[Editorial] A New Wave of Horror Stories in Pop Music - Part 3

If you haven’t read parts 1 and part 2 of this editorial then it’s worth doing so before reading this final installment! These reclamatory bodies of work are also uniquely suited to the current landscape of pop music. As noted earlier, the nature of more fractured release services and an unquantifiable amount of artists clamoring for audience attention has led to more and more artists undertaking conceptual projects, a trend in which these horror-influenced albums fit perfectly. “There’s definitely a mix of things happening, at least in the mainstream space. Today’s digital landscape means that less normative art, and perhaps more alienating art, can be monetized just as easily as everything more obviously or traditionally pop-friendly,” says film critic and music video scholar Sydney Urbanek. “So artists don’t need to be thinking as much about the industry middleman, so to speak; whereas you once risked MTV turning down your more experimental or family-unfriendly music video, as happened a lot to artists like Madonna and Nine Inch Nails and Prodigy, there are arguably fewer gatekeepers now. That’s partly why an artist like Billie Eilish could begin with a project like [When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?], rather than her having to ease the public into those sorts of aesthetics after a few albums and once she’d secured an industry foothold. There’s obviously still label involvement and intrusion to some extent, but it’s a very different ballgame overall.”

“Also, there have always been concept albums, but it’s arguably easier than ever to market one these days, when you aren’t relying on radio or TV play to get your message out anymore,” Urbanek continues. “A good example is all the video content that the Weeknd released for After Hours, where there were more videos than actual singles. (On that note, an artist would have struggled to get a video where they’re decapitated onto MTV during the network’s heyday.) And, because there’s so much more noise to cut through now, mainstream artists seem to be putting a whole lot more time and energy into creating not just albums but full experiences—this word gets thrown around a lot now—that’ll actually be talked about beyond the New Music Friday in question. If we’re again talking specifically about the mainstream pop space, Lady Gaga was more or less unprecedented in how she got right into things like body horror when she showed up in the late 2000s. And there’s a case to be made that pop got freakier over the course of the 2010s in order to compete in the same commercial landscape. But also, part of the reason why she was able to disrupt things in the first place was YouTube; as of late 2009 when Vevo first appeared, artists have been making videos for YouTube, where there are drastically different censorship rules compared to television.”

These releases also coincide with the growing feminist reappraisal of films that themselves use the language of horror movies past to build a feminist understanding of content communicated within the genre. Ginger Snaps (2000), Black Christmas (1974), and in particular Jennifer’s Body (2009)—movies that deal with topics of puberty, abortion, and sexuality, respectively—have all come to be regarded as cult classics thanks to this newfound appreciation. In fact, Jennifer’s Body has seen such a drastic heel turn in its critical reception that it has practically transcended the niche implications of “cult” status. In a landscape in which the reality of masculine violation of women’s bodily autonomy has grown increasingly punctured by women coming forward about experiences of these abuses, stories about reckoning with such trauma have become more popular and more recognized for that thematic integrity. In the context of pop music, these parallels feed into each other.

“There’s definitely a connection, and it might be as basic as: these artists have been reared in an online landscape where these films are frequently a topic of conversation,” elaborates Urbanek. “At risk of sounding a tad cynical, I think at least some of this also comes back to meme culture, and the idea that your target audience will essentially do your marketing for you if you nod to a beloved cultural touchpoint in your work. There’s obviously a tongue-in-cheek-ness to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘good 4 u’ that makes Jennifer’s Body a sensible visual reference point for the video, and there’s the revenge element. But it’s also interesting to consider how many people found their way over to the video because of the reference itself and not Rodrigo, since social media was clogged that day with ‘cinematic parallels’-type posts that pandered to millennials in particular.”

Pop music provides a distinctly compelling avenue to explore these themes: not only does the current market call for expansive, conceptual projects that will catch audience attention, but the medium itself, with its emphasis on concentrated bursts of overwhelming emotion, fits the equation with even more of an interesting flourish when fear becomes the emotion in question. These invocations of horror imagery provide not just a means of contextualizing fear within greater concerns of the Feminine Grotesque, but within the context of pop music, also provide a layer of artifice by which to engage with these anxieties at an arm’s length. 

Though Screen Violence, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, and Turn Off the Light all engage these questions with literacy and sincerity, indulging in audiovisual reference points also allows confrontation through metaphor rather than straightforward language. Breakups become slashers, vulnerability becomes a shadow, and lust becomes carnivorous. It’s telling that, rather than becoming a consistent anchor of any one artist’s oeuvre, these projects are singular experiments from which each act will likely break away in the future. In fact, Billie Eilish already has, stripping away the horror iconography of her debut for more plainspoken reflections on the realities of burnout, stalking, and even sexual assault that have now simply become regular aspects of her life in her sophomore effort Happier Than Ever—she needn’t pretend anymore, as the horrors that face her have now manifested outside the confines of metaphor.

It’s also worth mentioning that, although this pattern has emerged enough to become a fully-fledged trend, like Bastién criticizes in her discussion of the Feminine Grotesque and its critics, these explorations of the intersections of Final Girls and Madwomen are, at the moment, limited to interpretations by “conventionally beautiful, fragile, young-ish white women.” This is likely for a multitude of reasons: for one thing, as previously detailed, pop music is a uniquely fitting genre for this exploration, and despite the fact that the genre’s roots were developed by Black women, pop music as an ideal remains coded white. Furthermore, anyone who does not meet the description of thin, cisgender white womanhood likely has more consequences of oppression to face compounded with the everyday realities of being a woman, horrors that can not so easily be imagined into metaphorical abstraction. Even an artist like Backxwash, a Black trans woman who repeatedly incorporates magical and spiritual iconography in her horrorcore rap music, often does so with a constant cognizance of the role of colonialism in her understanding of how society conceptualizes the supernatural, and with that, the human and the inhuman.

Perhaps, as the confines for artistic expression become less and less limiting with time, this will change. What the future of any entertainment industry holds cannot be predicted in linear terms, but the momentum given to appreciating women’s nuanced roles in horror grows with each passing year. Albums like Screen Violence, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, and Turn Off the Light have already synthesized such complex dimensions of reckoning with the role of fear in societal conception of womanhood provides a promising foundation for interpretations of horror film that further investigate these intersections. Besides the analytical perspective, though, what’s more exciting is the potential for the creation of even more tunes that are… well, killer.

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