The Future of Pop Music Is Approaching and Black Women Are Leading the Charge — Why Aren’t They Also Leading the Charts? (Critic’s Take)

If you’ve been paying attention, the uppermost reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 look, feel and sound a lot like a default early 2020s TikTok For You Page.

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Users inundated the timeline with attempts at dressing like “old money,” seemingly everybody caught the sourdough baking bug, and influencers championing the “tradwife” movement quickly gained massive followings.

As it always has, pop music responded to and reflected that cultural shift with a notable change in sonics.

Taylor Swift’s woodsy Folklore and Evermore albums set the tone in 2020, and a few years later, pop radio was overpopulated with a host of singer-songwriters crafted in her image — in one way or another.

Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams and, more recently, Audrey Hobert have built on the approachable, diaristic, varyingly verbose, sometimes self-deprecating “normal girl” lyricism that Swift traded in for her first few records.

Meanwhile, if you were a pop hitmaker who wasn’t conforming to Swiftian songwriting standards, you were certainly moving away from the trap domination of the late 2010s and going for a more synthy, guitar-driven approach à la Billie Eilish, Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan.

And lest we forget, America’s general conservative swing (which coincided with the resurgence of country music) has also set the stage for country stars to become the new pop girls this past year, from Ella Langley and Megan Moroney to Stella Lefty and, well, Swift again, thanks to her chart-topping, back-to-basics Toy Story 5 hit “I Knew It, I Knew You.” Mind you, it was still earlier this very decade that rap girls were deemed the “new pop girls,” with Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj all topping the Hot 100 with tracks dripping with venom, sexual liberation and unmistakable Blackness.

It felt like Rihanna’s “How could you be so hood?/ But you so f–king pop?” lyric (from 2012’s “Phresh off the Runway”) had come to predict the near future.

But shortly after, the trap-infused, “pussy rap”-centering hip-hop of the late 2010s was almost immediately replaced with clean, safe, guitar-heavy tunes that still mine rock, soul and hip-hop while also softening their edge in favor of a sound tailor-made for unobtrusive listening in an autoplay-driven consumption landscape.