Cast your eye over the charts from any era before the 2000s, and it feels a little bittersweet. In the 60s, The Beatles dominated, while the 90s was the Britpop era where Blur and Oasis was all anyone listened to. Essentially, chart-topping pop music was good. More recently, the charts have been dominated by TikTok-friendly earworms which no one will be listening to in a year, let alone a decade.
Yet something is shifting. For the first time in years, pop music is cool again, and artists like Charli xcx and Chappell Roan are producing chart-topping songs with actual staying power.
This was on show at last night’s Brit awards. “I used to tell myself that things like this weren’t important,” said Charli xcx as she won Album of the Year. The singer said she was “literally never nominated for anything” before brat, her seminal sixth album which came out in 2024. Yet last night she was the evening’s biggest winner, taking home five awards. What changed? “I’ve been doing my own thing in my own corner of the industry for a minute,” she said. “I guess this time around, culture caught up with us and wanted to be on the journey with us.”
Until recently, contemporary pop was a little embarrassing to listen to: a guilty pleasure only enjoyed from the comfort of your own AirPods. Yet brat floated out of the speakers of house parties aplenty last summer, and all anyone wanted to sing along to was Missouri-born Chappell Roan’s Diary of a Midwestern Princess, an album full of joyful pop anthems that explore Roan’s queer identity.
It wasn’t just Charli: the Brits was a big night for the pop girlies. Roan won International Artist of the year and Best International Song for Good Luck Babe!, while Sabrina Carpenter gave a sexed up, Cool Britannia inspired performance complete with dancing King’s Guard soldiers and a Union Jack projected on the stage. She also took home the elusively named “Global Success Award”.
In her Brits acceptance speech, Roan said that she felt artists should be allowed to find success on their own terms. “Artists deserve that freedom… to flop and rise, and not be pressured into making music based off of what’s trending.” She dedicated her International Artist award to trans artists, drag queens, fashion students, sex workers and Sinead O’Connor. “They have laid the groundwork for me to be here today,” she said.
Both Roan and Charli xcx thanked artists who “don’t feel like they fit in”. Both of them have pushed back against industry pressure and been unafraid to call it out. In an interview with the Guardian last summer, Charli xcx said that “labels are desperate for artists to be liked”, while Roan told the BBC that she would be more successful if she “wore a muzzle”.
It’s telling that the most snubbed artist of the Brit Awards last night was Dua Lipa. Perhaps because her 2024 album Radical Optimism was a bit of a damp squib, or because she’s more reflective of the commercially palatable, charts-friendly sound that has seen us through the 2000s.
Part of the reason pop music is so good right now is because artists like Roan and Charli xcx are celebrating subculture and bringing it into the mainstream. Rather than reinvent the wheel, brat showed what pop music can be: dance-oriented bangers with unflinchingly honest lyrics about everything from doing drugs in club bathrooms to worrying about when to have a baby to grieving. (Charli xcx has said that the song So I is a tribute to Sophie, her friend and musical collaborator who died in 2023).
“I’m this girl who straddles the underground and pop music, and that, for some reason, is really difficult for some people to wrap their heads around,” she has said in the past. Yet it seems that finally, the people are ready for it. If the 90s was the era of Britpop, then now it’s all about Bratpop.
