{"id":1161,"date":"2026-08-01T10:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-01T10:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1161"},"modified":"2026-08-01T10:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-01T10:42:09","slug":"forget-albums-pop-stars-measure-their-careers-in-eras-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1161","title":{"rendered":"Forget Albums\u2014Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Earlier this year, Charli XCX starred in \u201cThe Moment,\u201d a mockumentary that pits the singer against record-company executives who want it to be \u201cBrat Summer Forever.\u201d The marketing plan seems designed to gall Charli, who has made a career out of hard pivots and clean breaks with past versions of herself. Yet the suits might be on to something. Even on a burning planet, it can\u2019t be summer forever. But it can be in a pop song. The stupid wisdom of \u201cBrat Summer Forever\u201d lies in how it recognizes the tricks that pop music plays with time: with one hand, suspending it and, with the other, marking it out for us in neat segments.<\/p>\n

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In May, a few months after \u201cThe Moment\u201d was released, ahead of a summer without a name\u2014Heat-Dome Summer? Red-Sun Summer? Cyclosporiasis Summer?\u2014Charli made a heel turn that would have confounded the fictional label bosses. \u201cRock Music,\u201d the first single from her upcoming album \u201cMusic, Fashion, Film,\u201d marked the end of Brat Summer and the beginning of something else. \u201cI think the dance floor is dead\u00a0\/ So now we\u2019re making rock music,\u201d Charli drawls, digitally elongating the vowel in \u201crock\u201d into a metallic stutter\u2014a \u201cMy Generation\u201d moment for the post-hyperpop age. Some fans welcomed what they immediately dubbed the \u201cCharli rock era,\u201d but others wondered if the whole thing was a joke. Even with its ultraprocessed guitars and occasional bursts of drums, \u201cRock Music\u201d is not quite rock music. But it\u2019s not not<\/em> rock music. The song tests how far we\u2019re willing to go along with its account of both Charli\u2019s present and our own. Another single, fittingly titled \u201cWink Wink,\u201d makes the same challenge from a different angle. \u201cI\u2019m not a bad girl anymore, I promise,\u201d the chorus goes, before immediately undercutting itself with an arch \u201cwink wink wink wink.\u201d<\/p>\n

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These songs poke at our contradictory desires. On balance, we\u2019d prefer pop stars to exist outside of time, preserved exactly as they were at the height of their powers, or during a particularly memorable season of our own lives. The reunited Backstreet Boys, currently in residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, offer a telling graphic in their \u201cInto the Millennium\u201d show: the Boys\u2019 faces frozen into a mountainside\u2014the icy rictus of pop monumentality, playing the hits night after night in Ultima Thule. Artists big and small are used to keeping their material on ice, playing their classic albums front to back whenever they get within spitting distance of a significant anniversary. The first two shows of Jay-Z\u2019s recent three-night run at Yankee Stadium celebrated the respective thirtieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries of \u201cReasonable Doubt\u201d and \u201cThe Blueprint,\u201d a fittingly conservative way for him to return to the limelight amid sexual-assault allegations (which he has denied) and lingering questions about his relationship with Diddy. Fans can receive new material with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In response to the announcement of Olivia Rodrigo\u2019s latest album, one fan wrote on Reddit, \u201cI really hope she didn\u2019t grow as an artist. I want the same exact vibe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And yet we do expect pop stars to grow. We want them to keep surprising us, collecting new experiences that we can share vicariously through their music. In 2010, Jay Caspian Kang argued that pop divas need adversity in order to achieve greatness: \u201cTo be a true diva,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe singer must make us feel her pain\u201d; she must take us on an \u201cemotional journey.\u201d Some sixteen years later, pop Bildung<\/em> abounds, thanks largely to online fan communities who can weave the most obscure ephemera into epic tales of redemption. See, for example, the jubilant arc of Dua Lipa\u2014less a purveyor of emotional journeys than of bulletproof club bangers and tasteful book recommendations\u2014whose stilted dancing once inspired the infamous backhanded comment: \u201cI love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!\u201d Fans crave these lows, if only to make their idols\u2019 eventual victory on the charts all the more satisfying.<\/p>\n

