The cliché of the artist as outsider remained an essential part of the pop mythologies of several generations. Even some of the most wildly successful musicians of the late 20th century — The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, even Madonna — became broadly admired not just for courting enormous audiences, but for their consistent unwillingness to compromise. The masses might still gobble up whatever was served to them but they were kept partially in check by discerning and knowledgeable obsessives and critics, insistent on at least some kind of standard for artistic integrity. Even the most kitsch-hungry audiences still maintained a sense that great artists were by nature opposed to the mandates of the cynical corporate bottom line of the music industry itself. As the last young people of the 20th century, Generation X summed up the ethos perfectly: there was nothing less cool or less authentic than “selling out”.

Now, one quarter of the way through the 21st century, it seems clear that almost every vestige of the sentiment has been summarily obliterated. The reigning value system of the arts in this century — sped along by the internet’s uncanny ability to fuse micro-celebrity with social media styles of personal brand management — has been one of increasingly unabashed obsession with wild financial success, naked greed, grifting, and cynical re-branding. Beginning in the 2000s, and ramping up to a fever pitch with megastars like Lady Gaga, Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Ed Sheeran, pop music became a field of nakedly-corporate brand ambassadors and stars happily turning themselves into avatars of narcissistic self-actualization. 

Gaga and Swift, for instance, have developed armies of loyal fans by crafting broad messages of inclusivity and churning out vicarious anthems of personal achievement. Beyoncé has turned herself into an empty symbol of political and cultural revolution. Singers with little interest in art, from Ariana Grande to Doja Cat, have carved out huge successes by presenting themselves as simultaneously ultra-perfect and ultra-relatable. The message everywhere is the same: the greatest artists of our time are the most famous; they have everything, and they deserve everything. To say otherwise is not only snobbish but discredits the mass popularity into which millions of distracted, depressed, and over-stimulated people have invested all their attention and aspiration. 

The usual name for this strangling monopoly of the mega-famous is “poptimism” — a phenomenon that crossed over to massive TV shows, film franchises, and fashion lines. At first an obscure internet discourse conducted mostly by critics and journalists, the term has come to signify the reigning ideology of our day, in which the old values of the avant garde are dismissed as out-of-touch and elitist (and, of course, trashed as too white, straight, and/or masculine). In the meantime, pop is associated with an enlightened sense of inclusivity, conveniently ignoring the many forward-thinking avant-garde cultures historically associated with LGBTQ artists and racial minorities in Western countries. 

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One accepted starting point for this contemporary discourse is music journalist Kelefa Sanneh’s 2004 New Yorker article, “The Rap Against Rockism”. In the article, Sanneh defended the aspiring popstar Ashlee Simpson after a disastrous SNL performance. Simpson’s backing track had faltered, and people quickly realized she had been lip-syncing; the blowback essentially cost Simpson her music career. But what Sanneh articulated — which he opposed to the stereotypically old-white-guy rhetoric of an early-2000s “rockism” — was a defense of Pop as product, and popstars as patently commercial projects. His defense became central to the rhetoric of many internet critics after him. What began as a fairly anodyne plea for a more open-minded idea of “authenticity” in a music industry dominated by capitalistic necessities, became a steamrolling social ethos in which artists were valorized for their business savvy and their ability to represent popular dreams of self-actualization and economic domination. Naysayers were merely snobs and bigots, to whom the response was always the same: “Shut up and let people enjoy things.” 

But it is 2025 now — and the high days of poptimism are over. Just a few months ago, Sanneh himself penned a remarkably unselfconscious article called “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge”, bemoaning how toothless music writers have become in a world that rewards valorizing the most popular, while disincentivizing critics from championing lesser-known artists, knowing a review of the newest popstar’s record will generate more web traffic and revenue. Sanneh himself sounds wearied by the paradigm he helped usher in two decades ago. “Poptimism intimated that critics should not just take pop music seriously but celebrate it.” he writes. “This aligned with the changing imperatives of the media industry: on blogs, you could draw a crowd with a contrary opinion, but on social media you became a ringleader by saying things that your followers could publicly agree with.”

