I think it’s safe to say that pop music this decade is dominated by women, with very few notable exceptions, like Barns Courtney’s “Glitter & Gold”; perhaps. Then, if we were to steer the ship in the direction of how exactly the form’s evolution manifests itself, my opinion would be that, more and more, we’re residing, reasonably comfortably, if you can believe it, in the era of radio songs being able to dispatch, and be distinct, while also being completely devoid of genuine emotion. This would, of course, seem fairly logical, as it is also the era of “A.I.,” which, if not emotionless, certainly nothing else is.
Now, before you come at my throat with a knife, or get all hissy-fit about this being an emotionless era in pop music, there are a couple of things I’d like to point out. One, of course, is all the train-wreck, corn-ball radio stuff from the ’80s and ’90s that was way too laden with sappy, phony emotion (think Prince, Melissa Ethridge, Sophie B. Hawkins). I mean just look at this Prince stanza: “All the flowers that you planted in the back yard mama / All died when you went away / I know that living with me baby was sometimes hard / But I’m willing to give it another chance”. The entire song is pining for this girl, that is, and then at the end he unveils the shocker that he’s willing to give it another chance. Also, what he’s actually referring to is living with HIM, not with her, hence leaving the listener to ascertain some sort of schizophrenic inner multiplicity in which he’s leaving and encountering a certain portion of himself.
This is the sort of head-scratching, Narcissistic stuff that will make Alessia Cara’s hopelessly puerile and mindless lyrics more than welcome. In turn, this brings me to another point about pop music these days — that the lack of emotion leaves room for more playfulness, something certainly welcome in radio material in this era of excessive information and, perhaps, impending destruction of our society. In this way, Taylor Swift’s “Karma” even endears itself to the listener, once he or she abides its strange, vapid and desultory way of bandying about these existential themes as if they’re completely trivial.
Ironically, on “Sweet Dream”; which is a sort of faux-trap, neo-soul pop tune I hear in the stores where I work and which is generally pretty good, Alessia Cara takes on an identity, by way of her vocals, that’s intriguingly multifarious and even transcendent. What I’m getting at is, in great accomplishment, she has a way of coming across as sexy, and also seductive, while lyrically handling something as casual as just trying to fall asleep. Now, part of why I don’t mind ascribing to her an unintentional mechanism here is the sheer stupidity of the lyrics — I mean there’s not much emotional authenticity to be gleaned in her perfunctory quest to actually just fall asleep here. The juvenility of the whole thing makes room for an interesting fluidity of disposition, of objective. Is it really so hard to perceive that she’s coming onto us? It doesn’t matter, of course, but if there’s not only playfulness but POWER, still, in 2026, in Alessia Cara crooning to us, then we have just have a new direction turned in pop music. And if it happens that the average person on the street can’t do what she does, all the better for elevating music into transcendent status, and granting musicians the much-needed extolled position in society they once enjoyed.
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