Overstimulation, emotional hunger, and lack of meaning in modern pop music
The hunger beneath the surface
Many people find pop music empty and reject it entirely. Others seem oblivious to how hollowed-out so much of it has become. Everyone, it seems, is exhausted by overstimulation and a deep emotional hunger, and reaching for its fulfillment both in and outside of what’s commonly available.
I do find much of pop empty, but unlike the first category of person, I don’t want to reject it entirely. I believe it can be redeemed. And this is important—I don’t conflate the medium with its poor use, which seems to be a common knee-jerk reaction, for better or for worse.
I believe that pop music is actually a real need: that people want common, relatable expressions of the human experience, and they want it to be captivating, joyful, and accessible. They are searching for meaning, and the natural place to look is in what today’s artists are pouring out at us.
But I don’t believe what we have now is an acceptable standard. Art forms the human person, offers insight and relief, and serves as a pathway to potential growth, maturity, and access to deeper and even eternal meaning—but this also can become malformation, affirmation of our worst inclinations, and a pathway instead to degeneration and a fully materialist focus. In a market-driven artistic world, this has happened rapidly.
The truth is that people are starving for meaning, beauty, and a speaking—somewhere—of the quiet but persistent interior language of their hearts, especially that which they do not yet have words for. Music gives these nebulous heart impressions form and structure, reality.
Although pop culture has always been less of the place where the best of human artistic works generally emerge and more of a place for the ephemeral, it was not uncommon not so long ago to find a lot of honest aching of the human heart.
What pop culture used to give us
Top 40 radio, I remember clearly, would often deliver something in the middle of a work day at the little bagel shoppe I was at in my late teens that cut through the noise, malaise, and meaninglessness of so much of the rest of modern life. Many movies were subpar, but we’d also regularly stumble into something that would provide a real catharsis through an honest, poetic telling of the human experience.
But there’s been a serious hollowing out in the last couple of decades. Seemingly, I would surmise, this hollowing out has happened in line with the emergence of an increasingly digital and thus distracted culture, leaving little room for thoughtful engagement with reality. What pop culture is, fundamentally, is downstream of the interior life of the populace.
It is most striking as a change when this lack of interior life seems to take hold even in the artistic prophets, who throughout most of history have served more of the role of “bard” than some purely commercial enterprise. The bards were known to be accurate receptors and communicators of reality, often providing a critical mirror to the culture such that people, from the highest ranks to the peasants, had the chance to evaluate who they were and who they wanted to become, as individuals and corporately.
This is a far cry from what we see in pop music today.
When the inner life disappears
Now, everything seems reduced.
The best case scenario that plays at depth is merely repeated self-confession—something understandable and charming in Joni Mitchell in her early 20s with real, vulnerable, self-reflective sentiment, and significantly less compelling as the pop stars age towards their 40s and their material still only speaks of themselves, their petty failed friendships and romances, and their implicit but constant, obvious impulse toward keeping the attention and finances of the masses. Big artists are just essentially corporations. There is little or often no growth arc, aside from the business spreadsheets; there are almost only personas, marketing schemes, and narcissistic self-indulgence.
And so we find, even among the singers seemingly attempting higher language and some degree of cleverness or honesty, an ultimate lacking in the inner reality. It’s hard to even put a finger on it for many, but in the way that one might encounter in a person who has become shallow via a long-standing life focused only on externals, there is just very little that’s real at the center.
We see the extreme lack of stable inner self common to severe personality disorders mimicked in our art. Over time, it is having this same effect on us.
What pop music could still become
But it doesn’t need to be this way. Pop music as a genre for example can serve an incredible purpose of bringing life, joy, creativity, and introspection to listeners. It can remove itself from compulsive self-focus and be a vehicle for thoughtful engagement with complex human realities, heightened poetic language, and even literature, history, philosophy, and important meta narratives:
Years ago, I set out to do that. I had never felt an inclination to pursue a more pure pop direction creatively, having always been so firmly inclined toward the poetic folk category which had so inspired me as both an artist and human being in most of my formative years.
But after moving to Los Angeles and doing more extensive co-writing, I fell in love with the power and capacity of a more popular-facing songwriting creation. I knew instantly it would be a perfect vehicle for me to share a more literary and meta narrative perspective that had long haunted me but hadn’t really fit inside of my normal work.
My own work is my personal, impassioned expression of hope for pop music and its possibilities in the coming years to lift the human heart and speak of our higher, better nature to which we can again aspire.
I would love to see many more creative people start peppering the pop music scene with depth and reality. I would love to see the mainstream music world and the powers that be choose to bring people something better rather than the nutrient-deprived fast food version of art we are all tiring of.
We don’t have to remain mired in the flattened view of life delivered by most pop music. We can re-infuse it with the deeply human, thoughtful, and real.
And we must.