6/15/2023 0 Comments Thr best pop mudicSunflower by Swae Lee and Post Malone (2018) Let’s hope she’s hard at work making new music in the meantime.ĩ. Adele’s runaway success sustained for much of the decade until its waning years, when she abruptly stopped making music. Her songs weren’t upbeat, she didn’t have a chipper Katy Perry voice or looks, and her songs didn’t feature guest verses from Snoop Dogg. It’s honestly amazing that in 2010, Adele was as popular as she was when she most certainly didn’t fit the pop star mold. After all, it’s my list, and I picked what I thought were the ten best pop songs of the 2010s.Īdele was only 21 when she recorded Rolling in the Deep, but when listening you could easily confuse her for a 73-year-old soul belter who’s been through every imaginable heartbreak. Then again, these distinctions are largely arbitrary and could also be completely ignored. So while I liked plenty of songs that might fit the stylistic criteria in the 2010s, if they weren’t being played on the radio, I’ll have to rule them out. Oh and one more thing, pop music is supposed to be popular. But let’s not even touch the definition of rock music, an even more complicated can of worms that I still can’t bring myself to open. Pop to me is essentially any upbeat music with a defined verse-chorus structure that has lyrics and is sung without overdriven guitars or any other “rock” elements. Feel free to disagree, but I’d like to point out that it’s my personal opinion and I define pop music very narrowly. But I would say artists like Kendrick Lamar and Travis Scott are still rap, and as much as I appreciate their music, it won’t be appearing on this list because I can’t really consider it pop. Drake in particular straddles the line so much that he’s basically all pop at this point. Increasingly, there is little difference between the two genres. I associate the hits of the early 2010s with car rides to school and time spent in stores, but when I think of the music of 2015-2017, I think of awkward school dances and looking over the shoulders of fellow students scrolling through Musical.y and Vine. But these songs were just as inescapable, and sunnier and goofier hits that would also spawn memes still appeared quite a lot. ![]() ![]() ![]() Lorde’s Royals had caused a seismic shift in popular music lyricism, and of course, the election of Donald Trump put the country in a very divided state. You could point to a lot of possible causes for this. Artists like Drake and The Weeknd reached their peak of popularity and moodier tracks by the likes of The Chainsmokers and Twenty One Pilots started hitting the airwaves. But around 2016, the landscape of pop became fragmented and moodier. These were loud, splashy, and fun songs that had no purpose other than to put a smile on your face (although those willing to dive deeper into Gangnam Style would have found some rather interesting political commentary). You would have to be an industrial-strength hermit to not hear Thrift Shop, Uptown Funk, or even Gangnam Style. In the early and mid-2010s, “Top 40” radio was upbeat and inescapable. ![]() Here are the ten best pop songs released in that decade. The 2010s were a fascinating time for music.
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