The Rise (or Fall) of A-Pop

Part 1: Introducing A-pop

All installments Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3 || Part 4 || Part 5

Pop Pantheon is a lively and engaging weekly pop music podcast in which geeky enthusiast host DJ Louie XIV invites guests from the wider world of music criticism to assess the stature and impact of various stars in a pantheon of historical significance. They chat about inside-baseball music nerd topics like imperial phases and Billboard chart statistics, and give fair consideration to acts that have never gained much critical traction. It is one of the most astute and generous ongoing attempts to evaluate and categorize the current pop landscape.

But Pop Pantheon has a Shakira problem.

The question of the hour, posed back in May of 2023, was what pop star tier Shakira fits into. Pop Pantheon’s tier system, the show’s conceit for freewheeling debates about the careers of major (and occasionally minor) artists, feels intuitive but can be contentious. Some acts sail through to the top of the pyramid: the rarefied icon status, which tells you that any book on the past 100 years of pop history must at least include an inset photo of them. Down at the bottom in Tier 5, you have “had to be there” also-rans. Most of the haggling happens in between.

Louie, ultimately the final tier authority, claims that Shakira is stuck in Tier 3, mere superstardom. In what is a common pattern in the show, the guest critic, Rolling Stone’s Julyssa Lopez, is more effusive and offers a placement higher than Louie is prepared to go. He clarifies: in America Shakira is Tier 3, and in Latin America she’s Tier 1. Should they split the difference?

The evaluation criteria that comes up in Louie’s mind to help them sort things out is “thinking about her music in the most globalized sense: you’re at a bar mitzvah in, fuckin’, Des Moines, Iowa…what Shakira songs are enduring to that group of people?” They settle on Tier 2, with Louie arguing that the ranking should go: Tier 1 in Latin America, Tier 2 globally, Tier 3 in America.

What does it mean to be an icon in Latin America and a megastar globally, but only a mere superstar in America? Who do these mythical Jewish Iowan teenagers represent, and why are they a sign of globalized scope rather than being localized to the United States? Why should the opinions of some major plurality of Americans be the ones to dictate what counts as pop in today’s pantheon? That is to say—whose pantheon is it?

To be clear, I’m not asking these questions as a smug rhetorical opportunity to insist on global cosmopolitanism. These are serious questions worth thinking about. I’m an American who loves pop music, but my ears are increasingly and consistently drawn to what’s popular outside the US.

That said, I also enjoy Pop Pantheon and I understand their rationale for covering what they cover. I have no interest in the show branching out into global music scenes that they don’t follow and don’t have any particular expertise in any more than I want them to cover jazz.

This is because Pop Pantheon is not, despite its title, really just a pop podcast. It is an A-pop podcast.

I’ve started thinking about American pop music (the “A” in A-pop) competing seriously, maybe for the first time in generations, as an equal regional competitor in a global pop landscape. The regional scene is hyphenated the same way you would describe South Korean K-pop or Japanese J-pop.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules of what makes something A-pop. The term merely points to an increasingly self-defeating provincialism in ignoring the global pop landscape at a time when ideas, sounds, and scenes originating outside of a long-dominant western music sphere have more global reach than ever before, and are increasingly finding their way to American fanbases.

At the most basic level, “A-pop” is just the banal observation that America is not now, and has in fact never been, the only country in the world. But this is a fact that was easy to ignore for a long time especially if, like me, you were an American who happened to like globally popular music. For a long time, American popular music has been so dominant in global charts that American pop has felt like a synecdoche for global pop. It’s just pop.

A regional understanding of American pop, one frequently caught on the back foot against ascendant pop scenes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, perhaps better matches today’s fractured cultural landscape of American pop below the vanishing icon tier. (Tier 1 really only seems to unquestionably have room for one celebrity who debuted in the 21st century: Taylor Swift.)

This fracturing is largely systemic: music is easier than ever to make and share, and we have frictionless access to all of it in a streaming environment that, despite its seedy machinations and terrible treatment of artists, has made it possible to engage in popular music that originates outside of western pop scenes without the aid of a tour guide.

But in the same way that there is Japanese music that is not J-pop and South Korean music that is not K-pop, not all American pop music is what I would call A-pop. Our rap, country, and even remaining rock music, including metal and indie, are all more or less operating parallel to the A-pop phenomenon.

You can distinguish the A-pop from the non-A-pop by thinking about how comfortable the Pop Pantheon podcast would be in taking on a popular act. The Black Eyed Peas have a better chance at even-handed critical assessment than Future. Some day there will be a crackerjack Kacey Musgraves Pop Pantheon episode, but Morgan Wallen would probably feel like a slog.

But most of the ‘20s breakthrough “pop girlies” (to use one of the podcast’s favorite terms) fit the bill: Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan. Second-stringers like Ava Max, Bebe Rexha, and Addison Rae are peak A-pop. Charli XCX is maybe too distinctively British to count, but Dua Lipa is probably A-pop, if you allow the “A” to encompass the occasional Albanian. (You could also expand the “A” to stand in for Anglophone, which gets you Canadian crossover stars like Tate McRae.)

One could imagine a more coordinated pop industry, like K-pop’s idol system, shaping this pop environment. Indeed, many of its stars come from children’s television, like Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo, who follow in the footsteps of A-pop antecedents Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus (who themselves followed in the footsteps of ‘90s child stars of millennial pop like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, and Fergie).

