It is as if to escape the curdling of character, pop music has to get either too close to or too far from the listener.
It was the year of the blues lawyer, the himbo, the boogeyman, the main pop girlie, the alt-rock crypto guy. It was the year, also, of the pink pony girl, the nontoxic man, the power-pop Svengali, the drag alter ego, the country alter ego, the country drag alter ego, the creep who pays people to give him compliments. It was so Julia. It was Eric Adams in the club. It was the worst year of my life, though that’s neither here nor there. Mostly, it was brat.
What a cast. Pop songs—descendants of vaudeville, the music hall, and commedia dell’arte—have always dealt in characters. Artists have long thrilled us with their ability to sketch or inhabit a type: Muddy Waters’s hoochie coochie man, Stevie Nicks’s witch lady, Mick Jagger’s good-time Satan, Carly Simon’s yacht-pilled dunce who may or may not be Mick Jagger. These were performances of mastery; to nail another’s voice is to claim or void its power. The character work in much of 2024’s most notable music, however, is less surefooted, as are the characters themselves.
Lately, when artists channel characters, the ley lines get crossed. In “reincarnated,” Kendrick Lamar recounts his speculative past lives, one as a figure reminiscent of John Lee Hooker, one as Billie Holiday—and a hint of a third, with a 2Pac sample staking another sort of claim. Kendrick draws on the power of these alter egos, but he also inherits their struggles, their propensity for fast living. In the last verse, he sets out not to match these aspirational figures but to exceed them. “Father, did I finally get it right?,” he cries after enumerating his good deeds. At which point more voices intrude: his father, then God, then Satan, all blurring and melding, all more or less answering his anxious question with a firm no. The power to summon the voices of the dead denatures into something more familiar: the power to conjure voices of self-recrimination. Some characters help us feel good about ourselves; others remind us of what we can’t live up to. It is often hard to tell them apart.
Frayed performances of aspirational personhood abounded this past year. Illuminati Hotties’ “Can’t Be Still” is a charming piece of indie-rock musical theater that reads a certain type for compassionate filth: “I triple book my Saturdays,” Sarah Tuzdin sings, ventriloquizing the kind of grindset character who, in the immortal words of one Fiverr commercial, “eats a coffee for lunch.” The seams start to show in the chorus, where Tuzdin yells, “Ooh-oh-oh, I can’t be alone now / Show me how.” In a way “Can’t Be Still” is a tasteful inversion of Taylor Swift’s bombastic “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart,” which doesn’t present a grustle warrior wracked with anxiety so much as a mess of a person who somehow wrings work product from abjection: “I cry a lot, but I am so productive, it’s an art.”
One name for this kind of character, who seeks aspirational intensity but often ends up spinning out, who stylizes her own failure to achieve or to fully enjoy, is brat. As Charli XCX explains, apropos of her album of the same name, brat is “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party… who feels herself, but then maybe also has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it, is very honest, very blunt, a little bit volatile… does dumb things… it’s brat; you’re brat.” To be brat, the record suggests, is to jerk between icy introspection—suicidal ideation reported in a flat AutoTuned drone—and fits of bravado, grind, hustle. Charli even gives us some notes toward a taxonomy of brat’s subtypes in “Mean Girls,” where we get a thumbnail sketch of a Lana-worshipping, recent Catholic–convert, Red Scare–listening (or hosting?) young woman, who then multiplies in the fist-pumping chorus into “all my mean girls.”
There is no shortage of these sorts of character field guides. It was a big year for the sociological pop song, the pop song as an inquiry into a particular type and its pathologies. These songs are less efforts to masterfully realize such a type than to ambivalently pick it apart, getting at it through disconnected images and snatches of overheard dialogue. In “Holy, Holy,” a dense hunk of Steely Dan–adjacent schmaltz, Geordie Greep sets the scene for a tawdry seduction: “From the moment you put your hand on my knee / I knew I’d have you with ease.” The music then shifts to a polyrhythmic jitter, as Greep yawps, “Everyone knows I’m holy!” The next verse is a rug pull: we learn that this sadsack guy in fact paid a woman to act out this whole scenario with him. In an interview, Greep explained the sociological motive for sketching such a pathetic character:
People are saying, ‘Oh, well, obviously toxic masculinity is bad stuff.’ And it’s like, yeah, obviously toxic masculinity is bad stuff. We know it’s bad stuff. Why is this happening?…. I thought it was more effective to just portray it and really get to the roots of it and try and see, ‘How is this funny?’ But at the same time, you can be sympathetic with these characters. You can feel sorry for them and, at the same time, repulsed by them. I just thought it was good to just lay it out.
This is the pop song as research; as investigation into a type of guy—in all his smallness and delusion—with a heavy emphasis on the guy.
Perhaps no release from this past year was more closely associated with guys than MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. A New York Times profile hailed that record’s “timely dude-ology”; a veteran critic at the Guardian asked Lenderman to weigh in on the phrase “dudes rock.” This sociological reading of the record’s gently twangy guitar rock is overdetermined. The obscure title, which initially fans thought might be yet another sports reference from an artist who has written wry songs about Michael Jordan and Dan Marino, in fact gives away the game: it is an album about manning, more or less in the Shakespearean sense—the ongoing and always thwarted struggle for mastery that would finally make you feel at home within masculinity. The album’s cover stages this process: we are given an acrylic painting by Matthew Reed in which three male figures—two with mullets, one with sunglasses and an unlit cigarette—are swallowed from the shoulders down by a green void, lit by a jet of flame. Here we find dudes stalled in loading, arrested in the process of manning, like the “birds against a heavy wind / That wins in the end” in the opening track’s first line.
