Influence in the Decade: Rihanna, Lorde, and Adele Make Pop Music Matter Again
If the summer of 2019 was “hot girl summer,” then December might kick off a “soft bitch winter.”
Similar to how I wrote about Greta Gerwig because of the fact that Little Women comes to theaters too late to potentially place it on my list of the best films of the decade, I want to write about the influence had in the past ten years by Rihanna, Lorde, and Adele. They are three mega-star musicians who are referred to by one name. And they are all rumored to have new albums coming out in December. Unfortunately, however, if these rumors prove true, then it would still be too late to feature any of them on my list of the best songs of the decade. But I still want to give them their due. Besides, they might not even have new albums! Then, what have we got?
In order of likelihood, I would expect Rihanna’s all-reggae album to come out in December. But Adele’s latest is probably pegged at a fifty-fifty shot. And the third album from Lorde is probably at a twenty-eighty. The odds aren’t great, but I remain hopeful because whenever we get new music from these three, it’s a good time to own headphones. This has been proven time and again in the past decade, which saw pop music rescued from the doldrums of an identity crisis and turned into a genre that actually matters again, thanks to many. But most of all, it’s thanks to these three, who restored pop to its status as a genre that matters.
In an era that was defined by the explosion of rap and the erasure of generic mid-2000s pop beats (let’s be honest, alternative music is what had real staying power from that time), Rihanna, Lorde, and Adele brought pop music back by making their songs unabashedly their own. They didn’t bow down to the tunes that were popular. They stayed true to themselves. In rescuing the pop genre, these three artists also redefined what pop music could entail. It didn’t have to be fast songs with “relatable” lyrics to dance to. (It could be that, but it didn’t have to be.) It could be better. It could be songs about sexuality, art pop anthems about being a teenager, or the most melancholy break-up songs you’ve ever heard.
But first, let’s begin with Rihanna, who still feels like she is the closest to this era’s definition of a “modern pop star,” even though her oeuvre of work shows that her songs are quite a bit more thoughtful than simply trying to engineer a pop hit. For Rihanna, her ceaseless ability to pull that off is an added bonus.
Regardless of what happens in December, Rihanna put out four albums in the 2010s and that puts her as one of the more prolific stars of the decade. Granted, three of those albums came out in the first three years of the 2010s, but is it not still better to have her music any way we can get it?
In 2010, she released Loud, which features hits like “Only Girl in the World,” “S&M,” and “Complicated.” In 2011, Talk That Talk came out and introduced us to “We Found Love,” “Birthday Cake,” and “Drunk on Love.” In 2012, we bore witness to Unapologetic, which turned “Diamonds,” “Stay,” and “Right Now” into some of the decade’s best hits. And in 2016, she released Anti, which features songs like “Consideration,” “Kiss It Better,” “Desperado,” and, of course, “Work.”
“S&M,” “We Found Love,” and “Work” are the best lenses through which to understand Rihanna’s decade, however. All three became pop anthems that helped to define what music morphed into over the past ten years, but all three took different paths to achieve that status.
“S&M,” for example, is a pretty racy song about things society is much more open about now than they were in 2010. Only Rihanna could have pulled something like that off because she had already carefully cultivated a persona as someone who was real and down-to-earth, but still had world-shattering confidence that made her a completely unique pop star and one most befit for the modern age. And it’s the sort of confidence that many others would have let go to their head, but Rihanna remained grounded. At least, as grounded as possible for someone who is as mega-famous as possible (Fenty hats still cost $180 after all).
This isn’t a role Rihanna has always had, though. It’s something she had to mature into and she grappled with many ideas, like fame and faith, along the way. As she told her Ocean’s Eight co-star, Sarah Paulson in a dialogue with Interview Magazine,
“I have been in a place where I felt like maybe I had disappointed God so much that we weren’t as close. Actually, that happened to me while I was making Anti. That was a really hard time, but, thank god, I got through it.”
Perhaps, this is what has kept Rihanna grounded. The idea that she could pal around with someone like Paulson, who operates in an entirely different realm from Rihanna. Her career as an actor has turned Rihanna into a multi-platform talent who can delight in so many different mediums. She starred in 2012’s Battleship, made a cameo in 2013’s This Is the End, played big roles in 2015’s Home, 2017’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and the aforementioned Ocean’s spin-off from 2018. She also made a turn in 2019’s Guava Island, a musical short film with Donald Glover. But perhaps her best non-music performance was in the excellent video where she goes day drinking with Seth Meyers, recommending that he blows his wife away by “blowing her away.”
