There’s an 8-bit crumbling noise midway through Britney Spears’ “Till the World Ends” that guzzles away the sound around it. You’ve heard it before in video games, just before you lose a life: the fizzle when your car or spaceship crumbles to pixels, or when the last bastion of civilization buckles beneath a missile strike, or as the Lovecraftian horror chasing you finally gobbles up the edge of the world. Game over.
But wait… Britney’s back, albeit with half her life and half her sound. She fully recovers later, but only just; static still mutters underneath everything, constantly threatening to gulp its way to the top again. The track ends with no bang and no apocalypse, but who’s to say it won’t happen tomorrow?
Never Felt Like This Before
The most striking thing about “Till The World Ends” is how generic it is, how fully Britney is subsumed by the cultural murk around her. Much of this is owed to the subject matter, of course: the same nihilism-via-hedonism (or vice versa) that makes up every other single on the charts and that I’ll get to later. But it’s just as much a function of structure.
Choose five seconds of “Till The World Ends” at random. Unless you picked the aforementioned crackling sound, you could easily paste your segment into any dance-pop track from the past five years and no one would know. As Asher Steinberg pointed out, the synths progress through ecstasy and sadness – part one of the wordless chorus ascends, hoping, then part two slumps down to the key note, resigned – but so does every other song. The verses sort of sound like Spears, but in the pre-chorus, on “felt-like-felt-like,” she slips into the same patois-mime that Jessie J and Lady Gaga picked up and cast off. In the chorus, Britney’s then drowned out by background vocals that could be anyone’s; there aren’t even any words to bear her vocal imprint. When Ke$ha takes over in the remix, you’d hardly know the singer changed if co-collaborator Nicki Minaj didn’t announce her name first.
Britney’s lyrics are neither specific nor sincere – of course she’s felt like this before, she’s past puberty, and her back-and-forth attraction (“you notice what I’m wearing, I notice that you’re staring” reduce flirtation to a marketing textbook. And where the lyrics once created memes (“not that innocent,” “____ me, baby, one more time,” etc.), now they merely regurgitate what’s already out there. At worst she half-heartedly mumbles ad-copy phrases like “hotter than the A-list,” and at best she simply reminds you of everyone else who got to her words first. Train (“let me blow your mind tonight”). Gwen Stefani (“what you, what you waiting for”). Even her old self: the first “kitten” line, the way she spits “baby” whenever it comes up in the lyrics.
This is pop language, as Leslie Savan defined it in Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: language that, once you use it, summons not only its direct cultural context but the echoes of all its fellow speakers. You’re not just one person with one person’s words – you’re millions, everybody and nobody at once. And so it is with Britney; by forfeiting her identity, she picks up that of everyone else. Britney’s a figurehead; she’s everyone. And when the world ends, it’s us, too, dancing into the void.
When I Lose, I Lose It Hard
To truly understand what a shift this is, go back about ten years to what’s arguably the last big pop resurgence. You know, the one led by a certain Swedish producer named Max Martin, mentor to a passel of pop princesses including one Britney Spears. The bubblegum era.
In one sense, the landscape’s remarkably similar. Martin’s stuck around, either accompanied by protégé Dr. Luke or solo, and the sound of the charts is still largely his. Yes, two out of four pop princesses (Mandy, Jessica) have become irrelevant, the third (Xtina) is barely hanging on, and most of the boy and girl groups have either shed their frontpeople (‘NSYNC, Destiny’s Child), made themselves novelty acts (NKOTBSB) or splintered entirely (everyone else). But Britney, the bubblegum era’s synechdoche, remains and is as prevalent as ever.
The roster’s largely the same, but the curriculum is new. The reason isn’t demographics – pop songs still overwhelmingly target teens. (For the latest iteration of this, look no further than Lady Gaga’s just-leaked Born This Way, her painstaking attempt to recreate the mindset of a 13-year-old.) But the songs’ approach has shifted completely. At the turn of the century, “our dark feelings sounded light when Britney sang them,” says Riese at Autostraddle. Listen to vintage Britney like “(You Drive Me) Crazy,” for instance, its emotion as tight and self-contained as a sugar cube. It does its work, then its disappears. You can take it to heart if you’re 12, but it probably won’t haunt you.
