2021 In Pop Music Represented By A Straight White Male
After a year of exquisitely diverse representation in music and visuals, the fan’s choice still looks like this.
On September 12th at the Annual MTV Video Music Awards, Justin Beiber took home the award for Best Pop, and Artist of the Year — succeeding artists such as Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, and Taylor Swift.
These are two of the four paramount awards of the night conveying that the winner represents a significant pull of Pop Music creation and success of the VMA interval year, which spanned from June 2020-June 2021.
It’s no question that Justin is a talented and successful artist, but the choice to appoint him these titles seemed capricious, to say the least. After the results of the ceremony that night many viewers took to Twitter about their bewilderment, and they didn’t hold back.
Scrolling down my feed, I saw hundreds of tweets expressing similar outrage for his wins.
“Justin Bieber… artist of the year… something ain’t adding up.” said one commenter. “JUSTIN BEIBER [sic] MADE MUSIC THIS YEAR???” queried another. “DOJA CAT…. MEGAN THE STALLION… AND THEY GAVE THIS AWARD TO JUSTIN BIEBER???????”
I’ll admit that the news of his win definitely left me scratching my head as well.
The year I experienced personally was tumultuous and unpredictable. Naturally, I turned to music to cope with everything, as most people do. Lucky for me, 2021 never seemed to stop giving in terms of intersectional feminist art.
Not only was it predominately female artists serving us with new music and visuals, but many BIPOC artists flourished this year. It’s hard to believe that of everything 2021 had to offer, one straight white male was at the center of it all.
As the VMAs are known for being a fan-voted event, seeing little representation of what I’d personally known and witnessed on stan Twitter definitely threw me for a loop.
To my surprise, Justin had been slowly releasing a string of singles since September 2020 leading up to his new album, Justice, which debuted in March of this year.
This strategic move worked well for him when it came time for MTV to make its selections. Even though his music wasn’t on my radar this year, he was steadily creating and putting art out into the world for months.
The numbers don’t lie. Justin’s consistency paid off. Justice opened at №1 with the equivalent of 154,000 sales in the United States including 157 million streams.
The fifth and final single from the album, Peaches, took the top spot on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart upon its debut, and apparently secured his win for the category of Best Pop at the VMAs.
In doing some research for this piece, I listened to all of the music Justin had released within the VMA period. His album, Justice, consisted of a few safe and familiar palatable pop confections sprinkled in with a lot of fillers. While I enjoyed the lyrical vulnerability and spiritual messages about his newfound marital bliss, it began to feel redundant.
Peaches is catchy in its simplicity and the video was colorful and appealing. But it paled in comparison to almost every other single I’d heard this year.
There was nothing compelling, lyrically or musically, about Peaches that made it the least bit memorable, aside from the repetitive nature of the song. Yet, this single and video specifically was the main reason for Justin’s many nods and big wins of the night.
The basis of how MTV chooses the winners of the VMAs has been speculated for years. Was Justin really the viewers’ choice? Or was he the most convenient artist to centralize as it’s been a while since he’s been in the spotlight?
These are the questions that plagued my mind as I reflected back on the numerous outstanding works of feminist pop perfection I’d allowed into my life this year.
Holding nine total nominations, Justin Bieber and his single, Peaches, dominated the VMAs. Megan Thee Stallion followed closely behind with six nominations of her own. Just below them were Olivia Rodrigo and Lil Nas X, who were both nominated in five categories.
Each of these artists were awarded in at least one of the main categories, besides Meg Thee Stallion, who unexpectedly left empty-handed.
I was happy to see that Lil Nas X received the recognition that he deserved for his controversial and resplendently provocative video for Montero (Call Me By Your Name). His acceptance speech made me even happier.
“First, I wanna say thank you to the gay agenda,” Lil Nas X shouted, “Let’s go, gay agenda!”