So it might be acting and comedy that keeps her at least semi-grounded. The drive of conquering a new challenge instead of being content to be the queen of pop music. No matter what angle she takes on her career, there is no denying that each step has been the right one as they work together to catapult her into global super-stardom.
Regarding her status as a role model, Rihanna told Vogue’s Chioma Nnadi in 2018,
“That title was put on me when I was just finding my way, making mistakes in front of the world. I didn’t think it was fair. Now I understand the concept, but at that time I was the same age as the girls who were looking up to me. And that’s a really hard place to be in as a teenager.”
But Rihanna isn’t a teenager anymore. She hasn’t been a teenager since 2007 when she unveiled “Umbrella,” one of the best songs ever made. And in the past decade, she has continued to grow and push in new directions. The disappointment of God? The unfairness of being looked up to? These are topics we do not often hear limelight pop stars discuss with such openness and honesty. But Rihanna has always been an anomaly (a Rihanmaly? I don’t know, I’ll workshop it). Her music may seem like fluff on the surface when all you here is “dur dur dur dur dur.” Many may dismiss the genres she dabbles in as “shitty” and “without merit,” but Rihanna is a much more thoughtful artist than many give her credit for.
This thoughtfulness and boundary-pushing in the decade can be traced all the way back to “S&M.” She can hit notes in a way that is satisfying to the ear like no other artist can do so deftly. That’s what makes her hooks often the best parts of her songs. And yet, the hooks have a magnificent staying power when she sings about things no one else is singing about, always with an alternate take on a popular feeling or moment.
Perhaps it is the fact that the pop anthems she created in the 2010s are eternal and timeless that has kept Rihanna grounded. She is not trying to recapture her former glory because she keeps reinventing what her own glory can mean. Her music is not destined to remain period music for people who want to reflect on the 2010s. Her music has proven to be relevant in 2019. Granted, 2019 is not that far away from 2012, but “We Found Love” feels like it could be the ultimate pop anthem of an entire generation. It won’t just remind us of 2012, it will remind us of an entire era of our lives. And it will still be there in the next eras, too.
Even “Work,” which left me lyrically disappointed, was an undeniable juggernaut in the popular consciousness of music. She differs from her contemporaries by making beats and songs and anthems that do not sound like they’re from the 2010s. They sound like they can be from any time. “Work,” with its catchy hook, still feels as likely to be heard on the radio now as it was when it was released. In a time when the most famous musicians force themselves to pump out songs to stay relevant, Rihanna is content to make what she wants to make. Knowing that she will be relevant anyway is a luxury that not many have. But not many have completely dominated the pop genre and made it their own for multiple chunks of time, let alone just one singular moment. Almost completely matured into her role as a music icon, Rihanna deserves the luxuries of time and open-mindedness that we have afforded to her as a delighted audience.
At twenty-two years old, Lorde has less experience and less of a legacy to keep her afloat through the future of pop music. However, she has never pretended to be anything except an artist who wants to take her time, pour her feelings into her poetry, and make art pop as popular as can be. After all, nothing from her second album reaches the same stratospheric impact that “Royals” had, but it’s not going to stop Lorde from trying and it’s not going to change the persona she so perfectly inhibits.
Lorde burst onto the music scene as a sixteen year old from New Zealand with an album that is still regarded as one of the best works of music to ever come from someone her age. 2013 brought us Pure Heroine, which not only unleashed “Royals” into the world, but also gave us youth rallying cries like “Tennis Court,” “Ribs,” and “White Teeth Teens.” To follow up Pure Heroine, Lorde delivered Melodrama in 2017, with its lead single, “Green Light,” giving way to such art pop hymns as “Writer in the Dark,” “Supercut,” “Perfect Places,” and “Homemade Dynamite,” which also saw a remix with Khalid, SZA, and Post Malone. Both of these albums are real and purely perfect.
