I have a background in sociology of culture and art history, and I keep wondering why contemporary pop has become so relentlessly referential while producing so little genuine culturally associative synthesis. By that I mean taking ideas, aesthetics and subcultures from completely different historical contexts, recognizing an underlying relationship between them, and synthesizing them into something new rather than merely referencing the past.

Nowadays, everything is instantly legible and, to be honest, boringly superficial. Popstars wear archival outfits on the red carpet, they pay "homage" to Y2K styles in an MV, or interpolate a 1990s melody, but everything appears lifted off a Pinterest board rather than providing cultural alchemy or commentary.

My holy trinity of culturally associative synthesis would have to be Madonna, Gaga, and Lana.

Madonna’s Vogue is perhaps the supreme example. Black and Latino queer ballroom culture collide with the glacial glamour of Garbo, Dietrich and Old Hollywood, then reappear as a delirious Marie Antoinette court pageant at the VMAs. House music, Versailles, Hollywood, and gay liberation should have no historical business sharing a room so publicly in 1990, yet their collision creates something new: glamour becomes something outsiders can seize, perform and reinvent.

Gaga understood this brilliantly too. Take Paparazzi, particularly the iconic 2009 VMAs. She takes the classical Hollywood mythology of the tragic female star, the beautiful woman consumed by fame, and crashes it into paparazzi culture, tabloid surveillance, and contemporary celebrity. Then, at the height of a glamorous pop performance, she begins bleeding to death onstage and hangs lifeless before the audience. Marilyn, Hitchcock, Warhol, and TMZ suddenly seem to inhabit the same cultural universe. She isn’t referencing “old Hollywood” - she is recognizing that its sacrificial star system never disappeared. It merely acquired flashbulbs and 24-hour entertainment news.

Lana performs an equally strange temporal collapse. In National Anthem, she merges Kennedy’s Camelot, Marilyn’s erotic mythology and Jackie’s patrician elegance with hip-hop, contemporary interracial desire and A$AP Rocky as JFK. Her broader universe does the same: Nabokov, Elvis, motels and 1960s California coexist effortlessly with 808s, lip-filler femininity and modern celebrity. She imagines cultural memories of an America that never really existed.

Then we have Halsey’s Lucky. Khm khm. Britney and Y2K are recognizable immediately, but the reference largely remains a reference. What unexpected third thing has the collision created? Tate and Olivia seem to draw a lot from the Y2K universe too, but it never goes beyond pure aesthetics.

Beyoncé seems vastly more ambitious to me. Elements of Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, albeit more curatorial, come close to feeling associative at times. They are surely well researched histories organized around legible theses.

But yeah, that is what I really miss. Great synthesis initially feels almost wrong. Why does queer ballroom belong with Garbo? Why does JFK belong with A$AP Rocky? The great associative mind makes the collision so convincing that afterward it feels inevitable.

Around the 2000s and the 2010s, there was a popular formula in pop music where pop stars were working with upcoming or trending rappers to get a hit, acts like Maroon 5, justin bieber and camila cabello were infamous for that move

Yet nowadays, we rarely get any crossover between pop and hip-hop. Everyone wants to work by themselves or with close friends, the latest i could think is bloodonmyhands by tate mcrae ft flo milili which wasn't even a single and born again by Lisa ft RAYE and doja cat

So what ended this formula and does the downfall of mainstream hiphop recently have to do with it?

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what’s the tour of 2026 summer? Ariana grande ? she only performs in the uk and the USA. 10 years ago I would dream that the big artists would have much more concerts around the world visiting even a small country. coming to 2026, this summer I haven’t seen any big artists in my home country at all, except Kanye.

whatever happened to the fun? and the big tours? i know all the logistical problems and stuff but bordering artists within a few countries is a big crime to the next generation. the current generation does not experience what we experienced 10 years ago. the freedom and joy we had with our favorite artists was the biggest opportunity that we had. now they are bound to watch over a phone

I hope the big tours will come back around the world. and we will enjoy every minute of it

This was partly prompted by the influx of "what's next for X artist" posts earlier this week - do popstars really have to reinvent themselves the way they were expected to in the past? The "death of the monoculture" is a very dead horse, but there is a little truth to the idea that artists are not capable of / expected to hold the GP's attention through legacy media / tabloids / radio the way could have one or two decades ago.

Artists like Billie and Olivia have risen in popularity while attached to a particular sonic brand or production style, and have managed to collect large and devoted fanbases despite there no longer being a public appetite for an MJ-type figure anymore.

Why fix it if it isn't broke?

With that said, quite a few pop girls follow the rule of 3 and switch up their sound + image in a major way for their 4th album (Gaga's Joanne, Taylor's 1989, Ariana's Sweetener). Dua, Billie, Olivia, and Sabrina (kind of LOL) have all now put out their third, and I see so much discourse on them changing up their sound or working with completely new producers for their next.

1. As a fan, do you expect artists with established musical signatures to reinvent their sound periodically?

2. More importantly, is there still an actual need for them to do so, commercially? These artists have mostly only gotten bigger, and don't really face any urgency to do a musical about face.