Genre - Eurovision in the 2010s

Satellite, So Lucky, Party For Everybody, Only Teardrops, Rise Like a Phoenix, Calm After the Storm, Heroes, 1944, Slow Down, Beautiful Mess, Amar Pelos Dois, Toy, We Got Love, She Got Me, Too Late for Love, Spirit in the Sky, Say Na Na Na

If you haven’t watched Eurovision since the glory days of Bucks Fizz and Katrina & the Waves, this essay serves as an update. The UK treats Eurovision like the World Cup: it’s something we used to win but people better than us usually win today.

The big event midway through the 2010s was the addition of a qualified jury to comprise 50% of the voting, with the usual 50% going to the ’12 points from Greece go to (pause) Cyprus!!!’ vote. Graham Norton has been elevated to national treasure status in the UK with his BBC commentary; the broadcaster is mandated to support Eurovision and if the UK entered Graham we would get points just on the strength of him saying ‘helloooo!’ for just under three minutes, plus key change.

I attended the 2011 Contest in Duesseldorf, which was taking place there thanks to the 2010 Contest win by Lena, a teenage German singer who triumphed with a cute song about ‘love, oh love!’ called Satellite. It was an unassuming yet catchy song, with a great middle eight, driven by a strong melody to which Lena sang of all the things she did while ‘in orbit’ around her man; she even did her hair for him! The way she sang the word ‘day’ as ‘daii’ was a horrible affectation, as if she had been forced to listen to Kate Nash and Lily Allen for weeks on end and told to replicate the vocal.

Lena returned to represent Germany in 2011, with a song written with Greg Kurstin. Taken by a Stranger was fine but probably designed not to win – only Ireland have hosted for three consecutive years and the third time it was in a converted barn! Lena’s final album of the decade is Only Love, L; it was stuck at two in the German charts, selling more than Billie Eilish that week but fewer than Andrea Berg. Good for Andrea, but Lena will always have Eurovision 2010.

The big song of 2011’s Contest was Running Scared, a ballad bought by Azerbaijan because you can source songs from anywhere and sing in your non-native language, something that came in in the 1990s; the UK hasn’t won since that time. We sent Blue with a carpe-diem song called I Can; Ireland sent talent show berks Jedward with an irritating pop song called Lipstick. I will include Moldova’s entry So Lucky, performed by Zdob si Zdub and sung in a mix of Moldovan and English, purely to mention the headbanging guy in our bit of the audience who rocked out to some horn-assisted rock for three minutes. The act itself included a woman miming playing an oboe on a unicycle; they scored three fewer points than Blue and came in 12th.

To Baku in 2012, and the UK sent crooner Engelbert Humperdinck, whose best days were in 1967. Only Norway scored fewer points in a content which by now required contestants to trot around Europe promoting their three-minute tune on various sofas from Amsterdam to Ankara. Ireland sent Jedward again, Sweden won with a dance-pop-by-numbers track called Euphoria but everyone remembers Eurovision 2012 for one entry in particular.

I watched in West London as a group of grannies performing as Buranoskiye Babushki sang Party for Everybody (‘Come on and dance!’) like a novelty act on Britain’s Got Talent. Opening with some tuneless singing, the second verse was equally tuneless but with an oompa beat behind it. Russia usually hoovers up votes from former Soviet countries but not even the babushki could halt Sweden, who invite public entrants to their Melodifestivalen every year. All the same, the song and the performers diverted Europe for three minutes, thus doing its and their job.

To Sweden (again) in 2013, where Ireland finished last and successful German dance act Cascada finished 21st, two places below the UK, who encouraged Bonnie Tyler to sing the soppy ballad Believe in Me before she returned to the Eighties nostalgia circuit. A barefoot Dane named Emmelie de Forest sang a pretty folky pop song called Only Teardrops with an addictive chorus (‘How many times…’) and it was to Copenhagen that Eurovision would go in 2014.

Alongside Waterloo and all those songs with nonsense titles like Ding-a-Dong, Rise Like a Phoenix by Conchita will go down as a Big Eurovision Anthem. This would never not have won: a bloke called Thomas with a beard in a dress, singing a camp song about self-empowerment, having done the light-ent sofa tour to drum up support for Austria’s entry in the 2014 Contest. It was dramatic, brilliant arranged and sung with phenomenal precision. 13 nations awarded Austria douze points, including the UK; we sent a boring ballad which came 17th and nobody gave us douze points. Rise Like a Phoenix is the finest Eurovision winner of the 2010s and Conchita the most notable performer since Dana International, who unlike the drag act Conchita was transsexual.

Brief mention here should go here to The Common Linnets. The Dutch duo announced themselves with a proper song, the gorgeous Calm After the Storm, sung in tight male-female harmony. The song was notable because I can’t remember many country-inflected songs amid the kitsch and glamour of Eurovision. 

To Vienna in 2015 where it was Sweden’s glory again. I adore Heroes by Mans Zelmerlow, a song the Swedish audience voted as their entrant. Hundreds of songs are offered, with the best put to a public vote and crowned with a grand final in a massive arena on Swedish television. The UK will never match Sweden’s love for the competition, one which put them on the musical map. Graham Norton had told BBC viewers that Heroes was impressive, with some nifty interactivity with an animated character. Sometimes this can be a gimmick but the brilliance of Mans’ delivery in singing ‘the greatest anthem ever heard…We are the heroes of our time’ won over the voters in the last year before the professional jury was brought in.

Germany and Austria both scored nul points in 2015, with the UK managing cinq points with a weird song called Still In Love with You. Humorously Mans is now a key part of the UK’s coverage of Eurovision, an adopted Brit every May. ABBA’s music, meanwhile, can be heard in an interactive sing-a-long dining experience inside London’s O2 Arena complex.

It was to Sweden again in 2016 where a politically charged song won for Ukraine. Jamala, dressed in blue, sang emotionally of the plight of the Tatars of Crimea in a song called 1944. The verses were in English (‘They come to your house…Humanity cries’) and the chorus was based on a Crimean folk song. Performed in tears and with expressive moments to a percussive backing that was very contemporary, audiences at home and on the professional jury were won over by the song, which did not impress Russia in the slightest, who unsuccessfully wanted it banned on political grounds. Strangely the song benefitted from a split in voting: Russia won the popular vote and Australia (don’t ask) took the jury vote. The UK finished third last and Germany dead last.

Brief mention here should go here to Douwe Bob, whose pleasant song Slow Down (‘If you can’t go on’) was one I loved, especially because it moved through three keys. Sometimes I am allowed personal picks for the 2010 songs, and this one was witnessed by millions, including those in Australia.

To Kyiv in 2017, where another emotional story captured the hearts of Europe. I never forgot, especially after I had attended the show in 2011, that Eurovision is television and performers can bring their personal stories and journeys to their attention. Thus it was that Bulgaria’s entry – the pop ballad Beautiful Mess (‘our love is untouchable’) by the cherubic Kristian Kostov – was beaten by that of Portugal. Salvador Sobral, his hair in a topknot, sang the strings-soaked Amar Pelos Dois solo in the centre of the arena in an oversized suit. His sweet voice and eccentric performance sold the Portuguese-language heartbreak ballad which was written by Salvador’s sister; while La La Land took the box office by storm, the jazzy song offered the same sort of thing to viewers of Eurovision.

In Lisbon, a lady from Israel with weird hair and lots of electronics won the Contest with a song that namechecked a Pokemon character (‘I’m taking my Pikachu home!!’) and had an irresistible chorus: ‘I’m not your TOY! You stupid BOY!’ It was Netta’s year, as she sang a self-empowerment song whose first line was ‘Look at me, I’m a beautiful creature’. It was both pentatonic and diatonic, with flavours of the East and West, and Netta’s performance, complete with chicken clucks that I never liked, ensured that for three minutes the eyes of Europe were on her.

That’s all Eurovision is: a ‘did you see that?!’ TV moment, today telegraphed months in advance thanks to holistic coverage. No wonder the UK always loses: we’re just not bothered. We should send Prince Harry and Ed Sheeran and James Blunt and Stephen Fry and David Attenborough, introduced by Graham Norton onstage. We’d still get fewer points than Sweden and Russia.

In 2018 the UK had sent a song called Storm, which had to be performed twice on the night after a prankster interrupted poor SuRie through the first run. As if to prove Eurovision had no logic, Portugal finished last at their own party, while the great, rather Swedish disco-pop song We Got Love by Jessica Mauboy only came in 20th place for Australia. She was by turns a bit too shouty, pitchy, nervous and awkward on the night, and most people who vote haven’t followed the many months of Eurovision fever so only judge on the night.

Tel Aviv hosted the 2010s’ final Eurovision Song Contest, which ought to have been won by Sweden. Too Late For Love (‘I can be the sun that lights your dark’) by John Lundvik was a gospel-pop song of some stature, and another correct choice from the Swedish public, but four songs outscored it: one was by Russian popstar Sergey Lazarev (who will be discussed in a future essay); one was Luca Hanni’s catchy She Got Me, which included some jolly dance moves; second place was Soldi, a rap from the Italian Mahmoud, whose performance included some clapping choreography and three male dancers behind him; and a dull, Ed Sheeran-lite song by Duncan Laurence sent Eurovision to Rotterdam as the Netherlands finally sent a winner.

I would not like to suggest that five black performers dissuaded voters from picking Sweden’s entry, but I can’t think of any other reason the best song didn’t win; ten juries gave them 12 points but only 93 came from the public vote. UK viewers now watch Eurovision with a social network open, absorbed in the kitsch and how the UK finished inevitably last. In 2019 we did, scoring 11 points with a ballad called Bigger Than Us (three from the home vote, eight from the jurors). Germany again did badly, scoring nul points from the voters at home, but at least there has been no Deutschausgang (a German exit from the EU).

Those of Norway and San Marino didn’t disappoint Eurovision parties across the UK. KeiiNO’s Spirit in the Sky was a dance-pop number which featured a bald man yodelling exactly the same emotive syllables in each chorus before he was given his own eight-bar solo in the Northern Sami language. For San Marino, Serhat’s Say Na Na Na was a fantasy duet between the Pet Shop Boys and Leonard Cohen, with added key change. What a shame he was on last!

I include those two in the 2010 songs from the decade as examples of fun pieces of music which were broadcast across Europe and down to Australia which brought distraction from the fact that in 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. There’ll probably be an Act of Parliament decreeing that we will still be allowed to participate in Eurovision; I hope people didn’t vote Leave just so they could watch something else for a few nights every May. Plenty of folk around Europe will keep watching a televised music contest, originally founded to unite broadcasting unions, into the 2020s.

Imperial One - BTS in the 2010s

Blood Sweat & Tears, Fire, Save ME, DNA, MIC Drop, Fake Love, Boy With Luv

In no universe circa 2010 would any lay pop fan have predicted that 2019 would see the coronation of a Korean septet who finally pushed that country’s style of hyperkinetic pop music to a world who didn’t know they wanted it. Or who had only had Gangnam Style.

With One Direction splintering and solo acts cheaper to run, only a few major-label acts like Why Don’t We and Brockhampton were able to bring a cool edge to the boyband market with their own smouldering starlets. Over in Korea, market penetration was dominated by familiar faces like Bigbang and Girls’ Generation, whose music will be discussed in a future essay; like One Direction, however, the key factor in BTS’s success seemed to be intense fan engagement.

I read a review of the 2018 London show where my eyes lingered on the cost of some plastic Bluetooth-enabled torches. These were savvy businessmen selling a product that no Westerner see without hopping on a plane and going to East Asia. Someone is writing a book on boybands and the Korean interpretation of the art form will certainly form a key part.

In June 2019, while browsing HMV’s dedicated section for the band, I met some European fans who had come to London to see one of the two gigs at Wembley Stadium. At 31, I told them, I was too old to understand it but they seemed attracted to their cuteness and their web presence. In those two London shows, and around the world, BTS gathered the next generation of tweens and teens to sing or rap along to Korean love songs. Their big US moment was a sustained campaign in spring 2019 where they popped up on Saturday Night Live and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. For the latter performance they played the exact room The Beatles had played in 1964 when millions of lives were changed and a thousand rock bands were born.

It was testament to the modern era that many viewers would already be familiar with seven boys all described by Colbert as ‘The Cute One’. RM, the rapper who had learned English by watching Friends, was the band’s spokesman when they did the talk-show circuit; member Jimin excitably told Jimmy Fallon that their names sounded similar. It endeared him to me – I see what the girls I’d chatted to were on about.