There is a vulnerable honesty to all of Lorde’s songs, but “Supercut” speaks most closely to the aura she projects, which is at once a veil of stardom as it is a testament to her inner truths. She writes,
I’m someone you maybe might love
I’ll be your quiet afternoon crush
Be your violent overnight rush
She continues,
So I fall
Into continents and cars
All the stages and the stars
I turn all of it
To just a supercut
Obviously, without the success of Pure Heroine, much of the work on Melodrama could not exist. But this does not mark a change in Lorde. Instead, it shows the development of her mission. She’s growing, growing all the time. But she always stays true to who she is. I don’t even mean that in a pejorative sense that would condemn artists who “sell out.” I mean it in the sense that very few artists burst onto the scene as fully formed and mature as Lorde seems to be. It was evident in “Royals,” too, when she sings,
But every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom
Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room
We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair
These are reflective, thought-provoking lyrics from anyone, let alone a sixteen year old. And I don’t even want to disparage teenage creators, but there is no denying that many of us look back at things we wrote when were sixteen and cringe. But Lorde isn’t like the rest of us. Her goals have been as true as her artistic demeanor for as long as she’s been a part of the cultural lexicon.
Her entry into this larger world of music has been largely defined by her youth, but I’m more interested in exploring Lorde beyond the pop hymns about teenage lifestyle. I’m interested in exploring the Lorde we heard harmonize “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins with Marc Maron on his podcast, WTF with Marc Maron. The one who does exactly what she wants to do and never worries if it’s the right decision because the right decision is always just to be herself.
That’s how she made art pop so popular during her tenure in the 2010s. That’s how she became an innovator when she never actually did anything so radically different from her contemporaries or her predecessors. She imbued her entire catalog and her entire sense of fame with honesty. About who she is, about what she wanted. She stripped the genre of all pretense to become a voice of a dwindling faction of her generation. People who buck traditions and trends found something like a rallying cry in Lorde. She was an icon before she could even rent a car. She was and, regardless of whether or not we hear her new album in December, still is the future.
When the late David Bowie heard Lorde for the first time, he described her as “like listening to tomorrow.” Bowie, an art pop deity of his own, surely knew exactly what Lorde wanted to do and he knew exactly the direction she wanted to take her music in. Generational art pop with no veils, no barriers. Just raw artistry that speaks to the hidden sides of life.
Tom Lamont of The Guardian wrote that Lorde has “A two-part self. One, this ugly, incorrect, fledgling person-trying-to-be-a-person. And the other, someone who could roll their shoulders back on live television and do it.”
But these two notions are not something that Lorde is at war with internally. She is not someone who can pull off any performance she feels like and she is not someone who is rebuking the notions of fame and stardom by being uncomfortable with her presence. She is both, operating simultaneously within and without of popular music, as one of its strongest purveyors and also as one of its most elusive superstars. Her music is a testament to someone who does not know what she wants, but is content to blow all the doors off of expectations to find out.
While a member of The Beatles, Paul McCartney was once asked if anyone would ever be able to come along and be so successful so fast with music that speaks to something it has never been able to speak to before. Answering yes, McCartney believed there was no doubt about this notion coming true.
Over the years, this statement has become a point of contention among Beatles fans, as they claim that there is inherent sadness to it because no one ever did come along to prove McCartney right. Obviously, this concept is purely a hipstery one because there have been plenty of people to come along and do what The Beatles did, to an extent. Lorde showed that there has not only been a parade of stars who followed in The Beatles’ footsteps over the years, but that she is perhaps pop music’s most worthy steward.
But then, of course, there is Adele. On the heels of 19, released in 2008, perhaps no one had a more meteoric rise to music icon status over the course of the decade than Adele did. Rihanna was already a star in the 2000s. Lorde is not quite a global phenomenon yet. But Adele has conquered music completely, becoming synonymous with so many different modes of songwriting along the way. She is perhaps the brightest diamond produced from the music industry in the past ten years.
Fairly known, Adele vaulted into the endless spotlight when she dropped 21 in 2011 and rocked everyone’s world. The radio would never be the same.
21 produced some of the decade’s most iconic songs with “Rolling in the Deep,” “Someone Like You,” and “Set Fire to the Rain” all emanating from the same album. That’s an insane stretch of hits to put out, especially when considering the seismic waves of impact that each song unleashed on the charts and the airwaves. It felt like each song was bigger than the last.
That’s a testament to the soul poured into 21 and how it was still able to reach across numerous cultural contexts. It’s become one of the top-selling albums of all-time in myriad countries because Adele used her insane talent to tell personal stories that resonate with everyone. Her feelings were universal, but also disruptive for the pop genre. She was writing about something deeper and more human than it felt like most stars were gravitating towards. They weren’t just break-up songs. They were odes to human spirit.