The first sign of this slackening grip may in fact have come from Charli XCX’s Brat. Like her contemporary Lana Del Rey, Charli XCX was a confusing figure in the 2010s. Both were initially “indie”-coded artists who went through heavily-corporatized windows of popularity, before settling down to work with specially chosen producers, honing distinct internet-savvy aesthetics. They positioned themselves on the edge of genuine stardom, and yet maintained a delicate sense that they were still first and foremost creatives, willing to make occasional sacrifices to preserve their own right to self-direction. It wasn’t unusual to find listeners and critics with a lingering distaste for poptimism, who were quite willing to make an exception for them: Charli and Lana represented an interesting compromise between poptimism’s valorization of striving stars and older ideals of artistic integrity and autonomy.

On the surface, Brat was ostensibly a victory for the poptimist ideal of self-marketing — though if anything, there was something old-fashioned about the record. Even that spectacularly successful campaign and rollout saw Charli going against suggestions from all sides, releasing the album after a rough renegotiation with her label, with little concern for whether the record would be considered commercial enough. What resulted was an exciting cultural moment that was at least as exciting because of the music itself. Like Madonna bringing voguing to the masses, Brat came close to mainstreaming subgenres of hyperpop and 2010s electronic club music, the closest things to actual underground subcultures in that decade. Still, Brat wasn’t quite the monocultural success many wanted it to be: it made next to no dent on the US Billboard Singles Chart, it was denied album of the year at the Grammys, and a year later the streaming numbers are still nowhere near that of much bigger stars. But this only helps to preserve a sense of cool. Brat Summer became cringe quickly but it hardly took Charli XCX to the same heights as Taylor Swift. This is ultimately a good thing.

The question all of this begs is just what will fill the vacuum: what will the popstar of the near-future look like? The younger generation of up-and-coming popstars all seem cannily aware of their era. Singers like Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and even Addison Rae are all savvy young women, versed in the contours of internet discourse, plugged into specifically Zoomer kinds of nostalgia, well-trafficked in internet “aesthetic” curation, and eager to declare themselves the vigilant students of previous popstars and eras. They’ve learned the lessons of Lana and Charli, working with specific producers (often Jack Antonoff, or The 1975’s Dan Nigro), rather than massive teams of rotating writers and engineers. And they each stand in unique relation to poptimist notions of “authenticity”. 

Two of these women have already reached levels of popularity to rival their forebears. Eilish initially seemed the most likely to become musically and aesthetically interesting, though she’s since backed away into far more conventional pop territory. Rodrigo has worked almost exclusively with Dan Nigro on both of her albums. And though she started off as something of a Taylor Swift copycat, her most recent record GUTS felt different. Compared to the ultra-compressed sound of contemporary pop, GUTS did spectacularly well without sacrificing great production and an actual dynamic range: certain tracks could’ve passed master on a Nineties alt-rock station. Sure, it’s pure throwback music, and the ballads are maudlin; there’s really nothing even vaguely experimental or new to be found anywhere on any of these young artists’ albums. But the anthems sounded bigger and better than just about anything else on Top 40 radio in the US or the UK Rodrigo became the first Zoomer starlet to make something that felt like good, solid, old-school pop-rock from a different time.

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This same kind of Zoomer nostalgia for the late 20th century also marks Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan’s music as well. For all Roan’s dramatic drag costumes and theatrical performances, the music is pure Eighties synth-pop and feels more cohesive and sounds better than any regular radio fare. Carpenter’s newest album Man’s Best Friend — which caused a firestorm of backlash online for its possibly-sexist album cover — is filled with lyrics straight out of the current internet discourse on dating woes and heterosexual resentment; but the music itself is pure Seventies AM radio, country, and the occasional Prince-lite Eighties disco track thrown in. Even if it’s relatively insubstantial, it still feels more “real” than most of the anonymous processed songs we’ve been subjected to for the past two decades. 