But nowadays, just about every single on the charts takes girls’ dark feelings and makes them even darker. There’s love, of course, but it’s complicated. Rihanna (setting “What’s My Name” aside, as is excellent protocol for anything involving Drake) pines for the S in “S&M” and fills “Only Girl (In The World)” with despair, making increasingly desperate pleas to her partner: she wants to feel like all the other girls are gone, like he’s never loved nor will ever love another, like she’s the only one in control, and eventually just to feel right. Gaga falls for Judas to a backing track with a sole rationale of making “Bad Romance” even heavier, but her heart’s not in it; she spits her words so hard their meanings are shaken off in flight. At no point do we ever get the sense that she’s actually in love with Judas, or even infatuated, or even happy. Even Katy Perry, America’s favorite whipped-cream-and-sparkler-spouting fount of powerpop pinup cheer, now has a gloomy muddle of a track — her only gloomy single to date — about wanting to be a victim of an alien abductor.
Then there’s partying, which comprises the rest: meeting, not meeting, seeing, being seen, dancing, collapsing. Parties have never exactly been a rare subject for pop songs, and today’s Black Eyed Peas and David Guetta-helmed Eurodance trend provides a readymade, neverending soundtrack – nary a remix is required. But not all parties are made alike. Some end in euphoria, and some end in shambles. For every “I Gotta Feeling,” which outright exclaims that the night’s will be good, there’s a “Blow,” which dismantles DJ, dance floor and venue to dance straight into hell. If this is the party, then it’s gotten to the point where everyone in OK shape has already left.
There seem to be more and more of those. The party-drive-as-death-drive trend isn’t new – ABBA, for one, went there first with “Summer Night City,” which writes off the entire day as useless and then writes off the night as well as “nothing worth remembering.” But lately, things seem like an arms race. There’s a place downtown where the freaks all come around? Next time around, it’s exploding. Dancing until the daylight? Try dancing like it’s the last night of your life. No, like it’s the last night of everyone’s life.
There’s something peculiar about this arms race. Think about who’s doing it, who’s celebratory and who’ not. Celebratory: Black Eyed Peas (“I Gotta Feeling,” that Dirty Dancing ripoff, etc.), Far*East Movement, Chris Brown. Dark: Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Britney. One side is mostly male. The other is mostly female. This is not a coincidence.
Dying for Company
I’ve been to my share of parties where Ke$ha was played; one was even Ke$ha-themed. (Photos of it thankfully have not surfaced.) They all adhered to one rule: you do not put her on the playlist before midnight. It does not happen. If you try it, someone will change the song. Nobody can blame them, though; her music, and that of the her nihilist/hedonist dance partners, doesn’t sound right until then, until everyone’s got enough alcohol in their systems for things to feel scary.
There is a literal point where the world does end. It happens around two o’clock. You’re dancing, then you’re not. You see your surroundings, then they’re gone. And when you wake up, everything around you looks half-destroyed – that is, if you’re lucky enough to wake up in the same place you fell asleep. The world has vanished and come back, if only for a few lost hours. The little apocalypse.
Teens know this point, and they recognize it when it’s reflected back at them. After all, while the Club may be a mythic, unavailable place, mundane parties are just becoming real. And the charts are full of nods to teen parties. The Peas call out to “people in the place” – what place? Any place you’re in. Later on, they whine the Facebook manifesto “I don’t wanna take no pictures, I just wanna take some shots.” If that’s too complicated, LMFAO gives listeners dozens of rounds of “shots!” with nary a chaser. Ke$ha might have more of these than anyone else: the Jack dental routine that begs kids to try it at home, the water bottle full of whiskey (every middle and high schooler knows this is the reason their school supposedly bans water bottles on campus), that “drink the Kool-Aid” line that functions both figuratively and literally.
“Teens” is of course the wrong word here; we’re really talking about teen girls. There was a period of a few weeks when the semi-trend was to soundtrack these parties with the fairly despicable music-streamer site fratmusic.com. At the time, it had a separate section for “girls’ music” (see those adjectives again), filled mainly with all the aforementioned dance-pop. Like chick flicks and certain sections of the YA fiction bookshelf, girls are the default audience.
That audience is getting pretty specific instructions: drink more. Party more. Drink harder. Party harder. Don’t stop until there’s no world left. It’s not a unique message, of course, but it carries the classic double standard. When guys pass out, it’s a victory; when girls do, it’s a defeat. But it’s a defeat you constantly have to take, a catch-22. Enter desperation, then resignation, then determination. Call it the Femme Fatale mystique, because who else could be its figurehead but Britney? Her entire career – innocence, fall, acceptance of fall – has led up to this. Willa Paskin called it “zombie fame” – an apt name, because zombies aren’t supposed to exist. Their entire existence in this state was wrong from the start. No wonder “Till The World Ends” is so dark – it’s the only feeling that would make sense. Most of those parties I mentioned up top ended fairly poorly. Fights broke out. Jerkish dudes scored by attrition. People passed out in various gruesome configurations. All generic stuff, of course – but it’s generic because it happens everywhere. Teens might not know what the apocalypse is like, but they know, if only subconsciously, what it stands in for.
