Across all corners of the music industry, artists were big on bragging in 2024. They were arrogant, they loved themselves, and they made no apologies for it—they were brats, if you will. It’s so obvious that the artist who popularized the term, Charli xcx, is your number one. Kendrick Lamar deserves it all. Tyler, the Creator doesn’t just have the light on him—he is the light. Taylor Swift may be tortured, but in the end, it’s really all about her.
It would be easy to write off all this self-evangelism as a symptom of our increasingly narcissistic society. This isn’t the first year musicians have talked about how awesome and important they are, and it certainly won’t be the last. But there’s a self-protective edge to these lyrics that’s hard to miss. To paint this trend as hollow vanity of the same type we’ve seen countless times before would be to obfuscate the message these artists are actually trying to get out—one they all seem to be screaming.
Even though Chappell Roan released her smash-hit The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess in 2023 (an album full of the same femininomenal hyperbole as above), it would be impossible to have this conversation—or really any about music in 2024—without her. Midwest Princess didn’t really find purchase in the mainstream until April, when new single “Good Luck, Babe!” and an impeccably timed Coachella performance vaulted Roan into honest-to-goodness superstardom pretty much overnight. From the outside, she looked to be living any previously niche artist’s—nay, anyone’s—wildest dream. Suddenly, she became the de facto headliner at nearly every festival she attended, courting pink cowboy hat-clad crowds who pushed and shoved for a space in front of the small stage. It was the kind of thing that would have seemed almost too unrealistic if it had been written for a film. But just a few weeks after drawing the largest crowd Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival had ever seen, the 26-year-old singer did something even more unprecedented: She told the truth.
“For the past 10 years I’ve been going non-stop to build my project and it’s come to the point that I need to draw lines and set boundaries,” Roan’s now-infamous Instagram post began. “I want to be an artist for a very long time. I’ve been in too many nonconsensual physical and social interactions and I just need to lay it out and remind you, women don’t owe you shit. I chose this career path because I love music and art and honoring my inner child, I do not accept harassment of any kind because I chose this path, nor do I deserve it.”
The backlash was swift. “Fans” spoke of entitlement, a bad attitude, and a lack of generosity, as if, because they vaulted her into the stratosphere, Roan owed them either perpetual grace or a performance of the same type of impenetrable bravado captured in the lyrics above. It got so bad that she began to fear for her own safety, as well as her family’s. “Part of me hopes I never have a hit again because then no one will ever expect anything from me again,” she told Rolling Stone in the aftermath.
But along with the backlash came an outpouring of support, especially from industry peers like Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers, and Charli xcx. In the latter’s case, it may be because Brat, underneath all those party-girl trappings, is a deeply similar project. Its beats signal a club classic, but the album’s lyrics tell a different story—one of a vulnerable, honest, and at times wholly insecure “young girl from Essex” (to borrow Lorde’s characterization), just trying to balance the forces of her irreconcilable inner and outer lives. Across songs like “I Might Say Something Stupid,” “Rewind,” and “I Think About It All The Time,” Charli paints herself as an incredibly canny curator of her own image, both 100 percent in charge and inextricably trapped by the paradoxes of her position. “I’m famous but not quite / But I’m perfect for the background / One foot in a normal life,” she sings on “I Might Say Something Stupid,” a perfect distillation of an experience that may not be the best of both worlds, despite what Hannah Montana promised so many years ago. On “I Think About It All The Time,” a radically honest song about weighing the pros and cons of motherhood, she further admits that her “career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.”
That line was written before lime green became the de facto color of 2024. It was written before “brat” was chosen as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year or the term found its way into Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. It was also written before the release of Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, the four-months-later remix album that transformed Brat from a very good project into an extraordinary one. It’s not often that we get to watch an artist process what it means to become a supernova in real time, and Brat 2.0 absolutely delivered. While she could have treated the release as a simple victory party with all her famous friends, Charli instead recognized the potential of the vehicle she had created for herself and told the rest of the world why she had to put up that brattish sheen in the first place. Being famous, just like being a girl, is so confusing. “It’s a knife whеn you’re finally on top / ‘Cause logically the nеxt step is they wanna see you fall,” she sings on the “Sympathy Is A Knife” remix with Ariana Grande. On the new version of “So I,” she reflects that dancing on stage with late artist Sophie in 2016 is “as cool as I’m ever gonna feel”—long before the charts, stadiums, and fanaticism. But it’s on the remixed version of “I Think About It All The Time” (featuring Bon Iver) that she bleeds the most by far. “First off, you’re bound to the album / Then you’re locked into the promo / Next thing, three years have gone by… But there’s so much guilt involved when we stop working/’Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working,” she sings of trying to plan a future and perhaps even a family with her fiancé, George Daniel. One gets the sense that if Charli was actually running out of time, as she says she fears in the song’s chorus, she knows exactly which way she would run.