Aside from being cute, no boyband had ever danced so hard in the US. One Direction famously didn’t dance at all, while the 1990s boybands like New Kids on the Block, Blackstreet and *NSYNC were by turns cute and gangsta. None of their dance moves looked like hard work, though, as BTS’s did. Impressively, RM and Suga of BTS were rappers who, by the rules of K-Pop, had to take part in the dance lines, while the singers – V, Jimin, Jungkook, J-Hope and Jin – also had to rap. What with all the TV appearances, including on their dedicated V-Live channel, they had to act, too.

Put through their paces by choreographers while living together – all in one room in their early days – Bangtan Boys aka BTS put out a steady stream of product from their TV debut, which came a year after formation, in 2014. They used online marketing to their advantage, dropping ‘bombs’ onto social media and staying in touch with their fans, christened BTS ARMY. These bombs mixed behind-the-scenes footage and dance routines, proving that K-Pop is far more than the recorded song but a journey.

Their initial goal was to win one of the many talent shows on Korean television, which was a tough sell when they were products of the independent Big Hit group rather than one of the three big groups with all the money to develop and market top acts. As they made more TV appearances, the seven-piece connected with their audience, stopped off in Austrasia, Europe and South America and, significantly, pushed a lot of recorded output onto their rabid fanbase.

Three EPs packed with intros, skits and outros did well in Korea and Japan, as well as anyone clued into the K-Pop scene in the diaspora. Unlike One Direction’s debut album, the two main rappers and singer J-Hope (a tremendously talented dancer) had credits on Dark & Wild, which gave them enough material to play concerts in Korean arenas and crank out music videos which have impressive viewing figures on Youtube.

Fire and Save ME were from another EP, this time from 2016. Like The Beatles in the 1960s, fans were not starved of new songs but, this being the 2010s, they could instantly become part of the band’s journey by watching videos and sharing them on various social networks. Fire (612m views as of October 2019) is a perfect song for a sync opportunity, with the chorus repeating the song’s title four times and a pre-chorus of la-las before Suga and RM rap about being fearless. In the video a car drops to its demise in a warehouse while the guys do their dancing then jump around and pose like a hiphop posse, hopefully satisfying the rappers’ artistic ambitions. K-Pop is truly visual music and every new video is an event; we will definitely see this in the West more often in the 2020s.

Save ME is a softer song where the non-rappers can shine. Over a triplet-y rhythm and sultry chords, there’s a mix of Korean and English: ‘I need your love before I fall’ goes the chorus, which is followed by a squelchy sound and an increase in the tempo. This is a great piece of pop music in the contemporary style. No wonder BTS were doing well on those TV competitions.

The 2016 album Wings came in four packages containing different photos in each one. It was a concept album influenced by Herman Hesse and dealt with weighty themes: adult love, personal growth, good and evil. The lead single, with another glossy video, was Blood Sweat & Tears, which opens with a choir and strings before a catchy chorus with huge production comes in. You can make out the word ‘chocolate’ in English as they sing of love and stuff in Korean.

DNA and MIC Drop both come from the 2017 EP Love Yourself: Her, part of a trilogy of EPs. These broke them to an American audience. DNA boasts the band’s most-viewed video with 848m watchers; there are only 51m people living in South Korea. The song itself opens with a whistling hook before adding some One Direction-type guitar lines and beats over which the band rap about love and stuff. The production is as good as any Western dance track.

MIC Drop, one of two tunes BTS performed on Saturday Night Live in 2019, was remixed by renowned DJ Steve Aoki, himself of Asian descent, who added a flute-type synth line. The beats thudded as the boys dropped in some English words (‘Billboard…worldwide…How you dare’, ‘Haters gonna hate, players gonna play’ and indeed the title of the song) in a diss track, showing their awareness of the hiphop genre. The song’s video is irresistible (570m views and counting), with the boys never keeping still and dancing around various indoor and outdoor settings.

All three of the above tracks were collected onto an album for the Japanese market called Face Yourself, with all tracks sung in Japanese. In Korea, they were winning Best Group awards while their fan ARMY started hashtags on social media. The boys, who spoke of the pressures of being in the band, also partnered with UNICEF to campaign to stop violence against young people. By this stage they lived in three rooms between them.

The song Fake Love made such a dent in the UK that one contestant performed it on The X Factor on primetime TV. I often think how jealous Simon Cowell must be of the Korean production line for talent, while his own Syco line offers acts with diminishing returns. Fake Love, a hopelessly devoted love song, has an enormous, direct chorus over minimal production, along with ‘love you so bad’ in English.

Love Yourself: Tear (rhymes with ‘beer’, from which Fake Love was taken) was a number one album in America, meaning BTS could no longer be just a cult favourite of teenagers. Even a CBS reporter who visited Seoul in April 2019 acknowledged to an imagined audience of parents: ‘These phenoms may not be familiar.’ Their fans are ‘enthusiastic consumers’, as American viewers witness plush toys and Barbie dolls (‘$20 a pop’) dedicated to each member.

Fans put up subway signs to commemorate the members’ birthdays; someone alert fans of Harry Styles. Sombrely the CBS interview notes the mandatory military service that will interrupt the momentum of the band, as when Elvis became a GI soldier. Harry Styles has not had this problem.

Fans around the world seem to understand the lyrics (that’s a wise use of Internet surfing) and are able to chant along phonetically if they have not learned Korean,. Meanwhile Western acts are keen to jump on the bandwagon. Lil Nas X released Seoul Town Road with RM, while Halsey sang the hook on BTS’s song Boy With Luv, the single to promote Map of the Soul: Purpose, their 2019 EP.

That song is packed with hooks like the best Western pop song, contains raps from both RM and Suga and breaks down to a sweet rapping bit from some of the singers. In a novel twist, the Westerner is reduced to being a featured artist, finessing the indelible ‘ooh-muh-muh-mai’ hook and having some fun while extending her own personal brand in the Far East (Halsey’s new album comes out in January 2020). The video to Boy With Luv has had 580m Youtube views in six months; it’s full of colour and dancing and sexy looks, and is the pinnacle of the six-year rise in plain sight of the biggest vocal harmony group in the world.

And, in case you’re wondering, BTS are so much better than Gangnam Style.

Imperial One - Adele in the 2010s

Rolling in the Deep, Rumour Has It, Someone Like You, Set Fire to the Rain, Skyfall, Hello, Send My Love to Your New Lover, All I Ask

I was in a flat in Edinburgh watching the 2011 BRIT Awards and was mildly impressed by Adele’s rendition of her song Someone Like You, essentially I Will Always Love You written by a lady from Tottenham and the man who wrote Secret Smile and Closing Time, Dan Wilson of Semisonic.

I didn’t know the rest of the UK would fall hard for Adele, whose first album 19 contained some magical songs like Hometown Glory and Chasing Pavements. Second album 21, which came out in 2010, included the magnificent Rumour Has It (a Ryan Tedder co-write) and the lead single Rolling in the Deep, which featured sublime melodic lines in the verse, bridge and chorus. Someone Like You outdid them both, topping the UK and Billboard charts for five non-consecutive weeks.

Did you know that no song with a piano as a lead instrument had ever been number one on the Billboard Hot 100? With only voice and piano, Someone Like You ushered in a revolution. A simple song about a girl moving on without her man, whom she wishes ‘nothing but the best’ but hopes isn’t forgotten, struck a chord with millions of adult contemporary listeners.

Because it was current, a poll in 2012 found that only Billie Jean and Bohemian Rhapsody were more beloved UK number ones. The GRAMMYs invented a Best Pop Solo Performance category for this song.

Set Fire to the Rain was written by Adele with Fraser T Smith (the man given the shout-out in Blinded by Your Grace by Stormzy). It’s about finding ‘a side…that I never knew’ in a loved one. The middle eight is particularly good here, and this was also a huge hit song around the world, helped by strings which sounded like the song’s title and a graceful piano line.

Rumour Has It was a song I remember listening to for the first time in Edinburgh as well, walking in the Meadows. I loved the beat and the harmony voices in the background, as well as the ‘Tedder handclaps’ in the second verse. The breakdown section is electrifying and when the song finished I went WOW! I thought this would be a monster song and it was.

Rolling in the Deep was written with the mighty Paul Epworth, who has worked with Paul McCartney, U2, Coldplay, Lorde, Mumford & Sons and Florence + the Machine. It was both Song and Record of the Year, from the Album of the Year, as the GRAMMYs saw which way the wind was blowing. The video to the song begins with Adele sitting on a chair in a large unfurnished room. The floor of another room is covered with glasses of water and then a chap dances in a room filled with sand. The long, held notes of the chorus (‘We could have had it all’) are underscored by the Motown-y backing vocals (‘You’re gonna wish you never had met me’). Adele’s vocal is sensational here, and a big improvement on the shy delivery of the first album. The production foregrounds the voice while giving equal importance to the backing vocals. The sound is phenomenal.

Adele and Paul Epworth also wrote the theme to the Bond movie Skyfall, which emerged at the end of 2012. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. She performed the song at the 2013 ceremony, with the familiar four-note motif transposed to piano and ushering in her vocal: ‘This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten’. With an orchestra and choir behind her, she sings the defiant chorus (‘We will stand tall, face it all together’). The song works in the title of the film without disrupting the musicality. Don’t tell Shirley Bassey but Skyfall could be the finest Bond theme of all.

Adele had dominated music for two years with her soulful voice that has no comparison. It’s a little Dusty Springfield and a little Amy Winehouse but it is definitely her own sound. One day in 2015 she popped up in a TV advert singing ‘Hello, it’s me’ and after three years away had returned.

Written with the great Greg Kurstin, it copied the Skyfall formula: emphatic piano, strong lead vocals, backing vocals, belting chorus (‘hello from the other side’), heartache and magnificent production from Greg. Another Pop Solo Performance, Record and Song of the Year GRAMMY hat-trick followed.

Famously beating Beyonce to Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs, Adele’s speech was a masterclass in British humility that no American would have dared do. Receiving it from Tim McGraw and Faith Hill she wept with thanks to the many producers, including Max Martin, Ryan Tedder and Shellback: ‘It took an army to make me strong and willing again.’ She spoke of becoming a mother (‘it’s really hard’). I can’t possibly accept this award. [The] artist of my life is Beyonce; the Lemonade album was so monumental! You are our light. The way you make my black friends feel is empowering, and I love you!’

The slinky Send My Love (To Your New Lover) has a looped acoustic guitar vamp over which Adele updates Someone Like You but with a Swedish touch. All I Ask, meanwhile, is another piano and vocal number written by Bruno Mars. I misheard the chorus as ‘hold me like I’m more than just a breath’ (it’s ‘friend’) and, though Adele’s take is superlative, I think Bruno has made the definitive version of the song, turning it into a Babyface or Boyz II Men type ballad that ramps up a key for the final chorus.

Adele, beloved around the world, may not record another note due to vocal trouble, an unwillingness to perform live and with her baby Angelo to raise. How fun must it be to take your child round to Adele’s for playdates and be able to ask: ‘So love, how does it feel to be an ordinary mum?’

Imperial One - Little Mix in the 2010s

Wings, Move, Black Magic, Shout Out to My Ex, Touch, Power, Strip

Jesy Nelson tried to kill herself while in Little Mix. She couldn’t deal (or dealt incorrectly) with the haters online. In the 2010s, pop stars found enemies online; some thought Jesy was ugly or overweight, and could say it to her through a screen.

When Little Mix won The X Factor in 2011, Leigh-Anne, Jade and Perrie would all wear shorts; Jesy would wear leggings or bottoms. Jesy told the Guardian while promoting her BBC documentary in September 2019, eight years into her stardom as a quarter of the most durable girl band of all time (I think), that when the band won she was in despair.

In 2013 Jesy almost walked out on the band, then almost walked out of the planet. Through it all – arena shows, chart-topping albums, some phenomenal pop music – Jesy was depressed. Leigh-Anne, meanwhile, has spoken of her issues with colorism, how she is ‘too black’ for magazine spreads. Perrie, for her part, broke off an engagement with Zayn from One Direction and has had therapy to deal with panic attacks arising from social anxiety; Jade overcame anorexia as a teenager.

Teenage girls dealing with any one of several issues of adolescence need role models and guides. Many are social media influencers who preach ‘love yourself…and give me some money’. Popstars have acted as big sisters and agony aunts for years. Little Mix, prominent popstars, have played that role this decade.

For that reason they deserve to be celebrated. A list of 2010 tunes must include those by the quartet, who have produced smashes which have hit public consciousness beyond their demographic of under-16s.

Wings, their debut single, is a great concoction about self-empowerment (spot the theme in this section) where a girl should ‘spread your wings’ which were ‘made to fly’. The verses are syncopated and give way to a lovely bridge (‘words don’t mean a thing’) and the song is driven by euphoric handclaps. Heys and yeahs make pleasant appearances and it was a brilliant first single, which reached number 7 in Japan and number 79 on the Hot 100 in the US.

