It means he’s been able to access the credibility offered not only by Latin music behemoths such as Bad Bunny, but via his endearing enthusiasm for grime and UK rap: he has a BBK tattoo, for the British grime crew, appeared with Giggs at Reading festival, collaborated with Dave and Skepta, and earlier this year brought J Hus out at his O2 show for the London rapper’s first performance since being released from prison. His vagueness means a song like Started From the Bottom, all unbridled braggadocio, still works coming from a middle-class former child star from Canada. As the decade has progressed, a generation has established a complex relationship with authenticityĪs critic Simon Reynolds pointed out, Drake’s music and artist persona are described best as “diffuse”, reflecting a new generation’s playful ignorance of genre lines and pop culture’s general distrust of “cool”. Drake’s only real rival for streaming dominance (in America anyway) is mopey singer/rapper Post Malone, whose albums contain a similar swirl of conflicting emotions, disparate sounds and undeniable hooks. It’s an amorphous sound that’s made pop sadder and slower while recalibrating hip-hop, as proved by the emergence of Migos, Rae Sremmurd and French Montana. It also came cloaked in minimalist, vaporous production that, from 2016’s Views onwards, has cherry-picked from global genres such as dancehall (Controlla), UK funky (One Dance) and New Orleans bounce (Child’s Play). Here was a modern-day icon who represented all things to all people: a mixed race, half-Jewish Canadian who sang as well as he rapped, and who diffused the perceived alienation of rap’s “bling” culture with emotionally vague songs that made the pitfalls of fame feel relatable. Late last year, the New York Times ran a piece announcing the arrival of “pop 2.0”, hailing Drake as its lodestar: he was 2018’s most streamed artist, with a ludicrous 8.2bn streams. Since that September night, the pair have gone on to crudely represent the two sides of pop’s current era. Kanye West takes the microphone from Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music awards.
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‘Imma let you finish but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time’. This unplanned cultural shift precipitated her move towards a more universal, pan-demographic sound – out went the country-pop scaffolding and in came Max Martin-assisted turbo pop on 2012’s Red. It also served as the catalyst for Swift’s transformation from country star to the subject of global discourse (Obama famously got involved, calling West a “jackass”). For the then 19-year-old Swift, Kanye West interrupting her speech for best female video started a ripple-effect that would threaten to consume them both for the next decade. The show gave Drake his first ever VMA nomination for the soppy Best I Ever Had, a song that set the template for the softly melodic, minimalist fusion of sad-boi hip-hop and R&B that would eventually become pop’s dominant mode.
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But the night also represented ground zero for two of the forthcoming decade’s most influential artists, Taylor Swift and Drake, whose professional ambitions saw them adapt in divergent ways to a shifting landscape exploded by pop’s globalisation and a pervading please-all-comers mentality. The type of megastar the Jacksons had helped create alongside Madonna and Prince – a spectacle-heavy mix of theatre, otherworldliness and determination – was present in a returning, and apparently rehabilitated, Britney Spears, and new pretenders Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and, of course, Beyoncé. When Janet Jackson emerged to perform their angry 1995 duet Scream, Beyoncé – the Jacksons’ heir apparent – looked giddy as a super fan. The show started in mourning, with dancers paying tribute to one of pop’s original megastars, Michael Jackson, who had died three months earlier. T he 2009 MTV Video Music awards represented a sea change for pop, the kindling of a handful of narratives that would shape its immediate future.