The idea of artists reinventing themselves every few years, in art and in life, is, of course, not new. Madonna, the original type of the modern pop star, has made her transformation over the decades into an artistic medium just as supple as her music. For a while, this kind of durational performance was mostly the province of Madonna\u2019s artier heirs, such as Lady Gaga. Today, though, even the most milquetoast artists are positioned as the protagonists of grand story lines, their careers measured not in albums but in eras. \u201cWhat are all of BTS\u2019s eras in order?,\u201d one fan on a discussion forum asks, as if cramming for a test. 2023 was said to have marked the end of Ed Sheeran\u2019s \u201cmathematics era,\u201d possibly because he ran out of mathematical symbols to title his records. An era encompasses both the music and its surrounding lore: in BTS\u2019s case, the ongoing cinematic universe of their music videos; in Sheeran\u2019s, the longer arc of the singer\u2019s transition from middle-of-the road folk balladry to middle-of-the-road R.\u00a0&\u00a0B. Even Dua Lipa\u2019s clumsy dancing ended up being part of her pilgrim\u2019s progress: it signalled a slough of despond that fans call a \u201cflop era.\u201d Taylor Swift\u2019s innovation, with the Eras Tour, was to take this bit of fan-speak and make it the motive principle behind her live show. Swifties have long taken Taylor\u2019s emotional journey to be their own. A show that replayed that journey over a single night would be almost unbearably profound.<\/p>\n

In the course of its hundred and forty-nine performances, the Eras Tour literally inscribed itself into geological time, the vibrations from the stomping fans registering on the Richter scale. Night after night, Swift would perform for more than three hours, running back her career one era at a time, each one its own world with distinctive sets, costumes, and colors. Curiously, the show\u2019s rapid jumps in time and mood were nonlinear; there was no narrative conceit holding everything together. The effect was less like watching a time-lapse than hurtling across a social-media feed. Swift herself described her vision for the tour in these terms: \u201cYou\u2019re seeing something new every fifteen to thirty seconds, and so it feels like you\u2019re scrolling in an algorithm.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When the Eras Tour started, in 2023, Swift had been at war with the shadowy entities that owned her recordings\u2014first, the bosses of her former label Big Machine Records, then the mogul Scooter Braun, who bought Big Machine, in 2019. Partially out of spite and partially out of determination to wrest back some control over her music, Swift set out on the quixotic \u201cTaylor\u2019s Version\u201d project, rerecording her classic albums nearly note for note and releasing them through her new home label, Republic Records. In 2025, flush with funds after the tour\u2019s end, Swift finally bought her original masters back from Shamrock Capital, the private-equity firm that had purchased them from Braun.<\/p>\n

From one perspective, the Eras Tour was a triumphant celebration of the star\u2019s ability to reclaim her own work. But from another, it was something eerier: a necro-pop spectacle, proof of the exhumed past\u2019s continued dominance over the present. As Tyler Foggatt wrote in this publication, the Eras Tour was \u201ca show fit for a late-career Las Vegas residency.\u201d Fans, Foggatt noted, caught the morbid vibe\u2014as one wrote, \u201cThis is what I imagine a farewell concert to be. Like, the last show you do in your life.\u201d When I caught the Eras Tour over live stream, I couldn\u2019t help thinking of a line in a song, by the underappreciated psychedelic-rock band Cotton Mather: \u201cSome can make a career out of just trying to say goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The morbidity implicit in the Eras Tour has become explicit in other marquee post-COVID<\/em> pop tours. The performances on the Weeknd\u2019s mega-selling After Hours til Dawn Tour issue from a ruined post-apocalyptic cityscape; the singer, flanked by red-cloaked dancers reminiscent of imperial guards from \u201cStar Wars,\u201d dons a mask and acts out a vague story line that plays his career loosely in reverse. Katy Perry\u2019s Lifetimes Tour, performed on an infinity-sign-shaped stage, imagined a campier apocalypse: a cyborg version of Perry fights an evil A.I. that is exterminating the world\u2019s butterflies, summoning her classic outfits and set pieces along the way. Unlike Swift, these artists use narrative devices to give some connective tissue to the succession of hits. These devices seem to share a conviction, however vague or coded, that the present is a wasteland bereft of life and color. The only hope for redemption is to borrow vitality from the past.<\/p>\n

Maybe future historians will look back on the pop mega-tours of this moment and see obvious COVID<\/em> symptoms. The pandemic, after all, sliced history definitively into an unknowing before, an interminable during, and a maybe-one-day after. The return to a golden age of normalcy was one of the most powerful pandemic-era fantasies. But COVID<\/em>\u2019s fingerprint on the Eras era may also be more direct. Ticket prices for the top world tours spiked some fifty per cent between 2019 and 2024, significantly outpacing inflation. By the time venues reopened, touring artists were returning to a market where live shows had become more of an exclusive luxury product than ever before. Perhaps the only way to give fans their money\u2019s worth was to make the cataclysm they\u2019d lived through feel like an epic shared history.<\/p>\n