Amid covers of Word Up (for charity) and Cannonball (for some product to coincide with their X Factor win), their original material emerged on DNA, their ‘winners’ album’ of 2012, and 2013’s Salute. The former featured the irresistible Move (number 19 in Japan) whose music echoes its title; it’s impossible to keep still while listening to it, jerky and irrepressible and definitely inspired by the soundtrack to Pitch Perfect.

The first two albums are packed full of great pop songs, immaculately produced, with Simon Cowell overseeing every aspect, since he was the one who put them together in 2011, spotting that there was a gap in the girlband market as well as the boyband one. (More on One Direction another time.)

Camille Purcell, now a recording artist in her own right under the name Kamille, was the secret weapon for Get Weird (2015). Black Magic was an enormous smash when it came out, fizzing like a Cyndi Lauper song about girls wanting to have fun and even alluding to something euphemistic (‘I’ve got the recipe…you belong to me’) while maintaining the gang vocals of Wings and Move. It had the strongest hook of any Little Mix single and deservingly secured them a third number one and number 67 entry in the US (but only number 47 in Japan). Three follow-up singles were also well received, but I am not motivated to include in my 2010 any of Love Me Like You, Secret Love Song – co-written with guest vocalist Jason Derulo – or Hair, where Sean Paul hopped on a remix.

Glory Days (2016) brought more amazing melodies as Syco and their Modest management team (more on them shortly) tried to push them in America. Touch (‘just a touch of your love’) could have been a song by A.N. Other American harmony group or singer but Little Mix took the bajon beat and rode it to number 4 in the UK charts. Far better was the album’s first single, the excellent Shout Out to My Ex, which was once given a dramatic reading on BBC Radio 1 by Bryan ‘Walter White’ Cranston. Another addictive confection, the quick delivery of the lyrics in the bridge, with the throwaway line ‘I’m cool, by the way’, was the fullest realisation of the characters of the band: four fun girls who are constantly opening themselves up to journalists and fans. Their fanbase are so lucky to have them, and they ended the 2010s with a huge arena tour of the UK.

Better still was Power (‘You make rain but I got the, I got the, I got the thunder’) which drew inspiration from Miserlou and put forward a new, sexier Little Mix (‘I’m a machine when I do it’). Their track Oops, a Motown pastiche complete with key change, was the great lost single from that album but the market had moved on and dark broody songs like Power were in vogue in 2017 when the song came out and hit radio.

Album five was LM5, the CD of which had four sets of bare legs upon it. The first single was Ed Sheeran co-write Woman Like Me, which was chosen against the girls’ wishes to lead with Strip. That song is inspired by the trap style, as the girls sing in triplets while the chorus strips the instrumentation right down to the beat (the song opens a cappella). It’s another self-empowerment anthem that includes the words ‘jiggle’, ‘provocative’ and ‘big ass’. The girls are all grown up!

While promoting the album the girls posed naked with slogans written across their body, drawing the ire of some right-wing commentators. Eventually, frustrated at the circus of promoting their single as young women not taken seriously, Little Mix split with their management. Almost instantly Jesy was able to make her documentary and lift the lid on exactly how damaging the social media trolls can be. Very few pop acts get to album six and still remain relevant; can Little Mix upset the status quo?

Big Acts from the 2010s - Billie Eilish and Lizzo

Billie Eilish – Ocean Eyes, Bury a Friend, Bad Guy, When the Party’s Over

Lizzo – Juice, Truth Hurts, Like a Girl, Good As Hell, My Skin

‘Duh!’ Billie Eilish didn’t even write a chorus for Bad Guy, her Billboard Hot 100 number one, leaving it as an instrumental. The verses (‘so you’re a tough guy, like it really rough guy’) are sung plainly with a layer of computerised vocal line on top, but that ‘duh!’ stands out unadorned by digital effects. Billie was a teenage popstar for a teenage audience who appreciated her candour and her way with melody.

Billie often talks about mental health issues and sexuality: she suffered depression after injury halted her dancing, while her baggy outfits counter any hint of sexualisation. She and her actor brother Finneas, who serves as her producer and co-writer, are children of two actors; their mum was in the same improv troupe, the Groundlings, as Will Ferrell.

As a kid of the social media age, it is scary that 38m people (as of September 2019) follow her Instagram page, which used to be called @wherearetheavocados. She told NME.com that she doesn’t look at it because of the trolls and haters; she also deleted her Twitter account around the time of her album release.

Traditional media is also attracted to her: she was on the cover of the August 2019 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, tidying her room while talking to her interviewer. Finneas describes his sister’s vocal range as ‘between a whisper and a hum’; her tour manager likens her to Portishead or Nine Inch Nails. You can definitely hear it on her breakout hit Bury a Friend, in which layers of Billies intone the album’s title: ‘When we all fall asleep where do we go?’ The satirical line ‘I want to end me’ leads into the breakdown section of the song, which is superbly produced and sounds like Billie’s friend is inside a coffin, so claustrophobic is the percussion.

Before the album and her EP came Ocean Eyes, an astonishing song with a brilliant melody and steady beat. It reminds me of Teardrop by Massive Attack, which I hope is a high compliment. Billie sings ‘I’m scared’ even as she looks into her beau’s huge eyes.

When The Party’s Over, opening with several Billies humming and oohing in harmony, has a chorus which repeats the hook ‘I could lie, say I like it like that’. It’s a break-up song whose video (watched over 380m times as of October 2019) has Billie crying bloody tears as she sings ‘Let’s just let it go, let me let you go’. The one-syllable words match the elegant piano chords on a song which is the centrepiece of her album.

Rather scarily, Billie Eilish is still only 17. Can she be the star of the 2020s, or will she tire of life on the road and in the magazines? Maybe she’ll go to college and tour in the summers, but she seems unstoppable at the moment.

Likewise Lizzo, who plugged away for the entirety of the 2010s before emerging into the mainstream suddenly in 2019. Lizzo plays the flute, wears golden outfits and is Missy Elliot incarnate. Yet it took her years of hustling to break into global consciousness. Previously she had been a sort of cult figure, big in the gay community and with those who knew their hiphop. Then came Juice, the first single from her Cuz I Love You album of 2019. I very rarely have moments when music stops me dead but, when Radio 2 played Juice at 9.20am, I almost stared at the radio. Every line of the song – ‘If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine’, ‘I’m like Chardonnay, get better over time’, ‘yadda-ya-ee’ – is quotable, and Lizzo’s delivery is technicolor. Helped by a fun video, Juice became my favourite song of 2019 on the fourth or fifth day of the year.

Yet it was never a big hit. By September 2019 it only had 35m views. She played it at Glastonbury and in her NPR Tiny (‘Ass!’) Desk session, but why was the world not connecting to it? Was it because a big black woman singing about confidence in spangly outfits was too shocking and new? Was Lizzo just a cartoon version of a fierce black woman?

The album kicks off with the title track, which proves Lizzo can sing as well as play flute. Like a Girl, track two, opens with the line ‘woke up thinking I might just run for president’; presidential candidates, including black woman Kamala Harris, have spoken of their love of Lizzo, while the album is small-p political in the way pop music has tended to be in the 2010s. Lizzo namechecks Serena Williams, TLC and Lauryn Hill and has an awesome chorus which will hit hard in her live shows, which she calls ‘church with a twerk’. Sasha Flute, as she calls her instrument, has its own Instagram page; Lizzo is using social media brilliantly, even if she didn’t like that some music critics didn’t unanimously praise her work (something Lana Del Rey copied later in the year). 

The enormous hit from the album wasn’t actually on the album. Truth Hurts had come out in 2017, with a glossy video showing Lizzo in a wedding dress. Over three chords (C, G and A minor) and a ubiquitous digital-cymbals trap beat, the lyric contained more quotable lines (‘I don’t play tag bitch, I been it’ is my favourite) and the melody is singable in the extreme, because the same melody is sung seven times in the chorus, hammering home the melodic point.

After a performance at the BET Music Awards, in which Lizzo descended from a massive cake, more people were interested in the song; after her MTV Video Music Awards medley with Good As Hell, another hit from before Cuz I Love You, Truth Hurts rose to number one on the Hot 100 to become the second rap sung by a woman to get there since Fancy by Iggy Azalea in 2014. What’s more, Truth Hurts is eligible for the 2020 Grammy Awards with a song that is outside the eligibility period. They have bent the rules for someone who doesn’t play by them anyway.

Good As Hell, which followed Juice onto the Radio 2 playlist (aimed at families), is grounded in the fun chorus: ‘I do my hair toss, check my nails/ Baby how you feeling? (Feeling GOOD as HELL!)’ is a lyrical and melodic hook to match the bridge, where Lizzo encourages her addressee to leave a man ‘if he don’t love you any more’. I wonder how many women (or, indeed, men) have felt the empowerment to do this by the biggest pop star of 2019…

Oddly, like Good As Hell, My Skin came out in the cycle for her second album Big Grrrl Small World. Prompted to write it by a bare-all online video (lines from which appear in the song), Lizzo anticipates the focus on body positivity towards the end of the 2010s. ‘I woke up in this…I can’t wash it away’ goes the chorus over a very minimalistic musical backing, while Lizzo sings and raps of how ‘I gotta love it, no conditions…I wear my skin like a peacoat’. Though the song lacks the funkiness of the big hit records, it is a suitably naked track that reveals Lizzo to be more than a flute-and-twerking cartoon.

Like Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, Lizzo is using the artifice of pop to smuggle in some decent messages of self-worth to an audience. In 2020, Lizzo’s audience will be listening in greater numbers than in 2015 and 2016, which is certainly good as hell for all concerned.

Genre - Country in the 2010s: Mainstream Males

Darius Rucker – Wagon Wheel

Blake Shelton – Boys Round Here, Sure Be Cool If You Did, Mine Would Be You, Over You

Sam Hunt – Cop Car, Come Over, Take Your Time, House Party, Body Like a Back Road

Luke Bryan – Country Girl (Shake It For Me) That’s My Kind of Night, Drink a Beer, Most People Are Good

Jason Aldean – Dirt Road Anthem, Don’t You Wanna Stay, Burnin It Down

Florida Georgia Line – Cruise, Meant To Be

Luke Combs – When It Rains It Pours, Beautiful Crazy, Even Though I’m Leavin

Wagon Wheel is the country music equivalent of Whipping Post or Free Bird. It’s a song with a chorus by Bob Dylan and a verse by Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show. Originally put out by the latter in 2004, Darius Rucker brought it to the country charts in 2013. A road song which climaxes in the line ‘rock me, mama, like a wagon wheel’, it is the song Darius will be able to leading stadium singalongs for until the day he can’t rock any more.

The bloke off of The Voice, Blake Shelton, had one of the biggest country hits of 2013, according to the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 (number 60. Wagon Wheel came in 54th). Blake is a superstar, and he wouldn’t have become one without having a killer voice and a knack for picking or writing a hit song. Boys Round Here was from the triumvirate of Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson and Craig Wiseman, who between them have written hundreds of hits.

The track was a collaboration (or ‘event’ as the award shows had it) with his then wife Miranda Lambert and her Pistol Annie bandmates Ashley Monroe and Angaleena Presley, who essentially provide backing vocals on a fun two-chord song about bros. ‘Talkin bout girls, talkin bout trucks’; it’s almost a satire!

The best line of the song is ‘chew tobacco, spit!’ at the end of the chorus, while there’s a fun reference to the dance craze the Dougie (‘no, not in Kentucky!’). A monster country hit that appealed to the ‘red-red-rednecks’! A slower song was Sure Be Cool If You Did, where Blake suggests that the lady he is speaking too, ‘looking like a high I wanna be on’, has a decision (‘no pressure at all’) to ‘keep on smiling that smile that’s driving me wild’ and end up in his arms. It’s a very forward-thinking pick-up song from Gentleman Blake, without the sleaziness of many other songs on the radio. After all, he was married to Miranda Lambert at the time.

A more suitable song was Mine Would Be You, a heartbreak song featuring the crashing drums of Nir Z in which Blake asks his beloved a series of question in the verses, which are in a hiccupping 7/4 time: ‘What’s your worst hangover, your best night yet…The craziest thing you ever did?’ The first two choruses are odes to fidelity (‘laughing til it hurts’) but the final verse and chorus reveal the lady to be a ‘regret’, one who left him ‘standing there like a fool when I should’ve been running’. Underscored by strings and a brilliant vocal from Blake, it is a sophisticated, adult song about love and stuff.

