The 2020s, pop music, and the politics of effort

What is a pop star?

The question sounds simple until you try to answer it. A pop star is not just a singer — plenty of singers are not pop stars. They are not just famous, either. So how do we recognize one? Are they performers? Entertainers? Songwriters? Industry plants or marketing pawns?

The definition of a pop star has been built, and continues to be built, by those who have been given that title. Anyone can be an artist, a singer, an interpreter. Not anyone can be a pop star.

Michael Jackson did not simply perform at the 1993 Super Bowl. He stood motionless for two full minutes while ninety thousand people lost their minds, and then he moved, and the message was clear: a pop star commands space at a scale that ordinary human presence cannot. Madonna built a career around perpetual reinvention, each era a new performance of selfhood, each costume and controversy a deliberate act of cultural authorship. Artists from Lady Gaga to Beyoncé inherited that template directly. Britney Spears gave the world something else: the pop star as a precision instrument, choreography so rehearsed it looked effortless, a smile so consistent it became a kind of armor.

When Robbie Williams opened his 2003 Knebworth show hanging upside down telling ninety thousand people that their ass was his for the next two hours, he was not making a joke. He was stating the terms of the contract. The pop star commands, the audience surrenders, and everyone goes home satisfied. That was what the golden age of pop performance looked like from the inside: a consensual, total takeover of space, attention, and emotional energy.

Michael Jackson / Robbie Williams / Madonna - The golden age of pop: one stage, one crowd, one unspoken agreement.

Judith Butler argues that identity is not something we have but something we do, a set of repeated performances that, over time, solidify into what looks like nature. The pop star may be the purest cultural expression of that idea. There is no essential pop star waiting to be discovered. There is only the accumulation of performances that, repeated enough times, make the category feel inevitable.

But if Butler tells us how norms are built, Roland Barthes tells us that myth does not deny things. Instead, it purifies them, makes them innocent, gives them a natural and eternal justification. The golden age performance standard was never natural or eternal. It was constructed, rehearsed, and repeated until it felt inevitable. When the conditions that sustain them change, the signs they produce start to mean different things. A performance that once read as total commitment can begin to read as desperation. Stillness that once read as laziness can begin to read as depth. The standard holds. The interpretation shifts.

The Labor Must Vanish

The 2020s began with the world indoors. For two years, stages were dark, tours were cancelled, and the entire apparatus of live performance simply stopped. In its place, a fifteen-second video filmed in a bedroom could reach more people than a stadium ever could. When the stages came back, the ways audiences watched and judged music had changed. Pop had always rewarded those who gave everything. But a generation raised on TikTok had started to find something embarrassing about being caught visibly trying.

The standard did not disappear. Contemporary pop artists are still expected to embody what a Jackson, a Madonna, or a Britney spent decades constructing. To be a pop star still requires commanding space, projecting a presence large enough to distinguish you from a singer. What changed is not the expectation itself, but the tolerance for its visibility. Effort, once the currency of pop legitimacy, has become something audiences prefer not to see. The performance must remain, but the labor behind it must vanish.

Brat (2024), © Atlantic Recording Corporation

Take Charli XCX. In the summer of 2024, Brat became the defining pop cultural moment of the year. A lo-fi green aesthetic, an autotuned voice against a bare backdrop, a deliberate rejection of the maximalist production that had defined pop ambition for decades. Charli herself articulated the spirit of it: brat is "a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra." The genius of Brat was that it made effortlessness into a manifesto. It did not accidentally look like it was not trying. It theorized not trying as the most sophisticated artistic position available. In that sense, Brat did not resist the new standard. It perfected it.

But Brat was not a solution available to everyone. It was a workaround available only to a specific kind of artist, one with enough critical capital, enough industry credibility, and enough cultural fluency to make "I'm not trying" legible as a statement rather than a failure. 

To perform or not to perform, that is the question

This shift did not land equally. For female artists specifically, it created a structural trap. Female artists are still held to the full weight of the golden age standard: the physicality, the visual perfection, the commanding presence. But the moment that standard becomes legible, it becomes a liability. They are expected to do the work and erase the evidence of doing it simultaneously. The trap has no exit, because the line between enough and too much was never meant to be found. 

