Pop
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(In 2019, the Billboard staff updated our originally 2018-released list project, which selected a Greatest Pop Star of every year going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Ariana Grande was our Greatest Pop Star of 2019 — with our ’19 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)
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For a while, Ariana Grande did everything by the book. She worked with the biggest and best producers (Babyface, Max Martin) to create radio-friendly singles (she had eight top 10 tracks on the Hot 100 pre-Sweetener) that featured the right of-the-moment guest stars (Mac Miller, Iggy Azalea, Nicki Minaj) and showcased her superlative voice. But she was stuck in top-tier pop limbo: big enough for an insatiable, powerful army of fans, but not quite big enough to claim ubiquity — much less coolness.
Then she released Sweetener in 2018: the bubbly, optimistic response to both surviving a terrorist attack on her Manchester concert and getting engaged to SNL star Pete Davidson. The shift in her sound from top 40-oriented pop to eclectic, glitchy (via Pharrell) R&B — plus the album’s clear message of resilience — was enough to push her fully into the critical and popular mainstream. But just when Grande seemed on track to finally graduate out of pop princess-dom, she was hit (along with the rest of the music world) by another tragedy, when Mac Miller, her close friend, collaborator and ex, died from an overdose. She and Davidson split not long after.
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Despite the fact that she was just a couple months removed from Sweetener, Grande elected to give the people what they wanted — some reaction to the turmoil in her personal life — in a form they never expected: a surprise-released, baldly confessional, irresistibly catchy single called “Thank U, Next.” That song, with its bouncy, call-and-response chorus and tabloid-inciting namechecks of Grande’s famous exes, became her first Hot 100 No. 1 that November — and would still rule that chart when 2019 began.
Just because Grande started 2019 at the top of the Hot 100 didn’t necessarily she would end the year as its defining pop star. But then she released her tour de force album, also called Thank U, Next — a project that drove home the fact that she had finally won over both critics and, well, everyone. As Next garnered near-universal critical endorsement, Grande cornered the top 3 spots on the Hot 100 with “7 Rings,” “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored” and “Thank U, Next” — the first artist to wrangle the top three on the chart simultaneously since The Beatles nearly half a century earlier.
In essence, she’d turned lemons into a multi-platinum pitcher of lemonade. Her previously announced Sweetener World Tour expanded from 59 arena dates to 101, mostly sold out to tens of thousands of screaming fans who were then documented on her live album, K, Bye For Now — released the day after the tour’s late-2019 finale at the Forum in Los Angeles. Grande had grabbed the reins, eschewing the conventional release schedules and promo tours she’d hewn to for most of her career — instead, she was releasing music more or less as she made it. Finally, the spontaneity and reactiveness that had long been de rigueur in hip-hop was working for a star used to the set schedule of the pop machine.
After releasing two big albums in a six-month span, Grande refused to space out singles in a methodical way. Soon after her history-making run at the top of the Hot 100, she started ignoring the albums altogether, in favor of trading verses with 2 Chainz and Lizzo and sharing one-off tracks made with her closest collaborators to boost their careers (Victoria Monet’s “Monopoly” and Social House’s “Boyfriend”). She produced her first soundtrack for the Charlie’s Angels reboot, a star-studded affair that included the minor hit “Don’t Call Me Angel” with Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus. Somehow in between all of that, Grande sorted through live tracks for the album after her shows and shared that process with her tireless fans on social media, effectively balancing effortless pop star gloss with the more confessional, real-time pace that medium requires.
The K, Bye live album seemed like the cherry on top of a year that Grande had dedicated to showing her work. It hadn’t been enough to simply make good or even great pop songs, to be pretty and charming. So Grande put everything she had on the line, taking personal and musical risks, sharing more of herself than is really fair to expect of anyone — and it worked. It became impossible to ignore that she was not only a generational vocal talent, but a thoughtful, audacious, vulnerable artist wrapped up in pop star packaging. On K, Bye, you hear her voice soar, and then crack as she cries. It’s mostly exposed, not cloaked in reverb: just one more risk that Grande has the skill to make pay off.
Honorable Mention: Post Malone (Hollywood’s Bleeding, “Sunflower,” “Circles”), Billie Eilish (When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, “Bad Guy,” “Everything I Wanted”), Lizzo (Cuz I Love You, “Truth Hurts,” “Good As Hell”)
Rookie of the Year: Lil Nas X
It’s always refreshing when, even as increasingly precise analytics and data shape the music industry, something truly surprising happens — in 2019, that something was the literally unprecedented mainstream success of a country-trap hybrid by a gay, Black artist. No one in 2018 would or could have guessed that a song called “Old Town Road,” comprised of a Nine Inch Nails sample and a truly spectacular hook, would become the longest-running Hot 100 No. 1 of all time. Perhaps most importantly, the song’s ascendance alongside the “yee-haw agenda” proved once again that hand-wringing about what constitutes real country is as futile as any other kind of genre orthodoxy.
