Slop-doom-ism: a new era for pop music & criticism

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It’s late summer 2026; as I start writing this post, it’s Lollapalooza weekend. My TikTok FYP is full of videos of Charli XCX and Slayyter’s performances at the megaconcert. My Bluesky feed is full of Gen X music critics and scholars skeptical comments about Billy Corgan’s attempt to rebrand his cranky North Shore libertarian image for Gen Alpha. 

None of this has anything to do with what’s happening at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Today the top 10 is:

  1. Ella Langley, Choosin Texas
  2. Taylor Swift, I Knew It, I Knew You (TS5 OST)
  3. Stella Lefty, Boston
  4. Ella Langley & Morgan Wallen, I Can’t Love You Anymore
  5. Ariana Grande, I Hate That I Made You Love Me
  6. Tame Impala & JENNIE, Dracula
  7. Olivia Dean, So Easy
  8. Ella Langley, Be Her
  9. Olivia Dean, Man I Need
  10. Bruno Mars, I Just Might

“Choosin Texas” hit its 16th week at the top of this chart, and die-hard music fans such as the users who post on r/popheads take this as, in the words of Riqich, “pop culture recession indicator.” In the thread announcing this chart feat, Reddit users bemoan the chart’s “stagnation,” and generally express the view that the week’s most popular songs are of unusually low quality. 

For a song with such record-breaking popularity, one would expect there to be plenty of criticism and journalism about both it and Langley published across the web. However, I, someone whose Google algorithm is trained to surface pop music writing, search Langley’s name and can barely find even tumbleweeds. The only press coverage I can find in my first page of results comes from…Fox News. When I Google for “Choosin Texas,” I can see that once the song broke the record for the longest non-holiday #1 by a solo woman artist mainstream publications like Yahoo!entertainment and CNN covered the feat, but again, the mainstream music press has nothing to say. The Fader published a piece about the track’s chart success, but it’s very very light on anything resembling criticism. On the works cited list for Langley’s Wikipedia page, sources consist only of venues from the country music press and industry/chart reports from Billboard; this huge hit has failed to take off with the mainstream music press, who just seem completely uninterested in either it or the artist behind it.

Stella Lefty, another country-leaning pop ingenue with a long-running Hot 100 single, likewise has little mainstream music press coverage. When I Googled “Stella Lefty,” the top journalistic hits were from “Country Now,” what looks like a PR slop site called “House of Solo Magazine,” a small concert reviews publication, a Just Jared piece on her nepo baby lineage (she’s daughter of a Groupon co-founder), and a Rolling Stone profile from the end of June. Swift’s song from the Toy Story 5 soundtrack got a little more coverage, with pieces in Variety, Billboard, The Guardian, and Elle, but this is a song by the biggest-banking pop star in the game that’s tied to the publicity for a Disney franchise summer movie. The top of the Hot 100 is populated with songs that are unprecedentedly popular per chart metrics but equally unprecedentedly absent from The Discourse.

The music press has been decimated in the last 10-15 years, but the gap between these songs’ chart success and the level of critical attention they are receiving isn’t solely due to industry shrinkage. There are plenty of working critics publishing things across traditional media, new worker-owned collective publications, and good old blogs like this one, and nobody seems to have anything to say about these songs; my TikTok FYP page algorithm is trained to send me music content, and I’m not getting sent any Langley or Lefty explainers.

If the poptimism era of the 2000s and 2010s was defined by critics’ view that even mainstream commercial “pop” music – precisely the kind of pop music that was popular enough to rule the Hot 100 – was worthy of serious critical attention and analysis, we seem to have left that era for one where there’s a new kind of disjunction between the music that is critically acclaimed (or at least analyzed) and the music that succeeds on the charts. To be clear, the professional and amateur music press is still publishing lots of content about popular music — but what they’re writing about is not what what’s sticking around the top of the charts on record-breaking runs.

There’s nothing interesting to say about songs like “Choosin Texas” because there’s nothing in them; they are designed to be so generic that they can accompany anything and fit any context. As The Guardian reports,

Brian Mansfield, managing editor of the trade publication Country Insider, says that the song’s twangy-but-smooth sound makes it appealing to program directors – whether in country, pop or adult contemporary – who tend to avoid songs that would sound jarringly rootsy next to fluffier pop fare. “It’s a song that sounds good next to almost anything you can play, and that is an underrated part of creating the music mix for any format,” he says.