There is a cottage industry of pop breakthroughs who have opened for Taylor Swift, the monolith to whose scale all A-pop aspires but usually falls far short: Beabadoobee, Gayle, Norwegian pop star Girl in Red, Gracie Abrams. And as usual, there is a talented cabal of songwriters and superproducers guiding the current sounds: Jack Antonoff, Dan Nigro, Amy Allen.

Alternatively, what about a competitive regional proving ground, like Eurovision? NBC attempted an interstate Eurovision-style competition in 2022, the American Song Contest, but the project was short-lived and only lasted one season. The show’s winner, AleXa, was an Oklahoma native of Korean heritage who began her music career competing in K-pop auditions organized by two major Korean labels behind many successful K-pop groups, JYP Entertainment and Cube.

A-pop is not coordinated by anything like a formal system necessary to strategize the launch of new pop stars in a globally competitive environment. After all, launching globally successful pop stars has traditionally just been what America does without much obvious rhyme or reason. Everyone who makes it big in America has historically had a decent chance at being big just about everywhere else, too, seemingly by default.

When other countries, like South Korea or Japan, develop their hyphenated “-pop” designations, it has been a sign of arrival on the world stage. Michael Bourdaghs, author of Japanese rock history primer Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon, tracks the prehistory of J-pop, claiming that the postwar pop music of Japan needs to be understood as being constantly in the comparative shadow of American pop.

Bordaghs reminisces about knowing nothing about Japanese pop while studying abroad, while everyone he knew also knew as much or more about American and British pop as he did. By 1990, he argues, Japan’s regional pop music could stand on its own two feet: J-pop “names a new kind of map.” J-pop was not free of western influence, per se, but it also was not so chained to the western pop market that it would make sense to compare it to, say, American or British counterparts.

Similarly, I remember watching K-pop’s American “debut” moment in 2011 on the Late Show with David Letterman, when Letterman, seated next to Bill Murray and Regis Philbin in Super Bowl gear, announced Girls’ Generation in their first US late night performance, and then afterward proclaimed: “The Girls are here, everybody!” This was a music scene diverging from American and other western pop music, often with the help of many of its hottest producers, charting out yet another new kind of map.

The Billboard Global 200 Charts, published since 2020, provide a glimpse at the widening impact of non-American acts to listeners around the world. 2023 was a banner year for non-western and not-in-English music. Rema’s Afrobeats hit “Calm Down,” several songs from regional Mexican music stars Grupa Frontera and Peso Pluma, J-pop from Yaosobi, K-pop from BTS and solo member Jung Kook (among others), and Colombian pop from Karol G and Shakira all went to #1 on the global charts.

These charts also show what was popular everywhere except for the US. While Taylor Swift hit number one on the global charts with her re-released “Cruel Summer” on the heels of her Eras tour juggernaut if you include the American charts, without those charts, the #1 spot in the rest of the world was held by a global TikTok smash from Spain, “Si No Estás” by Íñigo Quintero.

All told, non-American or broader Anglosphere acts were #1 for 22 weeks of the year in 2023 when you do include the American charts, and for 30 weeks if you don’t. (That’s functionally out of fewer weeks than 52, because December belongs to Mariah Carey now.) Many global scenes have now had a decade or more of maturity even in the US where these regional pop styles have durable American fandoms. To ignore them in an accounting of pop’s present or future icons seems short-sighted.

Granting American pop its hyphen with “A-pop” suggests that “arrival” to global competition can happen in both directions, one on the way up and the other on the way down. But is it even true that America’s pop is in decline from a former height? Or is it just that the rise of other regions helps us to understand what was always true, that America has always had a regional pop scene?

To some extent this is a moot distinction, because for generations, American and Anglophone pop has felt—to Americans perhaps unthinkingly, but maybe also even to non-Americans living comparatively in the shadow of American music and culture whether they liked it or not—like the pantheon against which to judge all new entrants.

What does it mean for American and western Anglosphere artists to have to think of themselves in a comparative lens against the rising forms of well-established pop scenes from Japan and South Korea; Spanish-language behemoths from Puerto Rico, Mexico, and South America; or globally avant-garde dance music from Brazilian funk, Nigerian Afrobeats, or South African house and amapiano? All of these scenes are not merely elbowing for a place among the royalty of the pop pantheon. They can be enjoyed without comparison, while western pop struggles to integrate the scenes’ advances.

If you buy that American pop is facing serious competition, it may be tempting to follow any perceived contraction of American pop music’s influence straight to doomerism along with everything else in the US’s global role. In his year-end analysis of 2024 in pop, Robert Christgau wondered if “America’s greatest gift to world culture is going out of style,” along with our democracy.

But I don’t think it’s helpful to get America’s newfound global competition tangled up in questions of the end of Pax Americana. The erosion of American pop’s power as stand-in for global pop has more to do with structural changes in music listening. It’s easier to listen to everyone, to see what everyone else is listening to, and to stumble onto worlds that would have come with steep import fees half a generation ago. It would be weirder for the global pop landscape not to change in response.

And change it has. The pantheons of the 2020s and beyond will need to be more radically ambivalent to who and what winds up where: world-beating pop music could come from anyone, and from anywhere in the world. The discussions won’t just be about which tier someone belongs in, but about how we can even keep track of all of the icons hiding in plain sight.