Olivia Rodrigo was another successor of the night, taking home Song of the Year for her single, Driver’s License, which hit №1 only a week after release. She was also awarded the coveted title of Best New Artist.
Beginning her career with two №1 singles and a blockbuster №1 album, the New York Times touted her as the biggest debut of the year.
Sour, her first album, opened with the equivalent of 295,000 sales in the United States and has the second-highest streaming total of 2021 so far.
Since the release of this introspective pop-punk banger of an album, Rodrigo’s fanbase has evolved from solely Gen Z teens. Being an eighteen-year-old Disney star, nobody expected such an intergenerational impact.
The wisdom and raw adolescent emotion in her lyricism transcend beyond her age demographic. Millennial women (including myself) instantly fell in love with the 2000s nostalgia and grungey catharsis that Sour had to offer.
However, the fact that Meg Thee Stallion received so many nods but left with zero awards just didn’t sit right with me. With the release of WAP last summer, Meg and Cardi B became the first female rap collaboration in history to debut at №1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
If that wasn’t monumental enough, within one week, Billboard reported that the song garnered 93 million streams. It then went on to be the most-streamed song by a female artist in 2020 despite only being released that August.
Besides reaching these astronomical metrics, this iconic feminist anthem has since dominated social media discourse and YouTube, as many found the lyrics and music video to be controversial.
In its simplest terms, WAP’s lyrical message demanded two things. 1) Female pleasure should be prioritized during sex. 2)Women should celebrate their sexuality instead of being ashamed of it.
What was most powerful about the grand phenomena of WAP was that, typically, rap songs by male artists include degrading messages that oppose both of these ideas.
Of course, wherever female sexual empowerment exists, it is sure to enrage the moralists. There’s no denying the hold this song had on every male talk show, radio, or podcast host in America for months after its release.
Meg’s success was celebrated at the 2021 Grammies when she took home Best New Artist. However, the viewers’ of the VMAs supposedly failed to acknowledge her massive impact.
She lost Artist of the year to Bieber and Video of the year to Lil Nas X. She was also nominated for Best Hip Hop, but that award went to Travis Scott.
The host of this year’s VMA’s was Doja Cat, an artist whose career had significantly taken off since the release of her second album, Hot Pink, in 2019.
Doja was nominated for several awards herself, including Artist of the Year, but left with little recognition besides for her campy fashion and exuberant introductions.
Doja released her third album, Planet Her, on June 25th, 2021. The album spent four weeks at number two on the Billboard 200 chart and earned the biggest opening day for an album by a female rapper in Spotify history.
Fans were blown away by this versatile and delightfully chaotic project. Within the album, Doja carves out her own lane and demonstrates the many layers to her world, all while maintaining a sonically cohesive work.
Commenting on the album’s persistent run on the Billboard 200, writer Kyle Denis said “Planet Her and its singles have unequivocally solidified Doja Cat as one of the defining pop stars of the Generation Z era.”
Although she didn’t release new music until late in the VMA year, she seemed to be everywhere this year. Doja’s unique rise to influence in 2021 is a result of her music’s popularity on TikTok, kaleidoscopic performances, and consistent social media presence.
The ubiquitousness of Taylor Swift this year somehow resulting in the absence of appreciation for her work at the VMAs was another questionable concept many fans wondered about. Ironically, Swift was not actually present for the awards ceremony.
Swift opened 2021 with her surprise album Evermore, released only 20 weeks after Folklore. Both of these incredible works were released during the VMA interval year and were highly successful.
While Folklore was announced as Album of The Year at the Grammies, Evermore debuted at the top spot and remained there for two weeks.
In the new album, much like Folklore, Taylor continued her tradition of delivering heartfelt confessionals while blurring the lines between fiction and reality through third-person story-telling.
The music video she released for her lead single Willow conveyed a beautiful story of love and destiny. It posted unsurprisingly strong opening week numbers on YouTube in December 2020, debuting at #4 on the Global YouTube Music Videos Chart.
