The truth is, when the pop music of 2023 is looked down upon by history, it will probably just be remembered as the year of taylor swift. It’s hard to think of a time in recent pop history when a single artist has dominated music sales and MMEs so much, and certainly not a pop artist who has clocked up 17 years and 10 albums in her career, the paper writes ” Guardian”.

At one point in July, he had 11 albums in the US chart, four of them in the Top 10, including No.1.

The current Eras tour is the first in history to surpass $1 billion in revenue, and the accompanying film is the highest-grossing concert film of all time.

In a tribute to Swift being named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, songwriter Phoebe Bridgers described her as “bigger than Beatlemania and Thriller». Vogue called her “a fantasy of uninterrupted American progress». A British tabloid newspaper recently hired a famous celebrity psychic to predict when Swift will take a career break…

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Like last year, artists seemed determined to make albums designed to be listened to from start to finish, bucking the latter-day wisdom that streaming has made pop music a world in which only individual tracks matter.

However, there was no match for it Renaissance by Beyoncéof The Weeknd’s Dawn FM or his Mr Morale & the Big Steppers by Kendrick Lamar. There were many new micro-trends in music, but no obvious, overwhelming musical trend, impossible to avoid because it was followed by a huge number of artists.

And yet, looking closely at the most acclaimed albums of 2023, one theme seems to emerge with surprising regularity. A fairly impressive number of them dealt with loss in its simplest form, as they touched on death and bereavement. The Everything But the Girl’s-Fuse occasionally haunted by the ghost of her late mother Tracey Thorn.

The The Greater Wings by Julie Byrne acted as a kind of musical obituary for her main collaborator and former lover Eric Littman, while you could take in its content Javelin by Sufjan Stevens as a description of a relationship falling apart, until the songwriter took to Instagram on the day of its release to dedicate it to his partner Evans Richardson, who had died in April. The My Back Was a Bridge for You To Cross by Anohni and the Johnsons found the singer reflecting on the suicide of a friend and more…

The The Ballad of Darren was an unlikely album to kick off their triumphant, celebratory – albeit temporary – comeback Blur. It was subdued, filled with songs about broken friendships and wistful reflections on the band’s previous career. It then emerged that Damon Albarn had written his lyrics as his marriage was falling apart: “I’ve lost the feeling I never thought I’d lose”, “besides, I think it’s just too late”.

But in 2023, artists didn’t have to be of any age to feel that way. THE Olivia Rodrigo she’s just out of her teenage years, but her platinum Guts made all the difference.

In the brilliant The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We by Mitski, the singer-songwriter — whose relationship with fame has proven rocky enough in the past to prompt retirement announcements — has come to a sort of reconciliation with her own stardom, though it includes a regretful record of things that most people take for granted, but that celebrity entails abandonment. On closer I Love Me After You, she depicts herself alone, making the most of loneliness because any kind of “normal” life is out of the question.

The question of why loss has become such a popular theme in pop in 2023 is a heavy one. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that we live in a post-pandemic world, where life has more or less returned to normal, but remains “haunted” by the feeling that things are not quite the same as they were – things have changed, but looking at the news, it is hard to conclude that they have improved. These albums of loss are unlikely to be how we’ll be remembered in 2023, but the point is there nonetheless…