So it is understandable that expectations were sky high for Adele’s follow-up album, 25. It took four years to come out (it’s also been four years since 25, which is insane to me) and I can still remember the hotly fervent anticipation when Adele made it clear that a new single was ready to drop. I remember thinking that she could never follow up the sheer perfection of 21.
And yet, it was clear from the first series of notes that she knew exactly what she was doing. When I eventually had a chance to listen to the album in its entirety, it became clear that it was even better than 21. It was more mature, more fully-realized, more atmospheric. Adele knew she was at risk of becoming a genre all her own. Not only did she lean into that notion, but she thrived with it.
The hits produced from 25 were not as tectonic plate-shifting as those from 21, but I thought they were more soundly produced works of art. “Hello,” “All I Ask,” “When We Were Young,” and “Water Under the Bridge,” still rank among my favorite songs. They are unstoppable ballads for all-time.
It would have been easy for Adele to crank out albums connected to the ages of 22, 23, and 24 in between her endeavors with 21 and 25. She would have sold a ton of music and she would have made inconceivable amounts of money. But she recognized how much she loved operating within the context of her talent. She loved writing songs that were honest and spoke to moments in her life and she didn’t want to give that up. This isn’t mean to be a treatise on artists who go for the money (by all means, secure that bag), but I have a lot of respect for what Adele told Jon Pareles of The New York Times in November 2015 when she discussed and somewhat condemned the transitional period between her two monolithic albums. She said,
“How I felt when I wrote 21, I wouldn’t want to feel again. It was horrible. I was miserable, I was lonely, I was sad, I was angry, I was bitter. I thought I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I thought I was never going to love again. It’s not worth it. Well, it was worth it, because, obviously, of what’s gone on. But I’m not willing to feel like that to write a song again. I’m not…If I wanted to just be famous, like be a celebrity, then I wouldn’t do music, because everything else I’ve been offered would probably make me more famous than I am just with my music. Commercials, being the face of brands, nail varnishes, shoes, bags, fashion lines, beauty ranges, hair products, being in movies, being the face of a car, designing watches, food ranges, buildings, airlines, book deals. I’ve been offered everything. And I don’t want to water myself down. I want to do one thing. I want to make something. I don’t want to be the face of anything.”
Fortunately, for her, Adele has done that one thing to perfection. She didn’t just make something. She created an entire aura. She created real art, whatever that means, over the course of the decade. And even though she did become the face and voice of break-up music, there is no denying that her artistic prowess has transcended any sort of fame, especially the sort that she thoroughly rebukes.
Adele turned the melancholy into poetry during her historic run. Perpetually able to propel ballads about heartbreak with genuine vocals and instrumentation behind them into insane popularity, Adele became one of the few artists behind radio-popularized music who was eagerly anticipated with every album, every song, every single. By doing so, she reminded the public that music to make you feel can still come from the radio. And it can still come from anywhere. Her transcendent persona was an echo of time gone by, when musicians could craft songs about true anguish to accompany their audience-captivating lives and artistic strategies. She’s more than Adele. She’s every note that made our hearts break and every note that made us cry.
Adele has the rare gift to encapsulate what is so intrinsically perfect about music in a way that so many other forms of storytelling can feel lacking. She told whole stories with succinct, genuine lyrics. Nothing ever felt incomplete with her stories and it always felt like we were feeling something. Never being told, never being shown. We communicated with Adele on a base level of feeling. For that to completely radicalize the popularity of a genre and of the radio is an uncommon thing in today’s era of music. How fortunate we were to experience the majesty of Adele this decade.
And on top of it all, she was the guest on the best “Carpool Karaoke” segment that ever aired on The Late Late Show with James Corden.
So that is Adele. That is Lorde. That is Rihanna. The three of them, all so different and yet, all striving to achieve true artistic greatness. For some, the goal is artistic immortality. For others, they want to just make songs that entertain and that speak to some greater truth about themselves. For these three, they were content to do both so effortlessly and so rhythmically. They just about make your ears sing, too.
When unconsciously combining their efforts, Lorde, Rihanna, and Adele each delivered brand new takes on some of the most beloved genres of music. In so doing, pop music became interesting once again. With these three at the helm, how could you not want to see where the industry flows next?
