Maybe you’ve noticed recently how evergreen pop-song subjects like love and fantasy have been supplanted by the “reality” of hustle and a meta-narrative. The inspirations and tribulations of life as a full-time entertainer are the subjects of many a recent female pop album, from debutantes and establishment icons alike: ADÉLA’s PRIMA; JADE’s THAT’S SHOWBIZ, BABY!; Ariana Grande’s petal; Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl; every Charli xcx album since Crash. I think this emergent phenomenon is like fifty percent a function of late-capitalist anxiety and fifty percent stan culture wagging the stars, but maybe it’s one and the same thing. “The American Dream is outdated/Now they sittin’ on the internet hatin’,” as Tinashe puts it on “Crash Out,” one of the dozens of brilliant little moments on Popstar, her new pop meta-narrative album to end pop meta-narrative albums. After this, hang it up.
Popstar really is that good: top-shelf material with a sense of purpose—a compulsion, even—about connecting sounds circulating in pop, electronic, and dance music right now. Its rhythmic sensibility works both song-to-song and as a full-album listen. It’s fresh in the best way—immediately accessible, a little bit avant-garde. And it’s super recognizably Tinashe: her voice, taste, points of reference, backed by the kind of producer lineup a creative director would probably call “directional.” She’s got Arca and Machinedrum on the dial-up modem (“Sunglasses”) and Kingdom’s crazy “Closer”-meets-bassline production for “Nobody Wanna Dance Anymore” is in the lead for dancefloor makeout track of the year. She’s playing into the self-aware theme by interpolating herself and the pop era she came up in. She knows when to step on the gas, and she will make the song too short before she ever gets bored.
No score yet, be the first to add.
One of those recognizably Tinashe things is the hooks with a facility for zeitgeist phrases that would embarrass another artist. You could go the rest of your life without hearing the word “brainrot”? Me too, but not when I hear Tinashe sing “Brainrot,” or “Crash Out” (a rather belated addition to Merriam-Webster this month), or “It gets to a point,” or “We live in a society.” It’s not just her line readings or her longstanding knack for getting in on the joke: Somehow she’s singing a little less than on past albums, not just when she’s sing-rapping but because the Popstar toplines are so integral to the beats. It’s as much about the melodies as the way their percussive qualities factor into the whole (brainrot, brainrot, brainrot)—this is something she’s worked toward for a long time, really being part of the rhythm. On “Pillow Fight”: “I was never innocent,” with an echo on “innocent” that sounds like it’s coming through the Britney mic; straight into a threat to whack you into bed that makes her sound like a featherweight Pusha T; then she says “tussle” so it sounds like “tesselate,” there’s a gorgeous harmony section, and it’s over so fast.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