“Choosin Texas” was crafted with ubiquity in mind: lacking in any prominent distinguishing features, it can work across radio formats and streaming playlists, and thus rack up the numbers necessary to top the Hot 100 for months on end. The song is a home-fried version of what I’ve elsewhere called “ordinary slop,” which “has to be flexible enough to adapt and give voice to a wide array of private individual feelings and experiences.” Ordinary slop is a strategy for developing licensable audio IP for use on platforms like Instagram or TikTok – generic sounds optimized for algorithmic personalization. Songs like “Choosin Texas” adopt a similar strategy of being dialectically so generic or indeterminate that they can fit many different determinate contexts, but applies it in a slightly different type of market (one more accommodating to traditional radio and its demographic-based formats). Both approaches are iterations of the idea that “in popular music the style of late capitalism is NOTHING.” Today chart and market success requires incredible flexibility and adaptability from songs: they have to soundtrack anyone and everyone’s short-form video clip, they have to succeed across numerous radio formats, etc. In order to accommodate any and every determinate quality, the songs themselves can have no (strong) determinate qualities. They have to be a sloppy void. And there’s not much meat on those voidy bones for critics to chew. What interesting thoughts can one have about nothing? 

This is not a case where musical traditions associated with women, queer people, and non-white people are devalued as having low artistic status – that was poptimism’s critique of the rock mainstream. Instead, this is the direct market vaporization of empty, sloppy nothing as content strategy. Nothing rakes in money in the same moment that musical labor has been largely demonetized. The feminized position here isn’t ‘pop’ as entertainment, but artistic and humanistic labor as demonetized, unremunerated labor. Whereas rockism once devalued pop for its purported vacuity and oversold rock gods’ virtuosity, the reverse is the case here: hard work is worthless and girly (derogatory), whereas the industry and its shareholders love scalable slop, which is girly (complimentary). Complimentary and derogatory lines are not drawn in terms of gender or race, but within them. 

Those likes are drawn in terms of friction: devalued things like labor and politics require and generate friction, whereas scalable value must minimize it. As Melinda Cooper shows in Life as Surplus, labor is traditionally understood quite literally as friction in the form of burning calories. In the Industrial Revolution, for example, figures like “horsepower” emerged as measures of machine power because according to the second law of thermodynamics the caloric or metabolic energy a horse burns is mathematically commutable to the energy a steam engine burns:

Underlying these different manifestations of force was a common principle of production or labor—muscles perform mechanical work through the combustion of nutrients, just as the steam engine produces energy by burning carbon. The physico chemical labor of the body was measurable in the same terms as that of heat. (Cooper, Life as Surplus, 107) 

Heat and combustion increase friction by making molecules move around and bump into one another more rapidly. Fueled by such combustion, the activity of labor requires the creation of friction. And that friction impedes exponential scalability: due to the second law of thermodynamics, there’s only so much energy you can get from burning a calorie or a lump of coal. 

Politics also generates friction socially in the form of what Jacques Ranciere calls “disagreement.”

The structures proper to disagreement are those in which discussion of an argument comes down to a dispute over the object of the discussion and over the capacity of those who are making an object of it. 

For Ranciere, disagreement is what emerges when interlocutors negotiate both who counts as a speaker and what it means to speak. Politics is what happens when disagreement reveals some group of people have wrongly not been counted as capable of speaking and thus excluded from personhood. For example, in traditional Western societies such as France, to recognize that women or foreigners are indeed capable of logical speech would require both a shift in what counts as “logical speech” and and what exactly it is that all speakers have in common. This revelation of wrong causes a reconfiguration of what counts as speech and who counts as a speaker. Such shifts involve friction.

Friction impedes scalability. Things that scale include neoliberal feminine resilience and neoreactionary masculine resilience. Musical labor creates friction, whereas sportsbetting and crypto scale. Friction/scale is coming to replace low/high or pop/rock hierarchies; however whereas those latter two hierarchies tied the performance of femininity and masculinity to the structural position of feminized low and masculinized high, the friction/scale hierarchy allows for the performance of any gender on either side of a hierarchy that is nevertheless itself structurally gendered such that friction occupies the structural place of femininity and scale occupies the structural place of masculinity in patriarchal racial capitalism.

In 2026, slop scales. Actual musical labor and the critical labor involved in interpreting music does not scale. Critics dig their teeth into the products of musical labor, where the friction of work creates the open, messy, plurivalent art object ripe for the labor of interpretation (and the social proces of debate). Demonetized, social, and friction-generating, that critical labor occupies the feminine structural position that is coming to define all humanistic labor these days (unless that humanistic labor is appropriated by tech CEOs as “taste,” where the executive authority of the boss re-masculinizes it). Even though the job or profession of the music critic or journalist may be a thing increasingly of the past, people will continue to write and think and debate about music. These things will probably happen outside prestige venues and outlets, just as today’s interesting music is happening outside the Hot 100. For people who think and write about music, one of our tasks is to theorize this new gendered (and racialized, though I haven’t said much about that here) political economy where we find our work alongside the music we think and write about in the structurally feminized position of devaluation and low status. Whereas poptimism-era critics used their position of tastemaking prestige to argue for the cultural value of pop, we don’t have that same leverage today. Perhaps this is a signal to put our energy into the communities that value us rather than trying to chase supposedly elite spaces.