023: Are the pop princesses okay?

The darker side of the sugary hit-makers.

Hello, lovely readers. We want to start this edition of The Fuse by taking a moment to recognise what a genuine force Substack has become in the relatively short time since we first started publishing here (less than a year ago!). We weren’t at the vanguard, but now, with the momentum that’s built after us — every week, it feels like a new Big Name is joining the platform, from Margaret Atwood to Kelly Wearstler to George Saunders — you could mistake us for having been. We love it! Long live the newsletter, pulping juice straight into your inboxes. (We have minor qualms of course — stop trying to turn writers into streamers, we’re literally here because we don’t want to do that, but that’s a conversation for another time).

Anyway. Onto the topic of the week. Pop is back (yay!), but is there any difference in the way it was sold to us in 2001 — where stars like Britney and Christina Aguilera sexualised themselves to top the charts — and the way that pop functions in 2024? Whether you look to Tate McRae, or Addison Rae, or Sabrina Carpenter, or any of their noughties predecessors, the themes run along a common thread: we’re getting dolled up for a night out, we’re revelling in the power of our sexuality over men, we’re rolling our eyes at how plain dumb boys are! If there is a politics to this era of pop it would be, as succinctly put by the brilliant Jade Hurley: Girls rule, boys drool. So, is modern feminism just cleverly facilitating the same dynamics of yesteryear, but with a good dollop of self-awareness to make it okay? Should we ask for more? Or is pop serving its exact, sugary purpose?

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Divya: So we’ve been talking about this whole ‘sexy baby’ thing for a while. You know: where adult women emphasise their youth and smallness and girlishness, while also…. wearing lingerie and posing with intent. It’s such a wild cultural flashpoint—like, where’s the line between being camp and ‘ironic’ and genuinely just catering to the male gaze? I think pop stars right now get away with being so flagrant about marketing this ultra sexy but essentially childlike image by sort of… never picking a side? Never really fully committing to the parody of it all, but always leaving the door open for that to be the case, by being so over the top about it. Does that make sense?

Diana: Totally. It’s all done with this winking self-awareness. Like, one day we’re acquiescing to the male gaze, as a bit. The next we’re all, we love women, Kamala is brat — but even that has the glib tone of a bit. I’ve been thinking, we’re in such a weird cultural moment for sincerity right now. Like, we’ll accept adults being moved to tears on this Wicked press tour, and then we’ll be really casual about way more serious things. Like, is nothing serious except this… movie musical about a 1930s film? We move between earnest nostalgia and total detachment so quickly!

So serious!!!

Divya: Right. It’s been going on for a while, and people have said it before more eloquently, but our brains are constantly processing wildly different content on the same screen almost at the same time — like scenes from Gaza sitting right next to memes about holding space. And our brains just… toggle. It’s all flattened to the same level of importance.