Can’t Take No More
For every trend, there’s at least one countertrend, and this one has dozens. The self-esteem pop trend owes a little to Dan Savage, but it’s just as much a response to all this destructive partying. “Self-esteem” isn’t too far off from “self-respect,” after all, and everyone knows what self-respecting girls aren’t supposed to do. (Drugs, drinks, dudes.) The same goes for Taylor Swift and her sisterly ilk; they’re role models, the good girls to emulate against all odds. And guys, when they’re present on the charts, are either predators negging you over the airwaves or Bruno Mars-esque white knights who want to save you from them.
What about those men, anyway? Over a nightmarish backing track swiped from “Sweet Dreams,” Enrique tells you that tonight he’s fucking you – “you” have no say in the matter, your consent is implied – as he croons a victory descant like the Duke in Rigoletto; if the gender politics weren’t clear enough, Ludacris adds that he’s going to do everything he wants with you (the “everything that you want” doesn’t come for two more lines). And if that still didn’t sink in, he hisses that he’ll make you fall. T-Pain and Pitbull take this idea even further; the melody of “Ooh Baby Baby” is so minor-key and so clearly trying to make its particular dance-threats a menace that the song is practically a farce. Elsewhere Elsewhere, Chris Brown coasts merrily through his parties with absolutely no remorse. The non-Dev, non-Fergie parts of the Black Eyed Peas and Far*East Movement are content to pretend none of this exists at all.
Exceptions are few. There’s Ne-Yo, but he doesn’t really count, because he’s played the submissive (sexual and otherwise) way before this started. For more insight, we’ve got to turn to another reinvented artist: Usher. As comebacks go, Usher’s has got to be among the saddest. (I’m focusing here only on his Top 40 radio hits, not his R&B-only ones; radio playlists create landscapes on their own, self-contained and not all that conducive to travel.) Remember “Yeah”? He was advertised as The Voice, his signature feature and the catalyst that makes your booty go pop. That doesn’t really exist anymore; Usher barely sounds like himself.
And then there are the songs. “OMG” is sex-by-obligation; lyrics like “honey got a booty like pow-pow-pow” sound as stupid as they do because of Usher’s monotone, and the stadium chants sound more mournful and farther away upon every listen – which at this point has got to number in the millions. “More” is a parallel-universe Britney track, Usher pushing himself beyond his capabilities to beastly and monstrous proportions. And then there’s “DJ Got Us Falling in Love,” the bleakest of the lot. The lyrics are standard nihilism/hedonism – “dance like it’s the last night of your life,” “keep downing drinks like there’s no tomorrow,” etc., but the delivery says volumes more. Remove the beat and slow things down, and the melody could come from a funeral dirge. The AutoTune on the choruses isn’t all there, so you can hear Usher’s voice petering out into a whisper on “in love again.” And when he sings his final run after the bridge, you can practically see his face in a sneer via dying rictus.
The moral of the story? Few admit it, of course, but this isn’t such a great situation for the dudes, either. Nothing’s exciting enough. Nothing satisfies. Think on the word left out of the title: “again,” then on that first line: “So we’re back in the club…” The song’s happened umpteen times before, it’s implied; it will happen umpteen time again. And again, and again, until maybe something changes.
To The Next Level
So what’s causing all of this sudden darkness? Pick a theory, any theory. You could take the obvious explanation and say it’s because These Hard Economic Times, the recession, etc. You could go the Susan Faludi route and call it a backlash against feminism, the Ariel Levy route and cite “raunch culture,” the Caitlin Flanagan route and blame “hookup culture.” You could dismiss all of this entirely and say that minor keys just sound good.
I’m not as interested in any of these theories, though, so much as what artists are doing with them. You can start to discern a few trends even now. First, you can try to differentiate yourself by becoming even darker – see Natalia Kills’ entire non-Verbalicious career. You can do your own thing like – all in different ways, of course – J. Lo or Jessie J or Nicki Minaj.
Or you could reclaim these feelings. There are many ways to do this. Britney’s too far gone for any of them, but notice how Gaga transmutes angst into (’80s) triumphalism. See the way Rihanna inhabits her darker feelings totally, eking out every last nuance to defeat them through understanding. Hear how Ke$ha turns nihilism into a battle cry. It’s no coincidence that these are some of the more fascinating figures in pop. After all, the world might end, but it’ll come back in a few hours. What you make of your sudden continued existence is up to you.