It’s fitting that Bon Iver was featured on that particular remix, because he also released an album this year—his first since 2019—meant to “unpack years of built-up darkness” he had acquired while “playing the part” of Bon Iver, as he wrote in the EP’s liner notes. Across the three songs that make up SABLE, (yes the comma is part of the title), Justin Vernon, the brain behind the Bon Iver moniker, went back to the building blocks that made him famous in 2007. Accompanied almost solely by his acoustic guitar, he apologizes, strips bare, and, in the space left by the absence of the constant pressure he calls a “metaphorical bruise,” is finally able to create anew. It was the isolation and forced pause caused by the pandemic that saved not only his career but his physical health, he explained. The anxiety of constantly having to perform—both onstage and in his personal life—had started to give him “literal physical symptoms.” It was only through resetting completely that he could begin to heal.
But while Bon Iver’s delayed pandemic album is an extreme example, Vernon wasn’t the only musician to delve into the ways fame, fortune, and public adoration are anathema to the creative process this year. Kendrick Lamar had perhaps the biggest run of his career in 2024 between the firestorm of “Not Like Us” and his surprise album, GNX. Still, he used part six of his “The Heart” song series to reminisce about the times he and Jay Rock used to smoke weed, laugh together, and make music on Pro Tools, long before he tried to “place [his] skillset as a Black exec.” His message for the youth? “Don’t let the socials gas you up or let emotions be your crutch / Pick up the phone and bust it up before the history is lost.” Life as a Black exec doesn’t leave much time for earnest, easy friendship or unbridled creative exploration. At least Lamar could metaphorically press rewind by carving out a space for his memories and curling up within his own lyrics.
But while isolation helped (or perhaps would have helped) some artists connect with what really matters, others expressed a very reasonable desire to live their lives outside the walls of their homes without feeling swarmed or accosted. “Things feel out of order/Look and look around, I’m not sure of/Pair of paranoia… Living between cameras and recorders/I want peace but can’t afford ya,” Tyler, the Creator sang on “Noid,” a Chromakopia track he paired with a video featuring Ayo Edebiri as a crazed fan. (She gets it, of course.) It’s the same thing Roan touched on in her Instagram post when she wrote about the “predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has become normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.” She just wants to giggle with her friends and go to a movie theater without feeling like she’s living through the “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror, like “every single person deserves to do.” The prize for achieving pop superstardom shouldn’t be a worldwide panopticon.
The horrors of one’s personhood becoming an entity for public consumption are nothing new. On one hand, it does seem like parasociality has ramped up with the advent of social media and presumed around-the-clock access to the stars. Here at The A.V. Club, we talked a lot in 2023 about the bizarre epidemic of terrible concert etiquette, and it follows that that bad behavior would eventually shift its focus to the singers themselves. Still, artists have always had to deal with some aspect of this culture of constant surveillance, no matter when they came up. What’s changed is that they finally seem to be empowering each other to speak out about it, no matter what their so-called “fans” may say.
But without a major cultural heel-turn that may never come, anyone who, in Roan’s words, “want(s) to be an artist for a very very long time” must necessarily deal with some aspect of this terrifying adulation if they want their work to be recognized. So they develop a thick skin and call themselves your “new addiction,” all while tending to their own metaphorical bruises as soon as the lights go down. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die,” as Taylor Swift wrote on The Tortured Poets Department‘s “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” a song about dealing with a secret pain while touring that she then performed on said tour night after night. “All the piеces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting, ‘More’ / I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’ / I was hittin’ my marks / ‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart,” she continued in the song’s chorus. If people are really listening, maybe next year she and the rest of her peers won’t have to.
However, Chappell Roan was far from the only artist to make such a bold decision. In fact, several other musicians and performers followed suit, choosing to distance themselves from the pressures of mainstream success and instead prioritize their artistic integrity.
From indie rock bands to pop superstars, many artists in 2024 took a stand against the commercialization of their craft and the demands of the industry. Whether it was turning down lucrative endorsement deals, refusing to conform to industry expectations, or simply stepping out of the spotlight altogether, these artists made it clear that their artistry was not for sale.
In a world where fame and fortune often come at a cost, it’s refreshing to see artists like Chappell Roan and others reject the trappings of celebrity in order to stay true to themselves and their music. And while their decisions may have raised eyebrows in the industry, their commitment to authenticity and creative freedom serves as a powerful reminder that success doesn’t always have to come at the expense of artistic integrity.
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Chappell Roan, rejecting fame, 2024 music scene, artist rejection, music industry trends, rising artists, music career choices, fame vs. authenticity, Chappell Roan music, artist spotlight
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