There are a lot of things on my bucket list. Diving between the tectonic plates in Iceland. Learning to speak Welsh. Painting a mural with my daughter. And getting a ride in Jon Caramanica’s car in New York City to talk music!
Jon’s a legend. He’s our pop music critic. He’s the co-host of the “Popcast” podcast. And he reviews songs while driving through New York City (though his car is currently in for repairs). Since the Grammys are coming up on Sunday, I thought I’d give him a call to ask where pop music is heading. (Spoiler alert: The era of American primacy is over.)
It’s not quite the same as getting a ride, but it will have to do for now.
Where pop music is headed
So, Jon. Let’s talk Grammys. There are a bunch of familiar names: Kendrick Lamar, who won big last year, Lady Gaga, Bad Bunny. Who do you think should win?
I feel like this should be Bad Bunny’s year.
It would be a real capstone moment for someone who, over the last 10 years, has shown a new path to global stardom that didn’t rely on any of the old models. He is Puerto Rican, he sings and raps almost entirely in Spanish, he’s nominated in the biggest categories at the Grammys, and he’s headlining the Super Bowl a week later.
What does Bad Bunny’s mega-success tell us? He’s the most-streamed artist on the planet.
Bad Bunny is hugely talented and creative and unusual. But he also became famous at the confluence of two huge threads of musical and cultural history: the internet as a distribution platform, and the way streaming has linked language communities around the world.
The biggest beneficiary has been Spanish-language music. Bad Bunny happens to arrive when that is really starting to take off. You see a similar dynamic with BTS and K-pop: the right act at the right time, dovetailing with technology that amplifies them beyond their traditional audience.
America has forever been a giant music melting pot. But what you’re describing is a new kind of global music melting pot.
Yes! Genres like K-pop, Latin trap and reggaeton often take some inspiration from American inputs, recontextualize them through local frameworks and then re-export them back out to the world.altho
So the blessing of the internet and streaming platforms is that they help elevate a bunch of viewpoints that maybe wouldn’t have been elevated previously. You can now have a kid who’s 15, has an idea, uploads it to the internet and somewhat immediately changes the world. As a pop music critic, that’s the place I want to live.
There is streaming, but there’s also TikTok. That’s where my kids seem to discover most of their music.
Yes, and if you look at the nominations for the Grammys, one thing really stands out: In the best new artist category, you see how normal social media has become as the proving ground. Addison Rae, Katseye, Sombr — they all started on social media or got huge boosts there. Five to 10 years ago, “started on social media” was a red flag, like it wasn’t real. Now it’s just a standard path.
Does this decade have a musical identity the way the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s did?
It’s the first decade where almost all music is a product of people everywhere listening to one another — a constant loop between communities and scenes. And it’s also the decade of the decline of American primacy in pop.
In the ’80s and ’90s, a huge amount of global pop emanated from the U.S. Those days are over: Great and terrible pop is made everywhere, and a single idea from a random place can shift the conversation quickly.
This is also the decade of artificial intelligence. How is that playing out in your world?
A.I. is already inside music in small, hard-to-label ways. A lyric suggestion. A backing vocal. A fake choir because you didn’t have 10 singers on hand in the studio. But I think people haven’t yet figured out how to use it in a truly artistically generative way.
A lot of what we’ve seen is low-hanging fruit — “sing this like Shania Twain.” That’s just shtick. The more likely near-term use is as a tool inside the creative process: a producer in a studio generating a twang version, an R&B version, because they don’t have the background vocalists that day. It’ll show up as scaffolding before it shows up as meaningful “art from whole cloth.”
Will A.I. eventually be better at making music than humans?
A.I. might become better at making it right, but it won’t become better at making it wrong. And wrong is where innovation is. Wrong is where the magic is.
Spoken like a true critic. I’m curious: What music do you personally listen to right now?
Look, I grew up on hip-hop — I wrote for rap magazines before I worked at The Times. That’s where I come from. But my job here is to see the world.
I’d point people to my No. 1 album from last year, by a Korean rapper and singer named Effie. It’s post-hyperpop in the shadow of K-pop — what you make when you’re surrounded by a huge industry and want something raucous, bold, colorful and different. That’s the lane I’m interested in as a pop critic: innovation, disruption, the next thing.
Finally, my most important question: When can I ride with you, Jon?
When the car is out of the garage!
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It was hard to have a conversation with anyone this week — colleagues, friends, my children, the greengrocer — without ending up in Minnesota.
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Much of the United States is in shock. So is the world.
Many of you have written to me. Marek Hubka, a reader from the Czech Republic, sent a particularly thoughtful note. Born in 1963, he grew up under Communism. America, he wrote, was always a dream to him — “a symbol of freedom and a model of an open society.”
“I vividly remember a specific moment during my university studies,” Marek said. “I was sitting on a hill above Mikulov, a small town near the Austrian border, with two close friends. We were looking at the razor-wire fence that separated us from the democratic world we longed to live in.”
“We were fortunate,” he said. “The system changed, borders opened, and I was finally able to travel freely. I eventually even visited my dream country and spent a wonderful time with friends in Kentucky. What I want to express, however, is my deep concern when I observe what is currently happening in the U.S.”
Systems can change. In good ways and bad. People from the former Soviet bloc know this better than anyone else.
Have a good weekend. — Katrin
TIME TO PLAY
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Katrin Bennhold is the host of The World, the flagship global newsletter of The New York Times.
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