The megahits of 2024 were inseparable from their back stories. And that was exhausting.
Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which racked up hundreds of millions of streams and helped propel him to the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, was the ferocious culmination of his battle, via quickly released singles, with Drake. With a title that flaunts tribalism, “Not Like Us” slings the most venomous accusations — including pedophilia — in a sneering, microtargeted barrage.
Taylor Swift’s album “The Tortured Poets Department,” which smashed streaming records, had fans clamoring to identify just which of a long list of ex-lovers Swift was referring to in songs like “So Long, London,” “The Black Dog” and “But Daddy I Love Him.” It also tied her romantic travails to her all-conquering Eras Tour in “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
Charli XCX made the leap from striver to headliner with her album “Brat.” In the song “Girl, So Confusing” she sang about an uncertain relationship — detached politesse? fellowship? competition? — with an unnamed songwriter she’d been constantly compared to: “People say we’re alike / They say we’ve got the same hair.” Four months later, on Charli’s guest-filled set of remakes, “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat,” someone stepped forward: Lorde, a fellow brunette, who added candid verses about her own insecurities to the track. Connection made, but enigma dispelled.
It has been a long time since a song simply arrived as a head-turning surprise from a radio playlist or a cranked-up chorus from a passing car. Now that social media has engulfed culture, pop songs are teased as snippets, mined for the briefest hooks and effects, choreographed for vertical screens and pitched as the latest plot twist in a performer’s continuing, open-ended reality series, otherwise known as a career.
In the studio, musicians and producers still work hard on the audio particulars of songs: beat, melody, arrangement, texture, vocals, ideas, emotions. But it seems that’s barely enough. An extra layer of drama needs to be called into play. Songs are seeded beforehand with social-media posts and coyly placed clues in lyrics, and then the drama is stoked by clout-seeking fan, gossip and reaction sites. Conflict gets clicks; attention leads to streams.
Deliberately or not, pop hits have been gamified — find the Easter eggs, identify the characters, reach the next level! The process offers the thrills of solving a puzzle and feeling like an insider, a true fan. But instead of expanding the scope of the song, that next level narrows the meaning down to autobiographical specifics. It diminishes the possibilities.
The career narrative can rival or even outweigh the music. Every Beyoncé fan is well aware that not feeling “welcomed” in country-music circles — notably the hostile-to-mixed reactions to her appearance with the (formerly Dixie) Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards — made her rethink being from Texas and growing up with country music, eventually motivating her to claim it as part of her musical birthright.
Her 2024 album, “Cowboy Carter,” demanded that country pay attention to Black performers; she gathered up-and-comers to join her. When the single “Texas Hold ’Em” lodged itself as No. 1 on the country charts, the narrative only expanded; it was not just a commercial win but also a cultural watershed, as well as a power play from Beyoncé’s dedicated fan base.
The extramusical story continued as she was completely, inexplicably snubbed by this year’s CMA Awards, then showered with Grammy nominations. Extending the drama, she amplified the album’s iconography and symbolism — including cameos by her Black country guests — to stadium size with her triumphal Netflix N.F.L. halftime show in Houston on Christmas.
Of course, pop appeal has never been purely about music. Looks, moves, rivalries, gossip and notoriety have always been factors in celebrity for movie stars and pop performers alike. But actors are playing roles; pop stars are enacting ways to play themselves for public consumption.
It’s a good sign for any compelling lyrical conundrum that fans want to solve it. Whole academic and journalistic careers have been built on interpreting (if not entirely deciphering) songs by boomer idols like Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Dylan even had a fan pawing through his garbage for clues.
But how much does it really matter who, exactly, was the immediate target of Dylan’s withering contempt in “Positively 4th Street”? I’m curious, OK. But the durability of the song is in its pitiless, yet all too understandable, emotional precision — not in knowing whatever actually happened way back then.
Songs can’t help being autobiographical to some degree; artists only have their own lives, memories and perceptions to draw on. But songs are never simply diaries or reportage, even those that don’t begin as sheer fiction. Their imperatives are not factual but musical: melody, catchiness, rhythm, compression, singability (or rapability). And the power of a lasting pop song is that it breaks free of its origins. It’s taken to heart (or hips) by listeners who make it their own, regardless of the songwriter’s intentions.
Hip-hop both raised the quantity of lyrics per song — multiplying typical pop word counts — and brought out deeper detective work. Songwriters have long known that local references are shortcuts to a sense of authenticity, whether establishing a character for the length of a song or assembling an artistic persona to further a career. And hip-hop revels in hyperlocal references, in-group nicknames, real or invented slang, glancing verbal and musical allusions, and multilayered wordplay.
Fans take such delight in decoding and footnoting the tracks that they sustain websites like genius.com and whosampled.com. The back stories can add depth to a hip-hop lyric; they can also reveal a petty gripe behind an evocative line. But even decoded, a song needs musical substance to endure: perhaps a well-chosen, neatly extracted sample like the chords and horns from Monk Higgins’s version of Ray Charles’s “I Believe to My Soul” in “Not Like Us.”
Tracing songs back to their biographical specifics is fascinating but ultimately limiting. Where songs are from is not where they can lead: That’s the magic. Social media encourages parasocial relationships, in which fans believe they have a connection with faraway celebrities. As songs turn into chapters of a narrative, fans can identify even more closely with their idols, envisioning themselves as stars while taking sides with clicks and merch.
But what celebrities reveal, even without makeup, is not necessarily who they are; marketing has invaded every interaction. Pop stars are definitely influencers, but they are wasting their talents if that’s all they intend to offer.
I want songs to do more. Art is imagination, and imagination can be unbounded, utopian, bitter, euphoric, angry, perverse, vicious, forgiving, embracing, revelatory. Art isn’t sworn testimony; it can be a beautiful or dangerous lie that reveals a deeper truth. When I hear a song for the first time, I don’t care about the particulars of where it came from — let’s leave that to the biographers. And I have no stake in celebrity feuds, much less other clickbait.
For the length of a song, the facts can wait. Just give me something that’s worth remembering and singing along to — something that lives up to the crazy, rigorous beauty of everything a song can be.
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