Far more serious is Over You, written by Blake with Miranda about his late brother who ‘went away, how dare you! I miss you!’ Blake’s words are given a terrific reading by Miranda, who recorded the song, and poignantly lingers on the gravestone: ‘It really sinks in, you know/ When I see it in stone’. A comfort for anyone who has lost a loved one, Blake doesn’t have many self-penned songs in his canon. He’s so busy inventing feuds with Adam Levine of Maroon 5 for ratings on The Voice that he can’t compose his own songs. He remains a top male act, especially with his support for the genre, as the 2010s become the 2020s.

Country music is always evolving at a slower rate than pop. These days Nashville is a music hub to rival New York City in the 1950s and Los Angeles in the last 60 years. It means pop and hip-hop are creeping into country music, with hilarious consequences(!) for purists railing against the genre.

Mainstream country music at the end of the 2010s is best summed up by Body Like a Back Road, written by three blokes and sung by one of those blokes. Sam Hunt spent a few years lying low after his debut album Montevallo came out in 2015, issuing a few singles in the interim period. A tune about a being with a girl whose every curve he knows like the back of his hand, it was the hottest country song for 34 weeks and a Hot 100 top 10 track in the States.

When a country song invades the pop charts, the questions start to get louder about the future of the genre. Purists want to keep familiar themes and instrumentation but this is always risks the genre losing a new audience. Zach Crowell’s production, full of fingersnaps and atmospheric noise buried in the mix, is immaculate and contemporary while Sam’s voice is like treacle. It helps that he is a hot, sexy guy but without the songs he’d be another one of the many hot, sexy guys in town.

I hated Take Your Time, Sam’s breakout smash. Every week when it was the Hot Country number one, Paul Gambaccini would play it on his BBC Radio 2 show and I would bellow at the radio: ‘Sing, Sam!’ Sam Hunt revived sprechtgesang, speak-singing, that was prevalent in the early era of commercial country – think A Boy Named Sue or Hello Darlin’ – but he added a pop sensibility. The verse didn’t do it for me – why does he rap one line and sing the next? – but the chorus is awesome as Sam seeks to take only a girl’s time and not ‘steal your freedom’.

This song was revolutionary and, as on the album as a whole, united pop, r’n’b and hiphop through the prism of a guy with a cap from Atlanta who had already written hits for Kenny Chesney and Keith Urban. Kenny knows how to pick hits from his pile of songs sent to him for each project and he leapt on Come Over (‘come over, come over’), an insistent song co-written by Sam with a nimble acoustic guitar riff running through it. Kenny is alone in his hotel room and pines for the company of a woman he no longer loves (but ‘climbing the walls gets me nowhere’).

Cop Car was even better, a story about doing something you shouldn’t which Keith Urban brought onto country radio. ‘Your daddy’s gonna kill me!’ is the key line before Keith sings of how he ‘fell in love in the back of a cop car’, drawn closer to his beloved. It’s one of the highlights of Keith’s live show, as he recounts the story of a guy being reckless with a girl. ‘By the time they let us go I was already gone’ is a great line to lead into a patented Keith Urban rocking solo.

Of Sam’s original songs I preferred House Party, a super song with a funky groove. In no way at all is it country; it’s pure pop music coming out of Nashville. The line ‘the roof is on fire!’ is thrown into the second verse, where t-shirts are thrown over lampshades to mimic the feel of a club. The bridge (‘I’ll be at your door in ten minutes…Gonna bring the good time home to you’) is contemporary and appeals to a young demographic.

That demographic lapped up Dan + Shay, whose inoffensive ‘Nashville pop’ brought them (and their manager Scooter Braun) untold riches. Their big, soppy number one From the Ground Up (‘we’ll build this love’) is a hymn to the strong bond between their grandparents, giving them instant country cred.

Their big third album brought them two big hits in Tequila and Speechless. The former, with an addictive ‘when I, when I’ post-chorus hook, is about how singer Shay can drink ‘whiskey, red wine, champagne’ all he wants but as soon as he tastes tequila, ‘baby I still see ya’. The presence of pedal steel guitar adds country instrumentation to a middle-of-the-road ballad saturated in production effects. Speechless, meanwhile, is a wedding song inspired by their wives. It’s basically Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton with Shay holding on to the ‘I’ before the chorus for extra oomph. The song sweeps forward, with the second verse both shorter and including quicker-paced lyrical delivery ending in a long, drawn-out ‘I’ across several beats.

To capitalise on the boys’ success and balladry, Justin Bieber was drafted in (after his recent nuptials) on 10,000 Hours, a song about love and stuff. In the music video, the three men kiss their wives as flowers blossom around them in a sort of magazine feature-cum-pop promo: ‘I’d spend 10,000 hours…if that what it takes to earn that sweet heart of yours.’ It’s another middle-of-the-road song from the boys who are pretty in face and voice, like Bieber.

And, indeed, like Luke Bryan. As Blake had done before him, Luke reckoned that he could sell more tickets outside of the south if he popped up on TV. In 2018 he became a judge on American Idol to cap off an incredible decade that saw him release a stream of songs which he could shake his tush to on increasingly bigger stages.

The first tush-shaker had a clue in the title: Country Girl (Shake It For Me) became the 81th biggest song on Billboard’s list in 2011; it is built on a groove and sounds huge on speakers. The setting is resolutely rural: there’s a truck in the opening couplet on whose ‘tailgate’ Luke ‘can’t wait’ to host a pretty girl whose audience includes ‘catfish…crickets and squirrels’. It’s the done thing to hang out by the riverbank, which seems the country music equivalent of ‘the club’.

Luke is a great salesman for country music. He croons love songs like Drunk On You, where rural elements include the ‘cottonwood’, ‘blue jeans’, ‘tied-up t-shirt’, ‘Crown in a Dixie Cup’, ‘Good God Almighty’ and the ubiquitous ‘tailgate in the full moon’. He bellows party songs like That’s My Kind of Night, where his ‘country-rock hiphop mixtape’ has a ‘little Conway [Twitty], a little T-Pain’ to soundtrack a night with a ‘pretty girl by my side…out where the corn rows grow’. Only in country music can the perfect night include ‘a little catfish dinner’ before the pair ‘get our love on’. It’s hard rock by the riverbank and millions went wild for it.

In between the party songs – I love Move and She’s a Hot One, which are both essentially Country Girl (Shake It For Me) Parts 2 and 3 – Luke can get philosophical. Drink a Beer is a reaction to hearing of a death of a loved one by finding the spot ‘on the edge of the pier’ where they used to drink together. ‘The greater plan is kinda heard to understand’ is a deep lyric written by Chris Stapleton and Jim Beavers. (More on Chris in another entry).

Most People Are Good, meanwhile, is a country boy’s credo to how ‘most mommas ought to qualify for sainthood’. Luke believes kids should ‘get dirt on their hands’, people should forgive other and ‘love who you love’ while watching less of the ‘nightly news’ because life’s not all bad. It’s a gentle acoustic song which outlines a useful way to live and was a pleasant alternative to love songs with programmed drums that swamped country radio in the 2010s.

If Luke is the good ol’ mama’s boy who can also dance a bit (a sort of Garth Brooks), Jason Aldean is a sort of George Strait of contemporary country, a salesman who sells whatever the backroom boys are putting together. I noticed that several songs were of a type: three or more can become ‘let’s get ready to rock!’ songs (Lights Come On, Gettin Warmed Up, Just Getting Started, Set It Off) while plenty more are ‘drive down the dirt road’ songs. Jason’s voice does sound rural and like a dirt road, while he performers muscular country music which is sometimes talk-sung in the Sam Hunt way.

Dirt Road Anthem is the best example of ‘hick-hop’, a genre that first made inroads into pop culture in the early 2000s with rap acts like Nelly and Bubba Sparxxx appealing to southern folk regardless of race or creed. White guys like Colt Ford broke through and encouraged Jason Aldean to record his take on the song, which he had a massive hit with in summer 2011. It finished as the 43rd biggest song of the year according to Billboard. People were attracted to the lazy chorus: ‘Chillin’ on a dirt road…Smoke rolling out the window’ made it a perfect driving song. The soulful chorus gives way to the familiar rap (‘all that small-town he-said-she-said’ in the first verse, ‘cornbread and biscuits’ in the second) which Aldean could expose to mainstream country fans familiar with his previous work.

Showing his diversity, his previous big hit was the duet Don’t You Wanna Stay (the 68th biggest song of 2011), where he was the bloke asking Kelly Clarkson to ‘stay here a little while’ to the accompaniment of soft-rock guitars and drums, real strings and a lovely diminished fourth chord before the chorus. Kelly takes the second verse, singing ‘Don’t just wanna make love, wanna make love last’ and elevating it to the status of a country karaoke duet for wannabe Aldeans and their loved ones.

Another love song, this time with an r’n’b feel and programmed drums, was a huge hit for Aldean and the 63rd biggest song of 2014. The writers of Burnin’ It Down included Tyler Hubbard (more on him shortly). The song is a slow jam in which Aldean wants to ‘rock it all night’. Country had never been so openly sultry and obvious, helped by the success of Florida Georgia Line.

The success of Tyler and his mate Brian Kelley came in the wake of Dirt Road Anthem. Florida Georgia Line peddled other dirt road anthems like Round Here and Get Your Shine On, produced by the man who gave Nickelback their rock sound, Joey Moi.

Cruise was the first Florida Georgia Line smash, with the effervescent chorus: ‘Baby you’re a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise!’ In the Year-End Billboard Hot 100 of 2013, only eight songs could outrank the version of the song featuring Nelly and a hiphop beat. The verses are each four bars long, while the chorus is double that, giving the song an odd shape.

The chorus was huge and very country: ‘This brand new Chevy with a lift kit would look a whole lot better with you up in it’ united the hiphop fetishization of women and the country domestic feel. Nelly’s rap is playful and elevates the song into a monster. It was a number 16 hit in its original form but, with an eight-month climb, peaked at four when Nelly popped up. Fun fact: the remix was produced by Jason Nevins who took It’s Like That by Run-DMC and made it a global smash.

Florida Georgia Line were lampooned as being urban kids in rural clothing, with immaculate haircuts and the same sort of product-line pop-country as Dan + Shay. It didn’t help that they surveyed country music from the highest summit, thanks to teaming up with Bebe Rexha on the most successful country song of the decade. 50 weeks was the run on top of the Hot Country charts for Meant To Be, a neat song about love and stuff (‘ride with me, see where this thing goes’) written with David Garcia and Josh Miller. Both Tyler Hubbard and Bebe take a verse, while the distinctive melody lines wrap themselves together in the final few choruses.

The production is phenomenal while the lyrical hook (‘if it’s meant to be, baby then it’s meant to be’) is alluring. Country purists lampoon FGL for being metrosexual bros but this song has some emotional depth and even uncertainty, as shown by the ‘middle bit’ where both parties sing four lines beginning with the word ‘maybe’. Grounded by the five-note piano riff and the despised ‘fingersnap’ percussion, Meant To Be is the sound of country music evolving beyond the heartland.

The key is to keep the heartland interested while lassoing in the rest of the world, as has been seen by the proliferation of Country2Country festivals across Europe and now, after taking over Ireland, the UK and Germany, Australia. As country radio pushed more traditional tunes at the end of the 2010s, inspired by ‘outlaws’ who will be discussed in another entry, Luke Combs entered the fray with direct, believable country music.

When It Rains It Pours begins with the line ‘Sunday morning, man she woke up fighting mad!’ before assuring the listener that his luck all came in at once (‘caller number five on the radio station/ won a four-day, three-night beach vacation’). Luke’s throaty growl was the necessary corrective and, like Jason Aldean, he could sing ballads like One Number Away and Hurricane and uptempo grooves too: set opener Honky Tonk Highway is particularly brilliant.

The simple wedding song Beautiful Crazy (‘her crazy is beautiful to me’) was a hit on country radio around Valentines Day 2019 and was part of an imperial phase which continued with Even Though I’m Leavin, a song with prominent mandolin united by the ‘daddy’ beginning each verse to choreograph what happens at the end of the song. Verse one is a boy going off to school, verse two going to fight for ‘Uncle Sam’, verse three watching his dad slip away. At every stage the father says: ‘Even though I’m leavin’ I ain’t goin’ nowhere.’ Craft is important to Luke Combs and his album sales demonstrate that hundreds of thousands of people like it. He can be a bridge for young fans between current sounds and the ones adored by their parents from the 1990s, which is strangely back in mainstream fashion, again as a corrective for all those programmed drums which have now grown stale as 2020 appears on the horizon.