If Greep’s method is sociological, Lenderman’s is more impressionistic. Sometimes he puts himself in the shoes of a Rogan-listening sigma male type, but never just to say what that character might say. Lenderman translates the red-pill spiel into dream language, delivering surreally pathetic come-ons like “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbodome,” before adding two lines later, “And a wristwatch that tells me I’m on my own.” At other times he speaks to his characters in the second person, taking on the role of a concerned friend: “You need to learn / How to behave in groups,” he deadpans in “Rip Torn,” to the screech of a rickety fiddle. The second person in that song allows Lenderman to get at the incomprehensibility of his characters’ speech from another angle. “You said ‘There’s milkshakes and there’s smoothies’ / You always lose me when you talk like that.” You can feel the condensation and displacement: milkshakes are sedentary and soy, while smoothies are for people who lift—or maybe milkshakes are thick and manly, while smoothies have too much fresh fruit. It’s undecidable; the inscrutability is the point. By subjecting manosphere-speak to the dreamwork, Lenderman helps us see both its goofy inconsistency and, dimly, the libidinal sources of its appeal for the lonely and disaffected.
These songs all gnaw on the same paradox. They sense that our existing character types, our genres of personhood, no longer quite work, but they try to come to grips with the waning of character by spinning up more characters. The fundamental trait of these new characters is their failure to become a certain type of person, even to become a person at all. This failure is scary. Other songs put up protective charms against this feeling. Some of these try to conjure a realm of pure image where the self is whole, radiant in its self-sufficiency—to cover oneself completely with what Jacques Lacan once called the “alienating armor of an identity.” Sometimes this armor has an ambivalently sexualized quality: “I like the way he’s telling me / My ass looks good in these ripped blue jeans/ My cheeks are red like cherries in the spring,” Addison Rae crows over burbling synths in “Diet Pepsi,” doing her best Lana impression. On one level, this is a vision of a self without gaps, the self as what one Twitter user confusingly called a “Lacanian superpredator,” embodying a promise of wish-fulfilment so total it’s actually terrifying. But at the same time, it is not a vision of a self at all. It is simply a hodgepodge of parts, as in the sonnets of old where the loved one’s physical qualities are isolated and praised. Objecthood is one refuge from the burdens of personhood, and by extension, of character.
Fiction might be another refuge. Rather than fixating on the dull characters who stalk our world, some of our more ambitious artists conjure and populate whole new worlds. Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, one of this past year’s most critically beloved releases, feels like a dispatch from an alternate timeline. On that record, Cindy Lee, who, as Andy Cush writes, is “the glammed-up alter ego of songwriter, guitarist, and drag performer Patrick Flegel,” gives us two full hours of murky homebrew pop, ranging from whacked-out spaghetti western guitar jams to menacing synth excursions evocative of Gary Numan recording to disintegrating tape. I’m far from the first to suggest that this stylistic variety, combined with the album’s title, invites us to take the record as a career-spanning compilation by a fictional artist. It is, as Sadie Sartini Garner has written, a “study in distance”: the ambiguous gap between Flegel and Lee, the gulf between the worlds Lee conjures and our own. But this distance also manifests in the music itself. Diamond Jubilee shrouds even its most energetic, melodically sharp moments in an impenetrable gauze of Velvet-Underground cool. While “Diet Pepsi” hits you with a barrage of part-objects, producing a sense of stomach-turning immediacy, Lee’s record recedes into the middle distance. It is as if to escape the curdling of character, pop music has to get either too close to or too far from the listener.
You could say that the shaky character work in recent pop music has been the result of artists’ reckoning with the limits of self-optimization culture in all its forms, from the self-exploiting girlboss to the crypto-mining shut-in. But the waning of character is a broader and stranger phenomenon. As Jon Repetti recently wrote in an essay about Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, much contemporary fiction proceeds from the premise that our received notions of character, which involve a belief that individuals can be fully reducible to a type, no longer function. Character is among other things a link between the individual and the universal, a map to how we fit into a social whole. Recent novels by authors like Rachel Cusk, whose offhanded claim that “characters don’t exist anymore” serves as the launching-off point for Repetti’s essay, are animated by a conviction that there is no longer any legible relation between the individual and the total situation. Today’s pop music sometimes seems to share this belief. But pop songs are on the whole reluctant to give up on character. More so than the novel, the pop song as a form depends on genericity. The commedia dell’arte lineage dies hard. Rather than trying to produce the sense of a world unmediated by character, where individuals bombard you with their private histories and hyper-specific traits, pop music today uses character itself as a medium for expressing the sense that character no longer works, that we don’t have any sort of easily graspable relation to totality. At its best, it suggests that the failure to live up to a type is itself a generic experience, the potential basis for a new sort of type.
Mitch Therieau works at Stanford University. He lives in California with his partner and an Italian Greyhound named Marzipan.