Only a few months later, she did something even crazier. She re-released one of her best albums, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), in April 2021. The album topped the Billboard 200 with the largest sales frame of the year.
After releasing three phenomenal albums within the interval, Swift was nominated for several main categories such as Best Pop and Artist of the Year, but as we know, Bieber took both.
If you were to ask me who my personal Artist of the Year was, based on my Spotify streams, it’d be none other than Ariana Grande. Surprisingly, she was absent from the awards this year as well.
Grande had released her album Positions on October 30th, 2020. Instead of a focus on resilience and pain like her last few bodies of work, the music is giddy with an unabashed new sense of self. Throughout the album, Grande celebrates the sweet beginnings and admits the real anxieties of new love after a painful past.
The album received mixed reviews from critics, but one thing is for certain, Arianators loved Positions. Debuting at number-one on the US Billboard 200 chart, the album received 173.54 million on-demand streams and 42,000 album sales in its first week.
When the title track hit number 1 on the Billboard chart, it extended her Guinness World Record of becoming the first artist to have five number-one debut singles.
Besides this absolute smash of an album, Ari was working this entire year. She was featured in several projects from other artists, her Netflix concert film debuted in December 2020 and she also released a string of Vevo Live music videos this summer for a few fan favorites from the Positions album.
Ari’s overall success made her a shoo-in for artist of the year, but unfortunately, she didn’t receive any awards that night.
Despite breaking several records, BTS was barely even mentioned. Within the June to June interval, they became the first all-South Korean group to top the Billboard Hot 100, reaching the coveted spot at least four times after that.
Additionally, their hit song Dynamite was nominated for a Grammy Award this year. Another one of their hits, Butter, became the most-viewed music video on YouTube and the most-streamed song on Spotify within its first 24 hours.
The success of Butter secured them a nomination for Song of The Year, but, considering their consistent accomplishments, should’ve also been nominated for Artist of the Year.
There were several other artists that made waves this year but seemed to be ignored by the VMAs. Demi Lovato had released a masterpiece, The Art of Starting Over, in April of 2021. Her lead single, Dancing With The Devil, was only mentioned once for the category Video For Good.
Lana Del Rey released an album in March, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, which debuted even stronger than Bieber’s Justice, yet she wasn’t mentioned at all.
Normani’s recent single Wild Side (nominated for Song of The Summer) amassed over 17 million music video views on YouTube in its first week and debuted at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Despite these impressive numbers, it took a fan campaign on social media — #LetNormaniPerform — in order for her to be considered for a performance slot when Lorde, another contender for Song of the Summer, backed out.
The VMAs asked Normani to perform last minute, and she was somehow able to throw together an unforgettable performance. The fans had spoken, and aren’t they supposedly the ones who choose the awards?
Although MTV has advertised the VMAs as the awards of the people since the early 2000s, out of all awards shows, they are the most secretive with their voting process. There is almost no public information on how they select their nominations.
Their voting rules even state that the VMAs “reserve all rights to cancel, terminate, amend, modify, extend or suspend the voting process and reserves the right in its sole discretion to determine the winners.”
My suspicion is that the awards are selected based on what results will cause the biggest stir in the media — whether this means making fans happy, outraged, or both. I suppose I fell right into their trap by deciding to write about the results.
Regardless, the VMAs is one of the biggest nights of the year for music, giving MTV the opportunity to use their platform to showcase the most compelling works of art. If their choice is based on nothing more than an algorithm, how much merit can the prestigious moon man actually hold?
The truth is that any of these other artists would have been a better choice for Artist of The Year than Justin Bieber. But the people that consume this media messaging don’t always realize the inner workings of these networks.
Therefore, the widespread message absorbed is one that is all too familiar to those of us who are non-white, non-straight, or non-male: no matter how spectacular of a year it is for intersectional art, mediocre work from a white man will triumph over all.