Sabrina Carpenter and Tate McRae are doing exactly what the standard demands, and both are being penalized for it. Carpenter has a fully realized pop universe through hyper-produced visuals, precise choreography, and a persona built around the stereotypical blond bombshell with a touch of cheekiness. Tate McRae dances with an athletic intensity that would have been celebrated without question in the MTV era. Carpenter's "House" music video drew widespread criticism for what audiences read as a sexualized, male-centered vision of femininity, as though a female artist deliberately building an aesthetic around her own sexuality is evidence of something gone wrong rather than a creative choice made in full awareness of its own provocation. Tate McRae and Addison Rae have both been mocked for doing too much too many times. Too much dancing, too much effort, too much visible ambition while not giving enough. But too much compared to what? The golden age standard this piece opened with was built entirely on that kind of commitment. What they are being criticized for is the standard itself.

Please Please Please, House, Espresso — a highly polished world, a confident femininity.

The contrast cases make the mechanism visible. Justin Bieber became the highest-paid artist in Coachella history by taking the 2026 Coachella stage and streaming YouTube videos, and the online discourse called it a commentary on performance, a genius provocation, a statement. Artists like Sombr stand nearly motionless onstage and audiences extend them the same generosity. Harry Styles goes on stage in a pink boa and gets called a queer icon. And yet, it only took Dua Lipa not dancing hard enough for the "Go girl give us nothing" meme to exist. And when she returned with a more physically demanding show, the internet patted itself on the back: "See? Now she knows how to put on a show." The implication being that her talent had always been there, waiting for their criticism to unlock it.

Coachella 2026: YouTube videos on the big screen, the highest-paid artist in the festival’s history.

"But men get criticized too!"

They do, but the defense that men face the same scrutiny does not hold up to pressure. Benson Boone's backflips have become almost as memeable as Tate McRae's choreography. They’ve been mocked for being too excessive, too much compared to what his music deserves in terms of show. But when Boone gets called excessive, the criticism stays contained to the performance. It is a stylistic note, a taste judgment, occasionally a joke. Nobody questions whether he deserves to be there. While the backflip is too much, Benson Boone, as an artist, remains unimpeachable. When Tate McRae or Addison do, the criticism attaches to their vocals, their likability, their physicality and their worth as an artist. When Sabrina Carpenter is called too much, it becomes a referendum on her sexuality, her authenticity, her sincerity as an artist. The criticism becomes a character verdict, rather than staying contained to the performance.

For male artists, "too much" is a stylistic note. For female artists, it becomes a question of legitimacy. TikTok did not create that asymmetry. It gave it a faster, more efficient, more publicly humiliating set of tools, and it had already decided, before the video even loaded, whose effort was going to read as cringe.

The Decade That Wouldn't Commit

What the politics of effort in 2020s pop reveal is not simply a double standard, nor a structural trap, though it is both. It reveals a culture that learned to read visible effort as embarrassing, that trained itself to reward the appearance of not caring and did not suddenly become neutral about who gets to perform and who gets to rest. It took an existing architecture of suspicion toward female ambition and gave it a new, more efficient language. The result is a generation of artists navigating a standard that shifts beneath their feet, not because audiences are confused about what they want, but because what they want has never really been about the performance.

Perhaps that is why the 2020s has proven so difficult to define as a cultural moment. Prior eras took what was before them to build a new identity visibly committed to a sound, an aesthetic, a set of values that could be named and eventually, used as inspiration for whatever came next. Each generation of pop has either weaponized what came before it or buried it. The boyband era grew directly from New Kids on the Block, and the singer-songwriter wave of the 2010s existed largely as a rebuke to it.

The 2020s keep reaching backward, borrowing the aesthetics of other eras with the ironic distance of someone who knows better than to mean it. Because meaning it would require visible commitment. And visible commitment is the worst outcome possible in an era that’s trying to do too much all at once without looking like it’s doing anything.