Then again, too much history all at once can give you amnesia. History, the late literary critic Fredric Jameson did not quite say, is what hits you in the head. Overwhelmed fans reported blacking out at the Eras Tour, all memories of the night dumped. (Swift later joked that she was delighted to hear this: \u201cI think we did it!\u201d she said on Travis Kelce\u2019s podcast.) All the more fitting, then, that amnesia is the central theme in Ariana Grande\u2019s Eternal Sunshine Tour, under way this summer. The narrative frame for the tour, Grande\u2019s first since 2019, is a gloomy sci-fi conceit reminiscent of those of Perry\u2019s and the Weeknd\u2019s shows. In a series of video interludes that break up the performance into acts, Grande plays Peaches, a woman who wants to undergo a procedure to erase her painful memories. (Grande has explored this character before, both in music videos and in the 2025 short film \u201cBrighter Days Ahead,\u201d a companion to her 2024 album and a tribute to Michel Gondry\u2019s \u201cEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.\u201d) Peaches, we gather, is a singer, and we are encouraged to imagine Grande\u2019s live performance as an enactment of Peaches\u2019s memories.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s hard not to see the whole concept as an allegory for the tragedy that has marked Grande\u2019s own life. Between the deadly suicide bombing at her concert in Manchester, in 2017, and the 2018 death of her close friend and ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, just months after the two separated, she no doubt has more than her share of things she\u2019d rather forget. Still, the Eternal Sunshine Tour is bullish on the past. At the climax of the show, having seen the value in her past experiences, Peaches decides that she doesn\u2019t want to go through with the procedure. (It\u2019s essentially a heady reiteration of her breezy 2019 single \u201cThank U, Next.\u201d) After a few more songs, the show concludes with Grande being beamed up into a giant ring-shaped screen suspended over the stage, where she vanishes; on the screen, Peaches and her older and younger selves have a final reconciliation. It should have been morbid or cheesy, but the visual delight of seeing the singer lifted into the air\u2014all while she riffs acrobatically over \u201cSupernatural\u201d\u2014obliterates any skepticism. The sheer vocal power Grande calls from somewhere in her fragile-looking body lifts the gloom and lets the sunshine in. For a moment, the past seems not to weigh on the present but to float above it like a halo.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it keeps playing on a loop. Whereas Grande\u2019s assumption is the most visually astonishing part of the show, the most compelling musical performance of the night comes during \u201cEternal Sunshine.\u201d Grande begins the song by looping a series of vocal lines, a cappella and live. As the loops build, the lines glance off one another, ricocheting back and forth\u2014an on-the-nose but effective arrangement for a song about being in a holding pattern. \u201cGet me out of this loop,\u201d she sings at one point\u2014and, later, \u201cI try to wipe my mind.\u201d Another allegory briefly peeks through: maybe the cycle she\u2019s trapped in is nothing less than the greatest-hits reel itself, the imperative to keep playing the old songs. Maybe it would be better to give us nothing than to give us the triumphal procession of one era after another.<\/p>\n

One era after another is not a bad way to describe the narrative arc of Billy Joel\u2019s \u201cWe Didn\u2019t Start the Fire,\u201d a song that arrived in 1989, right at the supposed end of history. The late poet and scholar Joshua Clover wrote about the queasy sublimity of that song\u2019s vision of history, how its speed run of the previous four decades\u2019 events ends up making the present feel inert and paralyzing: \u201cThis experience of immutable endlessness, of exploded time and a superfluity of history in the face of which meaningful action is impossible\u2014this is the secret sense of the period in pop music.\u201d Today\u2019s period-obsessed pop feels this stasis, too. Its most arresting images reflect Clover\u2019s sense of immutable endlessness: Swift\u2019s amnesia-inducing feed of memories, Perry\u2019s infinity-shaped stage, Grande\u2019s ascent to the big circular screen in the sky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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And then we have Charli, whose new songs take the endless void in stride. \u201cSpring, Summer \u201926\u00a0\/ When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it,\u201d she sings over spare guitar and drums, in her new indie-rock mode. \u201cYeah, we\u2019re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell\u00a0\/ Nothing\u2019s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.\u201d The chord progression loops without resolving, only briefly grazing the tonic in passing: walk, walk, turn, walk, walk, turn. The end is nigh, but endlessly deferred. It\u2019s a slow apocalypse, but it\u2019s also a fashion show.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

Read more \u201cThe Samurai and the Prisoner\u201d Fits a War Epic Into an Elegant Puzzle Box<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the earthshaking success of Taylor Swift\u2019s Eras Tour, artists from the Weeknd to Ariana Grande have tried to imbue their live shows with a sense of history, writes Mitch Therieau.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-weekend-essay"],"yoast_head":"\nForget Albums\u2014Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1161\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Forget Albums\u2014Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now - 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