “ Perfect Places” to the gut-wrenching devastation of “ Liability”-deserves its own entry. It’s all there in the title: Lorde’s sophomore album hits like a sonic tsunami of exaggerated emotions, covering the soaring highs and tragic lows of obsessive young love. Call the tale shallow, condemn its characters, it doesn’t matter whenever I watch, I almost want to join her quest. “I wanna robbbb,” whimpers Emma Watson’s scene-stealing Valley girl just before the crew, well, robbbbs. Never one to shy away from a story about the desires of detached young women, Coppola turned the ripped-from-the-headlines scandal into an intoxicating and unnerving ode to indulgence. This was a time when reality TV and a lineup of tabloid-friendly “stars” (namely the Hiltons and Lohans and Simpsons) started closing the gap between the A-listers and everyone else, while paving the way for the influencer era to come. It’s more of a beautifully shot anthropological study of late-2000s, early-2010s pop culture. Sofia Coppola’s account of the real-life robberies committed by a gang of celeb-obsessed California teens isn’t really a crime drama. But pop doesn’t feel like fantasy anymore. Her peers and descendants did something similar, and the results involve a more relatable kind of dazzlement. Gaga spent the rest of the 2010s shedding her masks to show her “real” self grappling with anxiety and trauma sans glitter or EDM. She seemed to realize that 2013’s Artpop might mark the endpoint for her supernaturally bombastic shtick, but it’s unclear whether she knew that James Parker’s prophecy in The Atlantic- “The Last Pop Star”-would come to pass. The “Applause” performance was not her greatest TV concert, but it was a great one, as well as a self-aware eulogy for her career to date. Sometimes, when slogging through yet another forgettable awards show, I wonder whether Lady Gaga getting fake booed while peeking through a white square represents the last bit of wonderful nonsense that mega-scale pop will ever cough up. The ouroboros was complete when you looked at your phone and made this expression. Drake memed himself before others did he used memes others made of him. He, of course, had some control of this dynamic. Broader debates over appropriation, authenticity, sports, the family unit, and so much more were litigated in terms of his sweaters. Reaction GIFs, dance crazes, text prompts, overdubs: His cult-and cult of haters-led the way on all formats. Which came first, modern internet culture or its favorite rapper? Just as Drake’s musical trajectory in the 2010s told the story of almost every larger shift in pop, the way he surfed the viral sea told the story about discourse itself. But the tornadic beats, devious melodies, and feral sound effects certainly evoke some cataclysm that, from the sound of it, might at least be aesthetically neat. electronic musician Clark had doomsday in mind when he recorded this ferociously beautiful opera-as-rave that became my go-to adrenaline booster. ![]() ![]() No era has a monopoly on apocalypse anxiety, but a decade that began with the end of the Mayan calendar and ended with freaky United Nations climate forecasts had special reason to fret about whether there’d be a next decade. ![]()
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