Genre - Country in the 2010s: Mainstream Females

Kacey Musgraves – Follow Your Arrow, Merry Go Round, Butterflies, Rainbow, Golden Hour

Maren Morris – I Could Use a Love Song, My Church, GIRL, The Bones

Miranda Lambert – Automatic, The House That Built Me, Tin Man

Carrie Underwood – Two Black Cadillacs, Church Bells, Cry Pretty

Little Big Town – Girl Crush

Brandi Carlile – The Eye, The Joke, The Mother

Ashley McBryde – Bible and a .44, Girl Goin’ Nowhere

I came out for Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves as the GRAMMY Album of the Year after I started crying while I listened to the final track Rainbow. ‘Let go of your umbrella…There has always been a rainbow hanging over your head’ was Kacey’s counsel over gorgeous piano; matching the symbol, gay folk have embraced the song just as Kacey embraced her gay fanbase. Golden Hour was the coronation in the mainstream for an act who didn’t play by Nashville’s usual rules, even being accused of being too mardy and glum.

In the UK, however, and outside the US, Kacey is able to play huge venues like The Royal Albert Hall. The songs from her first two albums – Same Trailer, Different Park and Pageant Material – are rooted in her upbringing in Texas and include country instrumentation: steel guitars, banjos, brushed drums and, at the end of the latter album, Willie Nelson’s voice.

I remember being really impressed with Merry Go Round, which denigrates small-town life, ‘this broken merry-go-round and round and round we go’. The wordplay in the chorus – ‘Mama’s hooked on Mary Kay, brother’s hooked on Mary Jane, daddy’s hooked on Mary two doors down’ – is backed up by the bridge after the second verse: ‘Same checks we’re always cashin’ to buy a little more distraction’ is an astonishingly mature line that recalls Dolly Parton or Loretta Lynn, her foremothers.

In a just world Kacey would be a Miranda Lambert-type star but she made the mistake of including the line ‘or kiss lots of girls if that’s something you’re into’ in the middle of the chorus of the bouncy Follow Your Arrow. She also alludes, in ‘roll up a joint – I would!’, to her own drug consumption. Country music is still very conservative and a song otherwise about small-town life (‘If you save yourself for marriage you’re a bore’ is the opening line. The middle eight contains sage advice: ‘Love who you love…you only live once’, showing that Kacey can be a sensitive songwriter too.

Golden Hour is an album about being in love. Butterflies soars, suitably, as Kacey sings of how ‘I remember what it feels like to fly’, brought out of her ‘chrysalis’ by husband Ruston Kelly. The title track contains a beautiful middle eight (‘you make the world look beautiful’) and guitar solo, which makes it a contender for a first dance at a wedding. Tucked away at the end of the album, it can be plucked out for a Wedding Playlist on any streaming service. In the 2020s Kacey should consolidate her stardom and become a pop artist who, like Taylor Swift, outgrew Nashville.

Maren Morris is well on the way to doing so. Coming from Texas, she started as a staff songwriter in Nashville, where she met husband Ryan Hurd. Teaming up with Mike Busbee to write a song that linked country music to ‘holy redemption’, which namechecked Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, Maren broke through with My Church. I remember hearing her play it in 2016 and could feel something change in the room. I was singing along, Maren was crying because the audience were singing along, there was an ovation and Maren announced herself to the UK. She got both ‘a hallelujah’ and ‘an amen’

When I heard My Church I knew it would be a modern standard; UK acts routinely cover the song live, it’s easy to play and sing and contains a chorus for the ages. The performance at the 2016 CMA Awards, with a full horn section, is amazing and the definitive version of the song.

The following two years saw her play to bigger crowds and grow more successful thanks to singles like 80s Mercedes (‘I’m a 90s baby in my 80s Mercedes’ went the fun hook, which is coupled with a poppy ‘woah-oh-oh’ post-chorus), the P Diddy-namechecking and Steve Miller Band-quoting Rich and I Could Use a Love Song. Only the last of these was a number one, which is a damning indictment of country radio programming; it’s a lush tune written on a bad day in which Maren wants to hear music rather than have another drink to ‘take the edge off’ another break-up.

She returned in 2019 with the album GIRL, preceded by the track of the same name which was a dig at those country radio programmers who would be forced to playlist a song called GIRL. The tune itself is perfectly fine, but live the reaction is extraordinary, with her core fanbase of young women yelling ‘I don’t feel myself right now…Everything’s gonna be okay’. Like Kacey, Maren fell in love and got married and, on The Bones, pours her feelings into song: ‘The house don’t fall when the bones are good’ takes an architectural term and turns it into some shimmering pop music driven by a reverberating soft guitar lick.

Both Kacey and Maren come in the wake of fellow Texan Miranda Lambert, an underrated songwriter who is still best known for having been Mrs Blake Shelton.

The broadcaster and critic Grady Smith admires nouns, and often gets pulled towards certain tracks through details. Miranda’s song Automatic is all details: ‘quarter in the payphone’, ‘suntea in the window’, ‘record the Country Countdown’, ‘Rand McNally’, ‘that ‘55’ and ‘Easter dress’ all appear before the chorus, where Miranda Lambert’s vocals amp up to ask ‘hey, whatever happened to waiting your turn, doing it all by hand?’

Nicolle Galyon, who co-wrote this, sang this when I saw her at a CMA event at Country2Country, and laid bare the plain-speaking narration. The third verse is about sending mail and the recipient getting it ‘three days later’; tenderly, boys would have to talk to girls and, if they secured their hand, ‘staying married was the only way to work your problems out’. The strength of the song is in the rural nature of things being ‘so good the way we had it’.

Musically the song is driven by a chugging acoustic guitar and I love the layered harmonies, especially in the chorus. It is both a fine song and a fine recording.I particularly loved a performance by Miranda at the Grand Ol Opry, with backing vocals from Gwen Sebastian, which I would watch for weeks on end as I fell for country music in the middle of the 2010s.

The House That Built Me, not written by Miranda but nonetheless her career song, became the ACM Song of the Decade in 2019. Tom Douglas and Allan Shamblin’s tune is set in the singer’s old house to where she ‘had to come back one last time’; her ‘hand prints’ are there on the steps and her ‘favorite dog is buried in the yard’. The colloquialisms in the first verse – ‘ma’am’, ‘up those stairs’ and ‘I bet you didn’t know’ – are conversational and set the mood for a tender, confessional chorus. The singer cannot heal ‘this brokenness inside me’ as she returns to the place where she could be the person she was before heartache: ‘I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am’ can only be a country music lyric, which makes it a valid art form worthy of critical discussion rather than one to be ignored as ‘for those folk’.

By 2017 hardly any women were heard on country radio and timeless tunes would be anomalous amid the ‘baby girl get in my truck’ songs that dominated. Tin Man, written by Miranda with the great Jon Randall, takes inspiration from the character who wanted a heart; Miranda, whose own ‘is in pieces now’, gives him her own, since love has been so unkind to her. Musically it is mournful and tender, conversational (‘by the way Mr Tin Man’) and an extraordinary vocal. It was the highlight of her double-LP Weight of These Wings, warmly produced by Jay Joyce and featuring plenty of fun uptempo songs and meditative ones.

Ahead of even Miranda in the ‘girl-singer’ stakes is talent show winner Carrie Underwood, who continued her 2000s momentum with a series of songs in the 2010s that enabled her to headline Madison Square Gardens in New York in 2019. She co-wrote many of them, for which she (like Miranda) does not get enough credit. Carrie is the All-American sweetheart who came to fame on American Idol, has hosted the CMA Awards – the Oscars of Country Music – the entire decade.

Her story songs are particularly excellent. The revenge tragedy Two Black Cadillacs opens with the image in the title and over real strings and huge drums tells the tale of a dead man whose funeral is attended by two women who ‘didn’t bother to cry…He’s not the only one who had a secret to hide’. Similarly, Church Bells tells of a girl called Jenny who meets a high society guy and becomes a Stepford wife (‘hosting junior league parties and having dinner at the country club’). The guy is violent and, in revenge, Jenny poisons his whiskey; the chorus is set in the church with the great image ‘fold your hands and close your eyes’. Oddly it was Miranda Lambert who was best known for revenge songs, while Carrie sang pretty songs early in her career.

After two successful pregnancies, Carrie transitioned into the role of a young mum who had suffered miscarriages and also a nasty fall at home. Returning in 2018, including international dates, she began her album Cry Pretty with the title song whose first line was ‘I’m sorry but I’m just a girl’. The final minute of the song contains some world-class vocalising (‘ooh’ etc) as Carrie hammers home the point that ‘you can’t cry pretty’.

The song was written with the famous trio who wrote Girl Crush: Liz Rose, Lori McKenna and Hillary Lindsey. That song, given a boost by radio DJ Bobby Bones, has become Little Big Town’s most beloved song, as Karen Fairchild sings tenderly alongside lush harmonies from the rest of the band of being jealous of a man’s girlfriend: ‘I want to taste her lips because they taste like you’ is a novel twist on a familiar theme, one which naturally shocked conservative listeners who didn’t listen to the words. Awards disprove their pig-headedness and the song will live on into the 2020s.

As should songs by Brandi Carlile. Grafting is essential in the music industry if you don’t want to be a Carrie-style talent show winner. Brandi Carlile was plugging away for years before her big break in 2017 which meant she was invited to be a quarter of The Highwomen. An openly gay mother and wife, Brandi is a star of the Americana genre, an offshoot of country music. Recognised with awards for her album By The Way, I Forgive You (which Kacey pipped to the Album of the Year at the 2019 GRAMMY Awards), her song The Eye broke through in the middle of the decade.

Over rootsy acoustic guitars and no percussion, three voices sing in perfect harmony of how ‘you can dance in a hurricane but only if you’re standing in the eye’. I feel this is a metaphor for making the best in the worst times, where one may be driven to drink or despair. Instead the listener should be ‘a sturdy soul…find the urge to run for another day’, keeping on keeping on.

There is a performance of Brandi’s song The Joke at Studio A, the hallowed studio in Nashville, which chilled my spine. Helped by the Hanseroth twins on guitar and harmonies (as on The Eye), Brandi sings a series of abstract images and portraits that draw the listener in, her voice breaking like Chrissie Hynde or Sheryl Crow. ‘Don’t ever let them steal your joy and your gentle ways’ is Brandi’s advice for someone bullied because ‘they hate the way you shine’. It is maternal and perhaps told with experience. As on the album version, the string section swells to a crescendo that cannot help but move the listener, especially when she hits the high note on the song’s title (‘The joke’s on them’).

The second verse of The Joke, addressed to a girl, includes some gender politics; Brandi is an out and proud lesbian whose song The Mother is a comfort for all mothers to their daughters, even as it is about her own daughter Evangeline. ‘She filled my life with color, cancelled plans and trashed my car,’ Brandi sings, adding: ‘You’re nothing short of magical and beautiful to me.’

Like Ashley McBryde, it is difficult not to fall for Brandi when the standard of performance is so high. Simon Cowell might call it The X Factor. Like Brandi, Ashley plugged away in dive bars where bikers would bellow over her songs. By 2019 she was playing London’s O2 Arena and Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Her uptempo tunes like Fat and Famous (‘You got fat and I got famous’) and Radioland are good, but her softer ones are great.

When Ashley finally got the eyeballs of the likes of Eric Church, Garth Brooks and viewers of the Opry Youtube channel, she made the most of it. Born in Arkansas to a preacher dad, Ashley rebelled, falling in with a crowd that loved music, drinking and the life of an itinerant musician.

As a child, Ashley was lampooned for her dreams: ‘Don’t waste your life’ are the first words of the song she performed at the Opry, which brought her into thousands of lives. I caught her in London in 2019 playing at the O2; when she sang ‘the lights come up and I hear the crowd’, we knew what to do and cheered to the rafters. ‘Not bad for a girl going nowhere,’ Ashley sung, as she had done through tears at the Opry.

Her career song, the one which Eric Church asked her to perform on stage with him, is Bible and a .44. Over an acoustic guitar in 7/4 time, Ashley sings of her late father, ‘the kind of man it feels good to be around…I miss that man and I always will.’ At the climax of the song she says she is ‘holding more than strings and wood’, referring to her dad’s hands that used to grip her guitar.

Country music, passed down to the next generation, is in (pun alert) good hands with the likes of Ashley, Kacey, Carrie, Miranda, Maren and Brandi.

Genre - Country in the 2010s: 18 Assorted Country Hits

Humble and Kind, Meanwhile Back at Mama’s, Highway Don’t Care, More Hearts Than Mine, Even If It Breaks Your Heart, Barefoot Blue Jean Night, Hard to Love, I Don’t Dance, I Drive Your Truck, Take a Back Road, Small Town Boy, Die a Happy Man, Downtown, Drunk on a Plane, Somethin Bout a Truck, American Kids, Girl in a Country Song, Redesigning Women

The Genre series in the 2010 for the 2010s project brings together individual tracks by artists who did not have ‘imperial periods’. I will touch on all kinds of music including jazz, r’n’b, soul, spiritual, easy listening, hiphop, alternative and mainstream rock, metal, Spanish-language, electronic and Eurovision, which I think is a genre in itself.