Strangest of all is Addison Rae — the massively successful TikTok dance star — who earlier this year released her debut album Addison to astonishingly good reviews, becoming the ultimate poptimist redemption story. She released a slew of grainy MTV-referencing music videos, rebranded herself as a fervent student of Madonna, and hunkered down with producers Elvira Anderfjärd and Luka Kloser to produce a record full of Nineties house, trip-hop throwbacks, and obvious nods to Brat. Infuriatingly, it sounds fantastic. Rae’s savvy turn was clearly meant to dazzle doubtful audiences with its sense of curated cool, and it worked: comments online are full of listeners in awe of the change, saying things like “this is how you rebrand”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s a particularly strong singer, or whether she actually wrote a single line. What matters to people is the sense that she played the re-brand game the smart way. Rather than chase the anonymous sounds of the charts, Rae pursued something that felt cohesive, and gestured toward an older sense of cool. It shows that the future for aspiring popstars like her may lie in cultivating good taste.

This is the strange legacy of the last days of poptimism. What began as a rejection of previous standards of cool has left us with decades of empty pop music, uncritical critics, and huge fandoms deeply resentful of anyone who suggests that the pop idols they worship are not brilliant simply because they’re massively wealthy and successful. The decline of poptimism has opened space for aspiring popstars to define themselves by their taste again. This is a step in the right direction. Still, the return of really exciting and adventurous pop music requires the return of authentic subcultures, too. This is going to be difficult: the victory of poptimism hampered the ability of subcultures to protect their sense of cool, just as it strangled the ability of critics to argue for anyone other than the most popular musical artists.

“The only alternative to criticism,” the great film critic Pauline Kael once said, “is advertising.” We have lived for many years now in a world that has increasingly collapsed the boundaries between the two. The job of critics now has to be to reject the market; to advocate again for neglected artists, and a sense of cool, and to push back against stan culture. But this also means recognizing and celebrating better pop music when it appears. If the young popstars are any indication, and the years of poptimism are giving way to a slight chance at a change for the better, then what artists need most is to be empowered to shift towards making good music for its own sake. This can only be done through the establishment of trustworthy critical voices. Such trustworthiness can only appear when enough people insist that art is not better simply because it’s more popular, and that commerce will always be a partial enemy to art. Do so long enough, and history tells us that audiences will eventually adjust. And it is at this point, when audiences really begin to adjust, that popular artists become free to make something truly new.

Rae was 18 when she broke into our cultural imagination amid the first Covid lockdowns. She choreographed and mimicked dances in TikTok videos, and turned her millions of followers into devoted listeners. Her first self-titled album, released the following year, preached the #GirlBoss feminism of a bygone era: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you.” It was a flop. But then she let go of her self-determined pop vision, gave up attempted originality. Instead, she became something cleverer, more kitsch, consciously emulating Britney Spears and Bjork — less a pop star than someone who wants to be a pop star. Since her transformation, every single she’s released has shot up the charts to wide critical acclaim.

Her success is an index of TikTok’s power as a star maker, and the way the app has dominated not just the music industry, but fame itself. But it’s a Cinderella not lacking for a dark side: TikTok fame endangers and takes advantage of teenage girls.

Rae’s metamorphosis followed a clear-cut, and volatile, path familiar to earlier generations of teeny-pop fans raised on the Disney Channel: that of the young star who shed the snakeskin of adolescence into something sexy and avant-garde. Rae’s formula was formula. Her innovation was not to innovate at all. And so, she fulfilled the American Dream that Disney, and now TikTok, promised: an ambitious cheerleader from Louisiana — where her idol Britney Spears also grew up — could be shepherded by managers and executives waving more cash than her family had ever seen, to become a global superstar. But it’s never that simple.

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There are Disney princesses, and then there are Disney Channel princesses. Disney brought up a generation of young people who went home after school and were parented by their televisions. As society shifted, so did Disney: the soft traditionalism of prince-charming love stories gave way to high-schoolers who fought, laughed, danced, and sang for millions of young watchers; the mediators of what life could and should be. Then those teenagers rebelled, turning their lives inside out. It’s now just as much a well-trodden path to success as the one it was originally defined as a fall from: Rae became, in the words of Rihanna, “a good girl gone bad”.

