In the early 2010s, pop culture was at the peak of a maximalist high. People wore T-shirts and baseball hats emblazoned with neon “YOLO”s (You Only Live Once) and listened to hyper-climactic pop bangers and rap odes to “molly” (the millennial term for MDMA). There was Ludacris ft Usher and David Guetta’s Rest of My Life with its soaring notes and Nietzsche-via-Kanye lines about cheating death and getting stronger, LMFAO’s apocalyptic Party Rock Anthem and Miley Cyrus’s nihilistic We Can’t Stop, which doubled as celebration and cry for help.
But by 2016, YOLO was out and chill was in: “Chill pop is the new music trend that isn’t going anywhere,” read one headline in August 2016. That year’s most successful EDM act were the Chainsmokers, a duo commonly described as “chilled-out” and “lukewarm”. As Slate music critic Chris Molanphy explained, the fact that their mega-hit Closer turns its first “drop” – the thunderous climax of club-rattling electronic dance music – into a “downshift” signalled a comedown from all that YOLO maximalism. It was, as he put it: “The end of an era.”
In this new era, YOLO feels less like a rallying cry and more like a threat. Washington Post pop music critic Chris Richards argues that in “today’s freaked-out America”, pop stars, like the rest of us, turn to drugs like Xanax“to numb the agony of existence”. According to Richards, pop audiences like to hear a similarly numbing effect in music: “Comfort zones are hard to find in Donald Trump’s America … We used to want to have our minds blown. Now, we’d prefer to have our minds massaged.” Songwriters now aim to “mitigate intensity” rather than build it, and remain well within “comfort zones … instead of forging new sounds or fresh styles”.
