Pop Turns Into Fast Food For The Ears

One lyric stood out, and not in a good way, as an ode to her ex-lovers. Sabrina writes, “I just hope you get agoraphobia (intense anxiety disorder) someday,” in her song Never Getting Laid. That line prompted backlash from mental health advocate Lucy McKenna, founder of Nurture Space. She posted on TikTok: “Agoraphobia isn’t a quirky word to throw in a song lyric or a TikTok trend… When artists + trends treat it like a joke, it hurts real people who are already fighting to be understood.”

Rock ’n’ roll dominated music once upon a time, with the belief that soul-stirring guitar-driven music was superior. Then came ‘poptimism,’ a critical stance that views pop music as equally deserving of serious critical analysis, respect, and interest as other genres, particularly rock music. But, studies show modern music’s complexity, harmony and timbre have declined steadily since the 1960s. Pop sounds flatter, duller, and more uniform. And, automated analysis reveals that simpler, repetitive lyrics are on the rise, while narcissism and negativity rule the roost.

On r/LetsTalkMusic, folks say mainstream pop is formulaic, repetitive, soulless. One user shares, “Mainstream rap, pop, and EDM… creativity and especially experimentation runs dry… emotion is missing.” And another: “If the public held pop music to higher standards, this formulaic cr@p would go away.”

The late essayist Ellen Willis once wrote, “The ecstasy of pop must not blind us to its limitations.” That line feels painfully relevant today. Even The New Yorker recently noted that audiophiles are now ‘fan-club managers,’ hesitant to ruffle feathers. Music critic Simon Reynolds tells us, “Pop no longer reinvents itself. It recycles nostalgia with more polish, less courage. Music has stopped surprising us.” Culture critic Laura Snapes adds her sting: “Poptimism was meant to celebrate pop’s brilliance. Instead, it’s become PR — critics as cheerleaders, not interrogators.” On Instagram Live, writer Daphne Brooks shares, “Pop has become like fast food – engineered for instant gratification, not nourishment. Snobbery isn’t elitist anymore. It’s self-defence.”

Musician Sharath Narayan holds that the endless stream of formulaic pop isn’t some mystery to untangle, it’s just business. “We shouldn’t expect commodity makers to be responsible, not Coca-Cola, not Pfizer, and not the music industry,” he says flatly. The responsibility is the consumer’s, he feels. “Pop at its most commercial has every right to exist. But it’s on us to evolve. Our discernment must sharpen, our taste must grow, and only then will we stop blaming the makers for what we choose to consume.” In other words, don’t expect the industry to change. Change yourself instead.

Sadly, pop has lost its purpose, says Mohul Bhowmick. “Where Black Sabbath, Megadeth or Rage Against The Machine once turned rage into resistance, today’s stars play it safe, more worried about political acceptance than speaking truth. We had musicians screaming against Vietnam; who’s screaming for Ukraine or Gaza? Modern pop has traded soul for algorithms, lyrics for repetition, penmanship for poorly mixed vocals. It’s junk food dressed as culture.” For him too, the failure isn’t just with artistes but with audiences too. “Maybe the music feels empty because the rage is gone. But if that were true everywhere, we wouldn’t have Gojira, Slipknot, Avenged Sevenfold or Bullet For My Valentine, proof that anger, mistrust and the will to resist still survive in music. That’s the art that matters.”

Insisting on melody, innovation and risk is the only way to save pop from itself. Reynolds says, “The danger of pop is not that it changes too fast, but that it refuses to change at all.”