The formula may be the same, but the medium has changed. The Disney Channel is a shell of its former self, with only about 100,000 viewers while 68% of teenagers go on TikTok every day. The Wild West of TikTok influencers — paid through lucrative brand deals but without contracts or stability — means that you can shoot to enormous success as a teenager without any guardrails or support.

Yet even in the Disney-dominated era, there were signs of trouble. Britney Spears shaved her head and was hounded by paparazzi; Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball; and so on. These tendencies have found their next shape in TikTok’s algorithm.

The day after Rae flashed Coachella’s crowd and was videoed by thousands, the child star Sophie Nyweide died at 24, from a what authorities suspect was an accidental overdose. Nyweide was thrust into the spotlight when she was just 5, and her death was a sobering reminder of what fame’s aftershocks can do to the young and vulnerable. Nyweide’s death, like Britney’s breakdown, is another example of the industry’s Faustian bargain: give up control and we’ll make you into a star.

Girls like Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Miley Cyrus, who got famous as kids on our televisions, turned their Disney fame into stardom at brutal costs to their lives. They were left unable to make the usual mistakes of being a teenager without the eyes of millions upon them. This was not an incidental side effect. As a new book by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl, argues, the industry was designed to feed on girls — and then discard them.

Gilbert suggests that two forces, porn and paparazzi, transformed a generation of women, impelling them to switch away from powerhouse idols like Madonna in favor of sexualized but virginal and girlish figures like Britney Spears and Kate Moss. Real women, in control of their music, were replaced by girls being shaped by their managers. This was the era of American Beauty, Britney Spears with schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, a 2003 Vanity Fair cover declaring: “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” The early Oughts showed girls that “there was only one way to exist in public”, Gilbert writes, “and it was a trap.”

TikTok has brought this trap to the doorstop of every teenager in the world. Want to use your body for likes, money, and fame? The siren app beckons. The algorithm rewards nudity, dancing, and oversharing personal trauma. The writer Roxane Gay, after sinking glassy eyed into the algorithm, observed how “right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more”.

Take Jenny Popach (whose real name is Roselie Arritola), who had 7 million followers by the time she was 15 and posts hyper-sexualized dance videos with captions like “when men can go to jail for being with you”. She rakes in a small fortune from brand deals but still has braces. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked her mom about her daughter getting famous, she said: “We loved it. We loved the attention…. I knew I’d be famous one day, I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe Roselie is that.”

Kids like Popach proliferate on TikTok, dancing, making money, and dreaming of the Addison Rae model of fame: where a video can turn into a record contract, and then into the main stage at Coachella. Nearly a third of TikTok users are under age 14; and any scroll on the app will lead you to prepubescent girls, dancing, trying on makeup, playing at adult femininity but for an audience that includes not only their peers, but millions of unknown grownups, too. Gilbert’s book tracks the horrific “countdowns” that magazines and public figures had for Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and the Olsen twins to turn 18 and be legal for sex. Popach’s 18th birthday has elicited countless such fantasies from men on TikTok.

By sharing your own life, you may eliminate some of the power of the paparazzi who stalked Spears so brutally, but you also have to accept your place in the industry’s ecosystem; or as Gilbert writes: “Young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.”

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Addison Rae bought into the bargain. She only got famous the same year that Britney gained control of her finances. Her tongue-in-cheek references to Spears show her ability to alchemize pop’s darkness into fun self-defense. She teased the paparazzi with her likeness to Britney when she was photographed walking down the street in pigtails reading Spear’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me; and in her music video for “High Fashion,” she danced next to a bottle of Spears’s perfume. Her success, we can hope, is a direct rebellion against the more exploitative forces that trapped Spears. She references Spears so frequently not just because she admires her, but because she isn’t her.

Still, as Gilbert’s book reminds us, the misogyny inflicted upon Britney and her peers never went away: we internalized it. Scroll through TikTok, and the exploitation paradigm feels like everyone’s reality. Back in the Disney days, says Gilbert, it was shocking to imagine that girls “could be most liberated while on their knees”. Now it would only be shocking to question that.

Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.