Here are 18 additions to the 2010 songs of the decade which all came from Nashville, home of American country music. There will be separate posts containing songs by the decade’s bigger acts: for males like Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line, and for females like Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris.

One of the anthems of the decade is Humble and Kind. The excellent version by Tim McGraw is excellent, but Lori McKenna’s version of her own song – music and lyrics written by her – is indispensable. A series of exhortations to her five children – ‘say please, say thank you’, keep cool when it’s hot, go to church and ‘always stay humble and kind’ – are intoned over three chords (and the truth). Lori’s vocal, which is more folk than country, is a magnificent instrument which she is allowed to show off in between writing smash hits for new and established artists.

Tim McGraw came up in the 1990s and, now in his fifties, he has a rich catalogue to draw from. In the 2010s he kept putting out albums, including one with his wife Faith Hill. Meanwhile Back at Mama’s is another down-home country song (starring Faith but not on that duets album) with a gentle acoustic guitar pattern and shuffling drums that has Tim pining for ‘a slow down, cos where I come from, only the horses run’. Stadium superstar Tim sells the hell out of a song about unwinding (with her indoors) and it’s a believable song, especially when Faith harmonises on the second chorus.

A female voice is also found on Highway Don’t Care, where Keith Urban takes the solo for good luck. As Tim drives around he hears a song on the radio singing ‘I can’t live without you baby’ sung by Taylor Swift (who had a song called Tim McGraw on her debut album); it reinforces his mood that Tim, not the highway, misses his beloved.

The key to country music songwriting is finding a new shape for old rope, new ways to say ‘I love you’, ‘I miss you’ or ‘I wish I hadn’t left you’. In her song More Hearts Than Mine, Ingrid Andress sings of taking a boy home to meet her family. There is plenty of detail in the song: ‘My dad will check your tyres, pour you whiskey over ice’ and ‘Walk you round the foothills of my town’ are vivid. The kicker comes at the end of the chorus: if they were to break up, Ingrid would be ‘fine’ but the boy would be ‘breaking more hearts than mine’. It’s a sleeper hit that will become her career song.

One of the top 100 hits of 2012, hitting 99 according to Billboard, is a track about being a musician written by Eric Paslay and Will Hoge and sung by country-rock act Eli Young Band. ‘I can hear the ringing of a beat-up old guitar…Keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart’ is an anthemic line for garage bands who want to make a living in music, playing on stages. ‘Gotta keep believing’ is the advice in the song to those whose ‘fire got lit’ by a rock act on the radio; in a nice meta twist, Paslay has taken to mashing it up with Learning To Fly by Tom Petty (it has a similar chord progression) when he performs it live.

Paslay is also on the credits of Barefoot Blue Jean Night, the 79th biggest song of 2011, where a simple four-chord loop underscores a party song full of ‘woahs’ about being ‘caught up in the Southern summer’ with buddies and babes: ‘The girls are lookin’ hot and the beer is ice cold!’ is sung with gusto by Jake Owen, an anonymous pretty boy who was lucky enough to be given this earworm of a song.

Lee Brice has had three of the top country songs of the decade. Drummer Tommy Harden knew Hard To Love was going to be a massive hit even as he was playing on it; in it, Lee sings of how ‘I don’t deserve it but I love that you love me’, a man who knows his flaws (‘short fuse, a wrecking ball’) and has found a girl who is ‘full of grace, full of Jesus’. It’s a song of fidelity and devotion sung by one of the great contemporary county voices: ‘I don’t ever want to take you for granted’ is a wonderful line. Likewise, the wedding song I Don’t Dance (‘but here I am’) is best listened to with a loved one and is a well-produced country song that works as an ‘adult contemporary’ pop song too.

I Drive Your Truck, as featured in the documentary It All Begins with a Song, was inspired by an interview with the father of a fallen soldier. Country music is without artifice and is a direct method of communication, almost a eulogy in words sometimes; Lee Brice’s vocals do the story justice and it is a very stirring song without being patriotic or over-the-top. It reaches a climax in the middle eight as Lee, singing as the bereaved father, lets his emotions spill over: ‘I’ve cussed, I’ve prayed, I’ve said goodbye/ Shook my fist and asked God why,’ he sings over strings and a new set of chords. It’s his career song.

Rodney Atkins is another beneficiary of the fruits of a writers’ room. He was given the Rhett Akins/Luke Laird composition Take a Back Road, another fun song perfect for listening to while driving because it’s about driving: ‘May as well take the long way home/ Put a little gravel in my travel’ goes the chorus, sung by Rodney in the role of a man sitting in traffic just wanting to meander around some ‘two-lane’ country road with his beloved.

Rhett Akins was named Songwriter of the Decade (non-artist) by the Academy of Country Music. He is one-third of the great Peach Pickers, along with Ben Hayslip and Dallas Davidson. The trio had huge success with Small Town Boy, a song that is country from its very first line: ‘I’m a dirt road in the headlights’. Dustin Lynch was the man chosen to have a hit with the song, which he sings in a cowboy hat’; he boasts of having a girl who acts as ‘my cool…my crazy…my with me till the end’. Over three insistent chords it’s a song perfect for hugging one’s loved one when it comes on the radio.

I always refer to Die a Happy Man as Thinking Out Loud because it’s the same song: a devoted man sings to his beloved over acoustic guitar in the key of D major. That’s unfair on Thomas Rhett; this song, his career song that will bring his riches year on year, has a better chorus than Ed’s. He doesn’t mind not building a house in Georgia, driving down the Pacific Coast Highway or seeing Paris ‘if all I got’s your hand in my hand’. The woman is ‘a saint…a goddess…the cutest, the hottest, a masterpiece’, all in one line of the second verse. Marvin Gaye is referenced in the first verse to acknowledge that he is inspired by Let’s Get It On, as so many others have been. The difference is that not many country music stars have been.

In the 2010s pop and r’n’b have made their way into popular country tunes, as I’ll talk about when dealing with the genre’s A-list male artists. Lady Antebellum, a poppy trio whose singer Hillary Scott is the daughter of a country music vocalist, followed up 2009/2010’s massive hit Need You Now with a series of lesser songs. The two-chord Downtown is a fun ditty where Hillary complains that ‘I should be counting on you at my door’ to take her out; many bars on Broadway are now named after or owned by country stars, though Lady Antebellum are not one of them.

Dierks Bentley is one. He has popped over to the UK a few times with soulful, emotionally driven country songs. In the 2010s Dierks hit big with Drunk on a Plane: ‘Buying drinks for everybody but the pilot…It’s Mardi Gras up in the clouds’, and prompting country fans to hope they were placed in ‘seat 7A’ on their trip over to Nashville. Kip Moore, another US act with a big UK following, announced himself with the fun and dumb Somethin Bout a Truck (‘in a farmer’s field’), which goes on to praise ‘beer sitting on ice’, ‘a girl in a red sun dress’ and ‘a kiss that’s gonna lead to more’. With a strong beat which you can line-dance to, the song is still Kip’s best-known song among plenty of rocky numbers which transfer his wild personality.

Behind Garth Brooks, who plays multiple dates in the same city when he tours, Kenny Chesney is still the number two live country act. He brings good-time vibes and a humanity to his shows, which are full of songs like the effervescent American Kids: ‘We were “Jesus saves me”, blue jean baby, born in the USA’ definitely locates the characters in the song as Americans, while the lyric ‘faded little map dot’ unites disparate communities across America whose people were ‘making out on living room couches/ Blowing that smoke on a Saturday night/ A little messed-up but we’re all alright’.

In the 2010s, women had a raw deal in mainstream country music. This was made clear when Maddie & Tae shot to number one with the cutting Girl In a Country Song, which took inspiration from a video by commentator Grady Smith that summarised how girls, in their words, were only good for ‘lookin’ good for you and your friends on the weekend…keep our mouths shut and ride along’. Namechecking old stars like Conway Twitty and George Strait, they sing gorgeously about how shaking their ‘moneymaker’ isn’t making them ‘a dime’ and use the familiar ‘yeah baby!’ hook in a mocking way. Aside from three or four women – Maren Morris, Carrie Underwood, Kacey Musgraves, Miranda Lambert – there were precious few female voices on country radio and it was bizarre that it took an ‘answer song’ to get them there.

The future looks brighter, especially with more country fans ditching radio for streaming services. September 2019 saw the release of an album by The Highwomen, a project helmed by Amanda Shires who roped in Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Maren Morris. In the video to lead single Redesigning Women, the quartet were joined by many ladies in country music in the video to the first single, including Wynonna and Lauren Alaina, crossing the generational divide as they sang of how women were ‘breaking all the jello mould…If the shoe fits we’re gonna buy eleven!’ The middle eight concedes that women are ‘making it up as we go along’. Singing either unison or in sparkling harmony, it was a perfect way to announce a revolutionary project which, Shires hopes, will kickstart a wave of females in the mainstream.

Imperial One - Taylor Swift in the 2010s

Mine, Mean, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, I Knew You Were Trouble, 22, This Is What You Came For, Better Man, Shake It Off, Blank Space, Bad Blood, New Year’s Day, Me!, You Need to Calm Down, Lover

Together with her great mate Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift has been one of the biggest white acts of the 2010s. Like Ed, she knows how to conquer territories; unlike Ed, she uses her femininity to sell concert tickets.

My mum went to see her show in Hyde Park and said there was too much talking. Around the 1989 era – which ended with a GRAMMY for Album of the Year – Taylor invited famous ladies onto the stage with her. They included Lena Dunham, Idina Menzel, Alessia Cara, Miranda Lambert, Charli XCX, Selena Gomez, Avril Lavigne, Lisa Kudrow, St Vincent, Alanis Morissette, Natalie Maines from Dixie Chicks, Ellen, Uzo Aduba, Mary J Blige, Joan Baez, Julia Roberts, Little Mix, Fifth Harmony, Lorde, Gigi Hadid, the US Women’s National Soccer Team and Serena Williams. For obvious Kanye-related reasons Kim Kardashian didn’t pop up…

Taylor is still known as the woman who beat Beyonce’s Single Ladies video at the MTV Video Music Awards which led to Kanye West storming the stage and ruining the moment. In 2009, when it happened, Taylor was already on her way to winning the CMA Entertainer of the Year award. She was a country starlet and her third album Speak Now was completely written by her with no co-writers. Mine was the first single, a nice bit of country-pop fluff about being young and in love, while Mean was addressed to the haters, specifically Bob Lefsetz, one of her more acerbic critics.

Come 2012 there was nothing to criticize any more. Outgrowing country music, Taylor went pop on her fourth album Red. Teaming up with Max Martin and Shellback, she put out the incredible We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which has so many hooks a fish would wave the right flag and just chomp on. It remains one of the decade’s finest pop songs, and daringly includes as a middle eight the voicenote from the writing session. It is both defiant and melodic, which is the Swift sound.

Taylor began her Imperial Period with Red, from which I Knew You Were Trouble and 22 (both Martin/Shellback/Swift compositions) also came. The former is a slinky track with more hooks and a spiky guitar part, while the latter celebrates being young and having fun. Stunningly, Taylor was 22 years old when she wrote the song.

How did she follow up Red? With something even more successful. Albums do not go diamond any more but 10 million people bought 1989. Perhaps because Taylor decided not to make the album available for streaming, they were forced to pay for one of the pop albums of the decade. If Britney Spears hadn’t fallen by the wayside and suffered horrific mental agony, she would have made 1989; Max Martin was at the mixing desk while other top writers (Ryan Tedder, Jack Antonoff, Imogen Heap) helped Taylor with her artistic vision of making great pop music to dance to.

Shake It Off was the album’s first single, a fine pop song about dancing that again mentioned the haters (who are ‘gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate’). Next came Blank Space, another number one on the Hot 100, knocking Shake It Off from the top and meaning Taylor was the first woman to replace herself (The Beatles replaced themselves in 1964). Blank Space is a fine production and suitably it was nominated for Record and Song of the Year at the GRAMMYs. Only Thinking Out Loud and Uptown Funk could, and did, outperform Blank Space, which I think is her greatest moment in her great era. The pen-click sound effect before ‘And I’ll write your name’ is a smart production device. The middle eight is a piece of advice to ladies: ‘Boys only want love if it’s torture…’

Bad Blood was a video blockbuster, with several of her ‘squad’ defeating the evil men but letting Kendrick Lamar, of all people, take the verses on a remix which sent the song to number one. The chorus is infectious and syncopated, and the production is again unstoppable. The mood points to the doomy production of Reputation, of which more in two paragraphs’ time.

