Don’t despair about the state of pop – fans are the new subversive force

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/14/beyonce-fans-bowie-audience-pushing-boundaries

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Tributes to David Bowie aren’t intended to make you feel pessimistic, but the more you hear that he was one of the last innovators of rock music, someone who changed the rulebook of what an artist could be, it’s natural to glumly wonder where the next Bowie will come from. Equally, it’s easy to look at today’s popstars, people as big now as Bowie was during his peaks, and feel a little comatose.

Related: In mourning Bowie we mourn the end of an era when art could truly subvert | John Harris

Adele, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, Sam Smith and Justin Bieber: many of them have produced exceptional albums, but they are hardly boundary-smashing. As John Harris wrote: “Rock music now seems to serve a different function. It is so ubiquitous – available for nothing, would you believe? – that it tends to either offer a comfy kind of reassurance or stand for nothing but itself.”

The closest we have to a Bowie, in terms of a beloved figure who makes pop music that is more than the sum of its parts, is probably Beyoncé. But her music, while empowering, is a long way from the dramatic ambition of Bowie. While her knack for visual motif is strong, she often plays the role more of curator, bringing existing ideas from the worlds of visual art, film, fashion and underground music – rather than alchemising her own identity in the way that Bowie seemed to. But to say that modern music has lost its capacity for innovation, to embody big ideas or take the form of high art, would be wildly off point.

There are plenty of people who embody a Bowie-ish type of sensibility and largely they’re considered a bit naff. Artists such as Empire of the Sun, who dress up and have songs about fantasy lands, tend to be critically panned; as are Muse, a band who carry the baton for some of Bowie’s dystopian themes. The same innovation the second time round always sounds hackneyed.

Rather, the past decade has seen completely different kinds of musical exploration, from Kanye’s adventures in sampling and sonic wizardry redefining the potential of hip-hop to LCD Soundsystem’s emotional assessment of the role pop music takes in our culture and ourselves, there have been plenty of artists who have expanded the potential for what music can do. There have also been a slew of artists who, like Bowie, use madcap style and visual elements to create complex narratives and personas, and they explore wildly different stories from the ones Bowie was telling. Try telling Grimes, MIA or FKA twigs that a white man born in the 1940s has already done everything they could ever want to do with a music video.

There have also been genuine youth culture phenomenons with ideology and style that have confounded older generations. Odd Future sparked a whole new tribe of teens in their image, frightening the UK government so much it has banned the rap collective’s leader, Tyler, the Creator, from the country. The emo genre became such a cause for concern that the Daily Mail linked it to self-harm and teen suicide, sparking protests. But even among those big, seemingly boring pop artists, there is subversion and discussion of complex themes, it’s just that the artist themselves is rarely involved in them.

A record such as Taylor Swift’s 1989 is a product of all that has gone before it: brilliant, highly listenable but pretty safe music that will do little to change the course of pop history. But these days that’s just the first part of the story. All the things Bowie’s music were about – gender, sexuality, false representation, futurism, politics – were discussed in relation to Swift’s album, just never by Swift herself.

Rather, the pop release begins a discussion between journalists, fans, and the hive mind of the internet that starts to draw out more complex themes. So Swift’s record was met by a tranche of think pieces explaining its impact on feminism, youth and global politics, even suggesting her video for Wildest Dreams is an accidental essay in race relations.

This is a new phenomenon. If Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines had come out in 1999 it may still have riled feminist critics but that would have been the beginning and the end of the outrage. Instead, its lyrical metaphors were discussed everywhere from student unions to public debates. The Guardian called it “the most controversial song of the decade”.

What’s different about what pop tells us now is that pop stars are no longer the ones saying it. Swift showed how little she understood racial dynamics when she waded into a Twitter spat with Nicki Minaj on the under-representation of black artists at the MTV VMAs. While Swift’s response to Minaj felt ill-informed, podcast The Read’s analysis was poetry, and showed an understanding of the dispute better than either Swift or Minaj did.

It’s true that mainstream pop artists are unlikely ever again to be as subversive as they were in the era of Bowie, but that’s because he was releasing music into a different cultural paradigm, and no one understood that better than him. In a 1999 interview with Newsnight he spoke, with astonishing prescience, about how the internet will change the way we relate to artists: “In the 70s there were still definitely artists, in the 60s there were Beatles and Hendrix, in the 50s there was Presley, now it’s subgroups and genres. It’s hip-hop or girl power, it’s a communal kind of thing, becoming more and more about the audience. The point of having somebody that led the forces has disappeared, because the vocabulary of rock is too well known.”

That’s what I believe was most unique about Bowie. Not his boundary-pushing innovation, but his ability to notice it in others, and change what he was doing to fit that. Unlike his contemporaries, he never went on a diatribe bemoaning the state of modern pop or claimed that music had become stale. Those worried about the state of music after Bowie should take comfort that he was more optimistic than anyone else about the future.