The Other Dave Glossary
This is a one-stop glossary for all of the weird neologisms and inside-baseball popcrit terms you may encounter here.
A-pop
A way to think about formerly hegemonic American (the “A” in A-pop) pop music as a large regional competitor in a global pop landscape, with other pop scenes seriously vying not only for influence, but actual market competition. For most regions in the world, gaining a hyphen is a sign of emergence on the global stage, but for American pop music, the hyphen may denote a (relative) decline. You can read more about it in the first A-pop series essay here.
Ama-pop
Pop music influenced by South African amapiano, but not using the groove-oriented principles of amapiano (which I describe here). Tyla is the biggest ama-pop breakout success story to date, but amapiano elements, particularly the signature log drum sound, have started to travel globally, from Nigerian Afrobeats to other forms of cosmopolitan international pop.
Bort-pop
A coinage by Edward Oculiz in the Singles Jukebox, in reference to Kygo x Whitney Houston’s “Higher Love.” Bort, literally, is a low-quality diamond that is often ground down to create industrial abrasives. Edward O imagined Kygo grinding Whitney Houston’s original performance into an offensive diamond dust, reducing it to babbling syllables in lieu of a chorus. I took this concept and ran with it: bort-pop, to my mind, was something like a last gasp of EDM’s relevance in American pop (I’ll write about this more in a future A-pop post). You can read my original thoughts about bort-pop at my newly imported TinyLetter archival post.
Blockbuster American Pop Era
The Blockbuster American Pop Era is a span of time whose origin is sometimes referred to as the “MTV Era,” but which I put at a much larger time period, from about 1983 to 2010. You can track how accounting for blockbusters change in different ways — one way I’ve done it is through charting the top ten Billboard Artists of the Years from each year since 1981, which you can see here. Defining the blockbuster pop era—and specifically the way that American pop transitioned away from it in the 2010s—is the subject of the fifth A-pop series essay.
Ferment
This is the word I use for the productive tension in a burgeoning scene that often but not always leads to a competent glut of music that may or may not then travel around the world and get absorbed into other music. A scene in ferment is taking wild swings and often breaking rules or inhabiting profound contradictions, but it is also operating at a baseline of quality that is very hard to do in a sub-par way—there is often excitement even in shameless copying and derivative attempts. Sometimes a competent glut will mellow into landfill, as in “landfill indie,” where the advances become a mere template, with further copies missing the spark that animated innovation. (Sometimes I still like the landfill stuff just fine!)
Hard clave
A way to describe the clave (“five beats in four”) rhythm in Brazilian funk music, which eliminates the sense of swing from traditional clave. The basic clave rhythm divides a bar into three and two, like in Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley” or Strangeloves/Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy”: clap, clap, clap…clap-clap. Brazilian funk music has reduced the beat to a more precise three-beat pattern to establish clave. If you’re clapping the “I Want Candy” rhythm you remove the first and fourth claps: X clap, clap…X-clap. I describe this as a much harder sound than the swing feel you get in other clave-based music, an awkward negotiation with the swingless throb of standard four-on-the-floor dance beat. Brazilian funk points vaguely to the swing and sway of clave and then strangles it.
Middlestream
This is the key argument in my third A-pop installment. I argue that through the aughts and into the ‘10s, mainstream American pop music lowered its commercial ambitions en masse in the pre-streaming era as record industry profits collapsed. At the same time, indie music, which had always operated as an uneasy “sidestream” to mass culture, started to converge with what was left of the mainstream. This convergence process arguably peaked between 2009 (the year of GAPDY, an acronym of the five indie albums predicted to win in various music critic polls that year) and 2011 (the year Spotify launched in the US). After the convergence, what you get is less distinction between what is indie and what is mainstream. I call the compromise a middlestream, which is where lots of semipopular music, including windowpane (see below), thrives.
Modal rap
Modal rap is a style of rapping in which rappers sing a limited set of notes in an improvisatory fashion. They are usually singing four notes (out of five) in the pentatonic minor scale, the scale used for traditional rock guitar solos. I refer to it as minor-key “Mary Had a Little Lamb” (if you have a keyboard handy, play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in C with your right hand but play an A note with your left hand). I lay out the concept in more detail in the fifth installment of my Taylor Swift series, in which I suggest that the same melodic simplicity evident in modal rap also characterizes a lot of pop music, including Swift’s, but for different reasons: Taylor Swift learned to write songs based on what at the time was her very limited melodic range.1 What I don’t go into in that piece is that lots of pop music has adopted a more modal approach—in the sense of limiting melodic choices and simplifying harmonies—to fit more words into songs, which is also the gist of this interesting study on melodic complexity that provides very useful data leading to generally poor cultural analysis.
