Hey Haters—pop music isn't garbage

Posted Dec. 11, 2022

By Lily Beckham

Cub Reporter

Pop music is not garbage, society will just find reasons to be hateful for no reason. Pop music is generally targeted at younger women, and so it stands to reason that the interests of those women are deemed inferior to those of others, but simply swearing off a genre of art to put down teenage girls is unnecessary and dramatic. 

The general consensus online is that that pop music is not real music. With social media, so many new pop music artists have come out with fresh sounds targeted towards, specifically, teenage girls. The reason that people hate pop music so much, is that they believe they’re better than those young women. 

Women have never been welcome in the music industry. It’s always been 10x more difficult for women to produce, make, or listen to music than it ever has been for men. 

Take Olivia Rodrigo as an example. Her music is entirely targeted towards teenage girls. Her fanbase is majorly young women, and a lot of people believe that she’s not a real musician because of that. Especially online, many people believe she’s untalented.

Taylor Swift has always faced this predjudice. One reddit user, “zorth41” said, “Taylor Swift is cancer…Like how many famous boyfriends has she had?” Another, “crystalvision3455” said, “ She expresses nothing of the soul, nothing of the heart, nothing that is real.”  However, nobody said these things about “the greats.” 

The greats are people like Elvis, The Beatles, and other classic male musicians. Or, at least according to most people on the internet. Of course, all musicians have people who dislike them, but the ideas those people have about the artists are vastly different from modern pop haters. For example, people when referring to classic artists may say they “Just don’t like the music.” However, when it comes to pop artists it becomes, “How many famous boyfriend has she had?” or, “It’s not REAL music.” 

Some of the best lyricism is in pop music that people write off as robotic and fake. For example, in Olivia Rodrigo’s “1 step forward and 3 steps back,  she says, 

“And maybe in some masochistic way

I kinda find it all exciting

Like, which lover will I get today? 

Will you walk me to the door or send me home crying?”

Or, in Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” when she says, 

“I could talk about every time that you showed up on time

But I'd have an empty line 'cause you never did

Never paid any mind to my mother or friends

So I shut them all out for you 'cause I was a kid.”

Those lyrics all resonate with teenage girls, and because of that, pop music has been sworn off. Anyone can call pop music garbage, but it takes skill, and talent to write a pop song.  It takes immense effort to produce music and to make it popular.

Pop music is not garbage. The internet is just disrespectful.