Like Ed Sheeran, Taylor was able to gift tracks to others. After using a pseudonym, it was revealed that it was Calvin Harris’ ex-girlfriend Taylor Swift who wrote Rihanna’s smash This Is What You Came For, a track that intersected pop and Calvin’s brand of dance music. Obviously Taylor had learned well from Max and Shellback, with the ‘you-ou’ post-chorus being particularly addictive and the melody being straight-up pop.

Taylor was inspired to write Better Man about her relationship with Mr Harris, and gifted the song to country quartet Little Big Town, whose vocalist Karen Fairchild delivers a song of regret suitably ruefully: ‘I just wish you were a better man’ goes the chorus, which has a real melodic kick that Taylor displayed in her country repertoire.

There’s a bit of a melodic kick in Reputation, an album for which Taylor did no interviews whatsoever. She let the music speak for itself, produced once again by Max Martin. I didn’t enjoy the album on first listen as it sounded too dark and claustrophobic, but over time I grew to appreciate the melodicism of I Did Something Bad, End Game (featuring both Future and Ed Sheeran), Delicate and the magnificent closing track New Year’s Day (‘hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you’). Taylor’s fans were able to stream this album, which meant there were no diamond sales. It’s like Fleetwood Mac following Rumours with Tusk, with one monster being bigger than the other.

In 2019 Taylor returned with a magical song called Me! With Brendon Urie from Panic! At the Disco. In 2018 she changed record labels, moving from Big Machine to Universal (to which the likes of Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Rihanna are signed) and creating a storm when she spoke out against Scooter Braun, Kanye’s representative, when he bought her old catalogue from Big Machine. (Why Universal didn’t buy Big Machine, heaven knows, though it could have been due to the equally ugly saga of artists and their estates suing for loss of property after the reporting of the 2008 warehouse fire.)

The farrago over Taylor’s masters reminds the world that music is a business, as Taylor, the daughter of a banker, knows only too well. It rather took the sheen off the announcement of Lover, album seven, and the release of the album’s second single, You Need to Calm Down, which featured a video in which Katy Perry and Taylor kissed and made up while Taylor promoted equality for all, regardless of gender. The album’s title track, a sweeping triple-time love song whose middle eight is set at a wedding, has a sweet chorus with a proper melody, which makes it stand out on radio, which Taylor used to dominate.

With the 2020 elections for US President occurring during the promotional run for Lover, Taylor’s political views will be aired – she’s from Pennsylvania and lived in Nashville, so can speak for both sides of the aisle – but it should not detract from an impressive catalogue from one of America’s top artists this decade.

Imperial One – Lin-Manuel Miranda: Hamilton (and music inspired by it)

Alexander Hamilton, My Shot, Helpless, Satisfied, Wait For It, The Room Where It Happens, Dear Theodosia, You’ll Be Back, One Last Time, Burn, It’s Quiet Uptown, Who Lives Who Dies Who Tells Your Story. From The Hamilton Mixtape: Wrote My Way Out, Who Tells Your Story, Immigrants (We Get The Job Done)

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman

Dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean

By providence impoverished, in squalor,

Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

With those lines from the opening song Alexander Hamilton, sung live on CBS at the GRAMMY Awards 2016, beamed over from New York, the world had a musical theatre equivalent of Bob Dylan plugging in an electric guitar.

I often think to myself, on hearing a great song or seeing a great film, ‘This is dangerously good.’ What I mean is that the creator and the created thing have the power to win awards, influence other artists and become a yardstick for that genre. The musical’s name in full is ‘Hamilton: An American Musical’, and not just because it is about the Founding Fathers of the American constitution; it’s about hope, friendship, career opportunism, graft and dreams. And, for all of this, every character except King George was played on Broadway by a non-white actor.

I first read about the musical Hamilton in a piece written by author Zadie Smith in the New Yorker magazine that seemed to run to about 15,000 words, but felt too short. The piece was effusive in its praise for the writer, lead performer and maverick Lin-Manuel Miranda (henceforth ‘Lin’). Lin had created his first work as an undergrad. In The Heights updated West Side Story to incorporate Latin rhythms from someone in whose blood Latin music was. In the show, the characters are three-dimensional, rap and sing and dance all at once and drive the story forward with panache. It came to the UK in 2015 where thousands saw it in a tiny venue in Kings Cross.

Hamilton, at the time, had been off-Broadway but was due to move up to the main thoroughfare in August 2015. It was an immigrant’s story which seemed perfect to tell using the idiom of hip-hop, America’s peerless late-twentieth-century export. It might also prompt a slew of musicals inspired by weighty biographies of historical figures; the musical is based on Ron Chernow’s doorstop of a book which Lin took with him on holiday. Originally a mixtape, he spent six years working it into a stage musical, which won 11 TONY Awards and stands above any other musical in the 2010s, including The Book of Mormon and Come From Away. (These, and Moana, will be discussed in the project.)

It was when the musical’s soundtrack was released in autumn 2015 that the local phenomenon went global. The smallish theatre sold out its 1300 seats months in advance, but a nightly raffle ensured the proles could see it at a low price. While the queue formed, and before the cast got into costume, Lin and his cast entertained the crowds with Ham4Ham, a five-minute improvised or planned set. Filmed by keen punters, the world had a free show from the hottest ticket in town, which promoted the show around the world. In winter 2015 they brought the show inside to film Ham4Hams themselves; guests included Weird Al Yankovic, Barack Obama and Jimmy Fallon, and in ‘Groff Week’, Jonathan Groff (who was King George) took centre stage.

The story of Hamilton is actually three stories. In fact, it could easily be a trilogy split over six hours of drama, rather than condensed into three in one night: Alexander Hamilton is the man who founded the Treasury; Thomas Jefferson is the renowned President who succeeds George Washington; Aaron Burr is the scheming VPOTUS, the US Vice-President trying to influence things and win power for himself.

Burr and Hamilton are orphans. Both are educated, driven and hungry to be at the vanguard of this new nation. In an act of charity, Lin has written the score’s best songs – Wait for It and The Room Where It Happens – for Burr. The former, Lin has said in interviews, was written in a hurry after he had to excuse himself from a friend’s party; he got to the shindig, quickly said hello and goodbye, and wrote the line ‘death does not discriminate between the sinners and the saints’, which forms the basis of the song. In it, Burr tells his story – he’s a preacher’s son who is ‘inimitable, I am an original’ – to an r’n’b backing; Usher performed a version on 2016’s The Hamilton Mixtape. It is a sort of Salieri’s aria, with Mozart substitute Hamilton (‘he exhibits no restraint...changes the game’) on Burr’s mind while he plots his own path to success.

Later, in another a ‘behind the arras’ moment, Burr sings how ‘no-one else was in the room where it happened’ when the deal to award New York the Treasury and Washington the country’s capital is agreed. Hamilton, Jefferson and Washington are there, but Burr is locked out. Political machinations fit for a play are instead set to music, with a banjo poking out in the earworm of a chorus. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to ‘build something that’s gonna outlive me’, a noble endeavour.

‘Burr hangs back while Hamilton charges forward,’ Lin said in the New Yorker profile. Ultimately the message is bigger than the characters, something Lin makes clear in his script, which is ‘sung through’ in the manner of an opera. The line ‘Immigrants, we get the job done!’ always gets applause on Broadway; ‘If you got nothing to stand for then what will you fall for?’ and ‘I am not throwing away my shot’ are motivational quotes rooted in universalism and ripe, in this day and age, for fitting in a small box on social media.

My Shot comes within the first ten minutes of the musical. The title puns on the inevitable duel that occurs at the end of the play where Hamilton throws his shot and Burr doesn’t. It’s a stirring summation of Hamilton’s aims with echoes of Lose Yourself by Eminem; it’s his ‘I Want’ song which also spells out his grievances with King George. There’s a three-bar soliloquy in the middle of the number where Hamilton fears he’s ‘talking too loud’, the orphan loner finally finding his crowd, and encouraging them to ‘shout it to the rooftops’. The second half of the number takes the theme of ‘Rise Up’, as Hamilton’s cohorts also realise anarchy and dissent is the way to change things. At all times, Lin is juggling wordplay, rhyme, melody, plot, character and subtext, all the while keeping the audience alert and foreshadowing any character flaws.

The show is driven by the brilliance of Hamilton. His passions for government and his wife Eliza and son are undercut by an affair which drags down his reputation. In the first act, Eliza wants him to ‘take a break’ but Hamilton seems on a mission. The pair’s ‘meet cute’ happens in Helpless, where Angelica Schuyler introduces him to her sister Eliza (‘Look into your eyes and the sky’s the limit/ Down for the count and I’m drowning in ‘em’) and they end up married by the end of the number.

Angelica gets an aria immediately with Satisfied, a wedding toast, in which she tells of her pride but also irritation that the one she spotted has gotten away from her. The song breaks into a rap halfway through which ends with a tender proclamation: ‘At least my dear Eliza’s his wife/ At least I keep his eyes in my life…’ At which point Angelica snaps back into the bridal toast. Eliza has her own aria in the second half: Burn is her lament at being let down by Hamilton, who is a worse husband than a statesman. ‘You build me palaces out of paragraphs’ is Eliza’s sorrowful words, as the letters she kept from him and her entire world are primed to be burned.

The show’s most beautiful song is the lullaby Dear Theodosia, in which Burr and Hamilton both sing to their children (‘I’m dedicating every day to you’, as Burr sings to his daughter). Placed just before the interval, it is a breath of calm air after some stormy warfare where the world is ‘turned upside down’. The most comic song comes from the fool, King George III. You’ll Be Back, with an addictive ‘da-da’ post-chorus, is a lot of fun that takes musical inspiration from British music from the 1960s; strangely, George is cheered on the West End (one of our own!) but hissed at in America since he plans to ‘kill your friends and family to remind you of my love’.

The narrative puts the audience through the ringer emotionally, as with It’s Quiet Uptown, where Eliza and Hamilton mourn the death of their son, Phillip. With a chorus of voices begging people to ‘have pity…He is working through the unimaginable’, Hamilton is a tragic figure who cannot ‘trade his [son’s] life for mine’. The strings and piano on the track, scored by Alex Lacamoire who arranges the soundtrack superbly, again offer peace amid the noise of the politicking.

Lin and the cast visited the White House to celebrate the continuation of Hamilton’s face on the ten-dollar bill; Obama’s patronage helped the reputation of Hamilton. The main cast entered ‘the room where it happens’ to deliver a spoken-word version of the famous Cabinet Rap Battle. At a visit to honour the Obamas in the final year of the Presidency, the cast performed four songs, one of which was One Last Time.

Chris Jackson as Washington and Lin as Hamilton performed it as a duet; in the musical it is sung when President George Washington announces he is stepping down as President to Hamilton’s dismay (‘The nation learns to move on, it outlives me when I’m gone’). As they read the words from real letters, the pair end up speaking in unison in a dramatic moment which sets up the musical’s third act, when Burr and Hamilton move to the inevitable duel.

After the duel comes the musical’s finale, Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story. Eliza starts an orphanage while Angelica is a public servant too, wondering ‘Have I done enough?’ The audience can’t help themselves from reflecting on their own story, having seen a brilliant piece of theatre which has already run on Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre for four years and in London’s Apollo Victoria for two. It will go to Sydney in 2021, joining Chicago as a longterm place where Hamilton’s story is told.

The point of the show is legacy, though America as an immigrant nation is also a major theme. Two centuries on, the Treasury still holds strong and Hamilton’s face still adorns the ten-dollar bill which, amusingly, rappers refer to as Hamiltons. ‘He took our country from bankruptcy to prosperity’ are Washington’s words on him.

In 2016, The Hamilton Mixtape brought songs inspired by the musical as well as other versions (Sia doing Satisfied, Andra Day singing Burn, comedian Jimmy Fallon taking on You’ll Be Back). Wrote My Way Out has Nas and Dave East joining Lin himself (‘Oversensitive, defenceless…I’m relentless’) in taking personal verses about their own origin stories with Aloe Blacc singing the hook; Who Tells Your Story has Common and The Roots meditating on legacy while Ingrid Michaelson takes the hook.

K'naan, Snow Tha Product, Riz MC & Residente (a Puerto Rican rapper) take verses on Immigrants (We Get The Job Done), which is the most striking original track on the album. Feasibly Riz Ahmed, aka Riz MC, could play Hamilton in London; the Englishman of Pakistani heritage has been a stage and screen actor from humble beginnings at Merchant Taylors’ School, which also counts me as a former student (he left just before I joined).

This is a musical that will go hand-in-hand with history as documenting The Obama Years of America, a point hammered home when Vice-President Mike Pence was booed when he saw the production, since he was part of an administration that was very unkind to immigrants. ‘It is rare,’ said President Obama, ‘where a piece of art can remind us about what’s best in ourself.’