Monsterverse
The “monsterverse” describes the massive popularity contest winners in a frictionless global music landscape. In the post-streaming era, anything in the world can become enormously popular for any reason at all, following the principles of cumulative advantage (i.e., popularity of a thing increases at an exponential rate as more people share it, a reaction that can be sparked for unpredictable reasons). This is the same backdrop that makes America’s hyphenation/“demotion” possible, which I discuss in the second installment of the A-pop series. Transnational cumulative advantage leads to both random pop successes—often attributed to TikTok but possible through many other means—and also durable, enormous music celebrities from around the world whose success is (seemingly) mutually exclusive from other stars doing something similar within their genre or region. If Taylor Swift is Godzilla, only a non-Godzilla (likely one not based in the US, or at least not based in her form of singer-songwriter-derived pop) can meaningfully compete with her.
Pop impersonators, pop mirages, and post-pop impressionists
Categories for transitional pop stardom through the 2010s, as the last of the blockbuster American pop stars outpaced most newcomers and, I argue, American pop was adapting to a new world of international competition without American pop at the center. These definitions are from the fifth essay in the A-pop series:
Pop impersonators do a sort of pantomime of tropes without really caring whether or not this signifies something new or interesting. This is a move that is common across pop history, especially as a sort of training stage—a big star starts out imitating someone else. Sometimes it works: that is, it might signify something new or interesting. But sometimes you just get a satisficing fulfillment of pop-star-like content (generic by design) in the hope of achieving pop star audiences, like an actor auditioning to be in a movie about a pop star.
A pop mirage is an artist posing as a pop star, usually temporarily, to lead a song. In some cases the singer remains practically anonymous; in others, a major or aspiring star gives their voice over to a hook in a way that feels like moonlighting from their “real” career. Often the star of the show is a DJ or producer, with the singer more of a collaborator or figurehead.
The thorniest category is what I call the post-pop impressionists. I mean “impressionism” in the art world sense, getting at pop obliquely using elements that only give you an impression of the thing holistically. The post-pop impressionists are very close to what I’ve called, in the third part of this series, the middlestream. But they have more of a feel of the old school of pop star—and they often make for more interesting pop personalities than the artists trying to recapture a faded former era of stardom (the impersonators) or those not really bothering with pop stardom at all (the mirages). Their only problem is that they usually aren’t very popular.
Teenpop / teen confessional
This is my opportunity to share something from my Taylor Swift Fearless proposal, mapping out a brief history of teenpop from c. 1996-2006
I use the term millennial teenpop music to refer to the explosion of youth music following the twin “invasions” of kid-oriented pop in the late 1990s: the “second British invasion” of the Spice Girls and the “Swedish invasion” of producer Max Martin and Cheiron Studios with Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys. This music was created at the turn of the new millennium, but also closely tracks the Millennial generation (an “echo boom” encompassing people born between the mid-80s and mid-90s), similarly to how rock music evolved as baby boomers came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
The evolution of teenpop’s sounds and artists was timed to the historically large Millennial generation reaching late childhood and puberty: its music “matured” along with its fanbase. Teenpop music took a turn toward earnest confessional songwriting with the rise of Avril Lavigne in 2002, and the production and songwriting norms changed: the sound was now rock-oriented in alternative and adult contemporary styles, with young singers expected to play their own instruments and participate in writing alongside professional songwriters. By the end of 2006, when Taylor Swift’s debut country album was released and the average Millennial (like Swift herself) was a teenager, most early teenpop stars had shifted into more risqué pop styles, while the confessional songwriting wave receded into a niche interest controlled almost exclusively by Disney and its record label Hollywood Records.
I call the roughly five-year phase of millennial teenpop’s evolution between Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift the era of confessional teenpop. Although Taylor Swift started her career as an aspiring country music star, her aims were always to cultivate the kind of youth audience that had formed strong relationships to the stars of the confessional teenpop era: that is, children and teens who were fans of young women who wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, and detailed the exhilaration and heartbreak of life on the cusp of adult independence.
Windowpane
A popular style of the middlestream, referring specifically to music with pop ambitions that sonically falls in an uncanny valley between indie rock and adult contemporary.2 Windowpane encompasses elements of guitar-band indie rock, retro synth-pop, and bedroom shoegaze, not necessarily in combination. It offers hooks less “sticky” than Top 40 pop, but also sounds that are softer and dreamier than what you’ll often find in indie rock or singer-songwriter adult contemporary. The ongoing 2025 windowpane playlist is here.
Since then, Taylor Swift has improved her voice to a full additional octave, and uses her new powers to sing the same melodies two octaves apart, which is a very Taylor Swift thing to do. My guess is that she has spent a few million dollars on voice coaching and approximately zero dollars on music lessons for guitar or piano.
The phrase itself was coined in conversation with Jacob Sujin Kuppermann and Al Valera, who both deserve credit, as does Hannah Jocelyn for the related genre name “yearncore.”