Books and articles will be written in future about The Hamilton Effect, if more sung-through musicals inspired by rap are staged in the post-Lin era of musical theatre. Someone has said Sondheim and Gershwin changed musical theatre and to those two Lin-Manuel Miranda should be added. In terms of the 2010s, however, there is no contest about the show of the decade.

Imperial One - Bruno Mars in the 2010s

Nothin’ on You, Fuck You, When I Was Your Man, Locked Out of Heaven, Treasure, 24K Magic, Grenade, Finesse, That’s What I Like, Uptown Funk

Peter Hernandez grew up idolising Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. When he teamed up with songwriter and entertainer Philip Lawrence and producer Ari Levine, the trio would boast of writing a smash, a ‘smeeze’, a ‘smeezington’. The name stuck and The Smeezingtons was the credit on the likes of Fuck You by Cee-Lo Green and Nothin’ on You: on the latter, Bruno sang the hook, drawing out his vowels on ‘girls’ and ‘world’, and B.o.B did a rap in which he praised his beloved for paying her taxes and being ‘the whole package’. It was a massive number one at the very beginning of the decade.

By 2013 the trio were one of the top producers in pop music, behind only Jeff Bhasker and Ryan Lewis and ahead of even Max Martin and Shellback, according to Billboard magazine. Their style took the best of funk, soul, r’n’b and pop, as evidenced on their enormous hits this decade.

Fuck You, or Forget You as the radio edit had, is a monster song. Cee-Lo ‘can’t afford a Ferrari’ and has been ‘hurt so bad’. The middle eight, where Cee-Lo moans ‘why?!’ three times, is the climax of the song (‘I still LOVE YOU!’) while the chorus is a mix of anger and sugar (‘hoo hoo HOO!’)

Grenade, from Bruno’s debut album Doo Wops and Hooligans, is a song I love. Bruno would do anything – catch a grenade, leap in front of a train, take a bullet through his brain – but his girl would do nothing. He’s a fool but the middle eight is extraordinary, probably Bruno’s best, ending in that ‘NEVER! NEVER!’ lyrical hook.

Locked Out of Heaven, the lead single from 2012’s Unorthodox Jukebox, is a monster too with a great and quotable title. ‘Your sex takes me to paradise’ is the bridge, while the chorus has those long held notes beloved of karaoke singers. Then there’s the intro, which doubles as the post-chorus (‘ah yeah yeah…oom!’).

Treasure was even better, an irresistible bit of pop, produced immaculately, with the perfect blend of funky guitar, soulful and syncopated delivery and a heck of a chorus: ‘Treasure! That is what you are!’ I realise a lot of these lyrics have exclamation marks after them, because that is how the song suggests they are to be transcribed.

When I Was Your Man – a song whose lyrics don’t come with exclamation marks but the dabbing away of tears – took Bruno’s mournful vocal and added a gentle piano line full of soulful chords. Often if a song becomes a hit you get ten worse ones entering the charts that ride its coattails (as with Adele’s Someone Like You), but I love the tenderness of Bruno’s delivery as he remembers dancing and being with the girl whom he has lost.

24K Magic was album three, released in 2016, and the title track became the lead single. The production is even better, though it is now Jeff Bhasker who hops on to the board to twiddle some knobs on the album. He didn’t work on the title track, which is credited to Shampoo Press & Curl, the moniker of Mars, Lawrence and newcomer Christopher Brody Brown. As with Locked Out of Heaven, the fun video was directed by Cameron Duddy, who spent the end of the decade in fake country band Midland.

24K Magic the song became the GRAMMY Record of the Year, which is awarded on the production and sound of a song: it takes elements of funk, disco, soul and r’n’b and sonically namechecks the likes of Zapp & Roger, Jam & Lewis and Chic. It’s basically the black American sound in four minutes with Bruno pratting on about how ‘so many pretty girls around me and they’re waking up the rocket!’. The lyrical hook of ‘pinkie finger to the moon!’ is fun, and the chorus has an irresistible synth(!) hook. It’s 24K hooks!!

Then came the second single from the album, That’s What I Like, the GRAMMY Song of the Year from the GRAMMY Album of the Year. 1.5bn Youtube viewers can’t be wrong. It helped Mars join Jewel and Ed Sheeran as an act who had two songs in the Hot 100 top ten for over half a year. That’s What I Like was ranked third in 2017’s Year-End chart, behind only Shape of You and Despacito. That’s what his accountant likes!!

I’ll note the remix of Finesse, which is a homage to the musical style known as New Jack Swing, pioneered by Teddy Riley in the 1980s. Cardi B, the most successful female rapper of the current era, adds a verse about her ‘money dance’ before Bruno sings about how ‘they don’t make no scent’ called Finesse. The middle eight, as is characteristic of Bruno’s work, is brilliant, as he exhorts the men to grab their lady and vice versa. Musically and in the production, Finesse is terrific and a good time party song to rival those of Prince’s band The Time (who once counted Jam and Lewis among their ranks) and any number of funk bands from the golden era.

Uptown Funk, meanwhile, was the monster of monsters.

Mark Ronson spent months fine-tuning the guitar part, which was given the blessing of his friend Nile Rodgers. Mark had risen to prominence in the mid-2000s with his album Version, taking songs like Valerie and Stop Me and bending them into new shapes with the assistance of the Dap Horns. He then worked magic with Amy Winehouse, whose album Back to Black was produced by Mark and again featured those horns.

Nobody could have predicted the success of Uptown Funk, which draws inspiration from Oops Up Side Your Head for its final few minutes. Jeff Bhasker helped write and produce it. The reason it works is because you can clap along to the beat, dance during the chorus (‘Don’t believe me? Just watch!’) and sing any number of lyrical hooks: ‘Michelle Pfieffer, that white gold!’, ‘stylin’, wildin’, ‘gotta kiss myself I’m so pretty!’, ‘too hot, hot damn!’, ‘call the police and the fireman!’, ‘make a dragon wanna retire!’, ‘stop! Wait a minute!’, ‘Julio! Get the stretch!’, ‘Harlem! Hollywood! Jackson Mississippi!’, ‘smoother than a fresh jar of Skippy!’ and ‘uptown funk you up!’ are 11 of them, again with the trademark Martian Exclamation Point.

As for the music, it is grounded by a bass voice scatting, as heard at the start of the song. The layers of gang vocals in unison match the harmony of the horns and guitar, with an infectious funk stab in the chorus. The last minute is pure joy as uptown funks you up, with Bruno playing the entertainer.

There’s an extraordinary performance of the song on Saturday Night Live from the end of 2014, two weeks after its release, which remains my favourite reading of the song and could conceivably go on for 20 minutes like some kind of James Brown wig-out. Seven weeks at the top of the UK charts and 14 on top in America makes it one of the most successful songs ever; only three songs have a bigger run at the top of the Hot 100, and one of them is the awful I Gotta Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas.

The video is another Cameron Duddy production, with Bruno and his mates dossing around outdoors, creeping up to a low camera for the ‘Too hot, hot damn!’ parts. Only three music videos have been viewed more times on Youtube: Despacito, Shape of You and See You Again. Uptown Funk even overtook Gangnam Style, though Baby Shark is hot on its heels.

In any reasonable review of the 2010s, Bruno Mars looms large.

Imperial One - Ed Sheeran in the 2010s

The A Team, Sing, Thinking Out Loud, Castle on the Hill, Perfect, Shape of You, Galway Girl, 2002, I Don’t Care

All Ed Sheeran wants is to make Damien Rice proud.

The lad from Framlingham who didn’t go to uni or even BRIT School (both little-known facts) has become perhaps the single most successful beneficiary of the streaming era. How has he done it?

Ed Sheeran is all things to all people. He’s a busker who can write award-winning songs about teenage drug addicts set to acoustic backing – The A Team won him the Ivor Novello award when he was only 21 – and songs you can walk down the aisle to, as my cousin did at his wedding. Both Perfect and Thinking Out Loud are love songs that are designed for Magic FM and Steve Wright’s Sunday show on Radio 2, even if one is Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton (‘you look perfect tonight’) and the latter is Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye (same chord progression in a different key). I remember messaging the co-writer of Thinking Out Loud congratulating her on her future GRAMMY award: I know a classic when I hear it. I also marvelled at how the song had a fine structure, with the ‘people fall in love’ bridge key to the song’s catchiness.

I also admire how Ed picks his collaborators. Pharrell Williams co-wrote the two-chord jam Sing, with its woah-ful chorus and percussive delivery that is Ed’s trademark, influenced by black music in the UK. In 2010 his Collaborations Project included duets with Wiley, JME and Ghetts, among others, while Stormzy contributed a verse to a remix of Shape of You.

That song, released in the first days of 2017, will go down as one of Ed’s biggest tracks. Knowing his way around the radio dial, he put out Shape of You to be promoted to pop radio and Castle on the Hill for rock radio for mature audiences. He’s no idiot; he and Taylor Swift trade spreadsheets and vie for the status of top pop dog.

The allure of Shape of You is in the 12-note bajon rhythm that starts in bar one and continues throughout the song; it’s a love song which starts at a bar and moves to a buffet over which the couple ‘talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour’, then they get in a cab and hear Ed’s song in a meta commentary on Ed’s ubiquity.

Castle on a Hill starts with Ed breaking his leg at the age of six and moves to a childhood of bliss in Framlingham, home of the eponymous castle. The third verse spins forward to see what his mates are up to now (‘one’s brother overdosed’) and the pull of nostalgia; Ed owns a house in Fram and all reports say he is a nice neighbour, although one keen to build a swimming pool which upsets some of the nimbys.

Ed fought for the inclusion of Galway Girl, a three-minute advert not sponsored by the Irish tourist board, on Divide. I’ve always loved the song, and it did folk band Beoga’s career the world of good. Even when Ed isn’t on the charts, he follows the Bee Gees route in giving his songs away. Hilariously he had forgotten giving Justin Bieber a song which turned into a big hit but Ed definitely remembers Love Yourself and 2002. The latter, a hit for Anne-Marie, features Ed on backing vocals uncredited; the Essex-born singer is signed to his record label and her delivery is very Sheeranic, which is the adjective I have just coined.

Come summer 2019, Ed finally had a Song of the Summer – Shape of You dominated winter into spring 2017, while Perfect was the 2017 Christmas number one – with the lead single from his new Collaborations Project. The cast list was like an Avengers film: Khalid, Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Stormzy, Yebba (who popped up on Mark Ronson’s 2019 release), Eminem and 50 Cent, Travis Scott, Ella Mai, Dave, H.E.R., Skrillex and Chris Stapleton & Bruno Mars.

As the album rollout cantered on, I Don’t Care remained at the top of the UK charts, holding off Old Town Road. Funny how it topped the charts in the UK and not the US because of the subject matter of the song: both Justin Bieber (‘crippled with anxiety’) and Ed are at a party with their lovely lady, who makes it bearable. You can also tell Max Martin is involved because of the strongly melodic bridge part (‘don’t think I fit in at the party’) and the ‘ooh-ooh-ooh’ bit in the chorus sounds like a joke.

The same weekend in August 2019 saw Ed play to 40,000 in a park in his home city of Ipswich and, days later, be subject of a headline in the Sunday Times which casted doubt over the originality of his ideas. Shaggy had to be credited on the song Strip That Down because the songs had rhythmic similarities. Photograph and Shape of You were both subject of lawsuits, the latter prompted by Sami Switch. He had sent Ed’s team a song and alleged that Shape Of You unfairly stole elements of the 2015 song Oh Why; Ed countersued and the case is ongoing.

2010 for the 2010s

The ‘Twenty-Teens’ has been one of the scariest decades in the history of the world.

Though there has been no Black Death, flu pandemics or genocide, humans seem more frazzled and wired than ever before.

Through it all, live and recorded music has provided a soundtrack to the march of human life.

From January 1 2010 to December 31 2019, popular music has given people comfort, joy and companionship.

In the 2010s project, I hope to offer 2010 songs for those ten years. There are roughly 201 songs for every year, with all songs considered. Pop, rock, independently minded, major label, jazz, rap or hiphop, country, the blues, new age, soundtrack and syncs, African hi-life, Scandinavian power-pop, hardcore punk, reggaeton, electronic, lo-fidelity, soul, rhythm and blues, Kanye West…

Just as global events progress, and one Prime Minister or President follows another, so people dance, clap and sing along to popular sounds.

Join me on my journey to find 2010 songs for the 2010s!

Hello

Welcome to my website, JonnyBrick.com!

It’s a chance for me to show my work in one handy place. You can leap to another site from here, be it my collection of essays on pop music from 1984 to today at nowthatswhaticallnow.com or my country music criticism at countrywol.com.

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Jonny Brick