Comeback of the Year: Jonas Brothers
The JoBros and their purity rings may have ridden out of the industry almost a decade ago as a punchline, but the potent combination of recent nostalgia and an album of unexpectedly solid jams — aided by the successful side careers of Nick and Joe — made their return hit significantly harder than those of most aging boy bands. “Sucker,” the first single the group had released in six years, became their very first Hot 100 No. 1; the album, Happiness Begins, was 2019’s biggest debut until Taylor Swift dropped Lover. The Jonas Brothers may have gotten older, but people’s enthusiasm for bright, fun harmonies and massive pop hooks hasn’t changed a bit.
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2020 here, or head back to the full list here.)
(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981. Read our entry below on why Ed Sheeran was our Greatest Pop Star of 2018 — with our ’18 Honorable Mention runner-ups, Rookie of the Year and Comeback of the Year pop stars at the bottom — and find the rest of our picks for every year up to present day here.)
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Drake’s generational popularity by the time of 2018 could only be truly grasped through a deep understanding of late-’10s trends, of collapsing genre borders and changing gatekeepers, of social media-driven virality and narrative-building, and of general Millennial anxieties and aspirations. But in a sense, all you need is one number: 29.
That’s how many weeks Drake spent at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 2018 — not even counting his crucial uncredited appearance on Travis Scott’s chart-topping “Sicko Mode” — the most for a single year in the chart’s 60-plus history. When you can claim majority ownership of the Hot 100 for a calendar year, chances are you’re just the guy for that year.
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It was the culmination of a decade in the spotlight for the teen actor turned hip-hop superstar. With the blessing and early guidance of Young Money label paterfamilias/21st-century icon Lil Wayne, Drake broke out at the end of the ‘00s with a blend of puffed-chest hashtag rhyming and melancholy, melodic introspection, often singing and rapping on the same song. His hooks, verses and business sense only sharpened into the thick of the 2010s, and by 2013 he could credibly claim to be “just as famous as my mentor.” In 2016, he was unmistakably the biggest rapper in the world, with both an album (Views) and lead single (“One Dance”) topping the Billboard charts for double-digit weeks — even though the muted critical and fan reception to each seemed to leave the rapper vulnerable to claims about his slide being imminent.
Indeed, what made Drake’s unprecedented level of chart prosperity in 2018 so fascinating is that it happened while, on a slightly more below-the-surface level, his career was thoroughly under siege. A long-simmering feud with veteran street rapper Pusha T and his superstar producer Kanye West reached a breaking point with an escalating trio of volleys between the two rappers — Pusha’s “Infrared,” Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” and then Pusha’s “The Story of Adidon.” The last one landed the heaviest blows, most notably unearthing (via its single art) an early photo that the mixed-race Drake had taken in Blackface, and revealing that the rapper had fathered the titular child the year before, whose presence he’d not yet announced to the world.
The threat to Drake’s credibility felt real, as it had three years earlier, when collaborator Meek Mill — like Pusha, a respected rapper whose hard-luck hustle and come-up fit the classic hip-hop narrative a lot more neatly than the Canadian-bred, Degrassi-starring Drake — declared war via ghostwriting accusations. But in 2015, Drake triumphed with volume (in both senses), as he dropped two diss tracks aimed at Meek before he could respond with one, then loudly proclaimed victory at his OVO fest while his rival was still trying to figure out what had even happened.
By 2018, Drake was well-positioned enough in the pop mainstream to just let his stats do the talking. He refrained from directly responding to “Adidon,” and trusted that his commercial momentum was overwhelming enough to weather any blows to his image and rep. He had reason for confidence: “God’s Plan,” released that January, had already reigned for 11 weeks on the Hot 100 with no chorus or major musical hook, while follow-up “Nice For What” — which had both, plus a star-studded female takeover video — followed it for seven non-consecutive weeks immediately after. (Even third single “I’m Upset,” which failed to match those commercial heights, provided a valuable diversion when its Degrassi-reuniting video dropped in the weeks following Pusha’s verbal assault.)
Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, Drake’s bet was validated. Fifth studio solo album Scorpion was released in June — a double album, many of whose tracks addressed the Adidon controversy without furthering the tête-à-tête with its progenitor. Those songs still captured headlines and inspired trending topics, but not as many as a new track that had nothing to do with Drake’s son at all: “In My Feelings,” a New Orleans bounce-inspired banger that both sampled and shouted out ascendant Miami duo City Girls, and even invoked Wayne (via his own crossover classic “Lollipop”) as a NoLa patron saint. The dance challenge “Feelings” quickly inspired blew up over social media, the song rocketed to No. 1, and Scorpion made all kinds of chart history while posting the year’s best first-week numbers. By the end of the summer — which “In My Feelings” owned almost exclusively — the Pusha feud was again a footnote.
The year cemented Drake as finally having reached the same level of commercial invincibility as the giants of the Reagan era. After all, what MTV was to the early ‘80s, social media is to the late ‘10s, and in Drake the moment had officially found its Michael Jackson: one whose videos dominated through memes and gifs rather than TV rotation, one whose albums subsequently racked up historic Spotify play counts instead of unprecedented retail numbers, and one whose dance crazes didn’t even have to be performed by the man himself to become iconic. What’s more, he made it clear to future rap adversaries that he’s now playing by pop rules — and as his 2018 foe should understand better than anyone, he’ll never be taken down as long as he’s still putting numbers on the boards.
Honorable Mention: Ariana Grande (Sweetener, “No Tears Left to Cry,” “Thank U Next”), Cardi B (Invasion of Privacy, “I Like It,” “Finesse (Remix)”), Post Malone (Beerbongs and Bentleys, “Psycho,” “Better Now”)
Rookie of the Year: Dua Lipa
America took its time with Dua Lipa, the Albanian-English pop singer-songwriter who’d already become massive just about everywhere else by the time “New Rules” started to creep its way up the Hot 100 at the end of 2017. It entered the top 10 in early 2018, thanks to its brain-sticking refrain — which took a proactive and highly memeable approach to heartbreak — and viral music video, whose refined choreography and inspired art direction framed Lipa as the star that she really already was. She closed the year as the house diva of choice for Calvin Harris (“One Kiss”) and Diplo/Mark Ronson superduo Silk City (“Electricity”), scoring international hits that made her unavoidable even between album cycles, as true a star sign as any.
Comeback of the Year: Lil Wayne
Really, Lil Wayne deserves the title here for the Carter V announcement video alone: a charming mini-tour through his domicile and house studio, in which he announced with a gleaming-as-ever smile that the long awaited fifth installment in his signature LP series was imminent. The hype was instant, and the album delivered: a 23-track set that delighted fans and even impressed critics, featuring Wayne’s most invigorated rapping in years and some of his most personal bars ever. A decade of label drama and disappointment was seemingly washed away in the record’s first week, where it posted nearly half a million in units moved, littered the Hot 100 with new entries, and proved that Dwayne Carter was still very much Weezy F. Baby, and the “F” ain’t for “finished.”
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2019 here, or head back to the full list here.)
Taylor Swift is singing the praises of Eras Tour opener Gracie Abrams. In a post reflecting on her six-show run in Toronto, the pop superstar gushed about how fans in Canada’s biggest city treated the concerts like they were a “hometown show” before turning her attention to the “That’s So True” singer, who has opened […]
(In 2018, the Billboard staff released a list project of its choices for the Greatest Pop Star of every year, going back to 1981 — along with a handful of sidebar columns and lists on other important pop star themes from the period. Find one such sidebar below about how Lorde unforgettably took the air out of an increasingly puffed-up 2013 pop landscape, and find our Greatest Pop Star picks for every year up to present day here.)
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Over the early 2010s, as a class of rising and returning stars was minted on radio, iTunes and YouTube, pop’s arms race was accelerating to unsustainable levels of hype. Each major-label release was a self-proclaimed event, each expected to be bigger than the last. Something had to give, and in 2013, the dam broke — over and over again. Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP, Katy Perry’s PRISM, Jay-Z’s Magna Carta… Holy Grail, Britney Spears’ Britney Jean, Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience – 2 of 2; each promised the world, and each fell short in different, fascinating, and exhausting ways.
Amidst all the hubbub emerged a 16-year-old with humble origins and a grand name: Lorde.
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Popular music had never seen a teenage star quite as self-possessed as the New Zealand native, whose debut single “Royals” was pointed directly at the state of the pop zeitgeist: “Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash/ We don’t care/ We aren’t caught up in your love affair/ And we’ll never be royals…” Her Queen-like vocal harmonies swoop above her dramatic, yet conversational lead vocals, barely accompanied by producer Joel Little’s kick drums and finger-snaps. This was a pop song with no obvious predecessor, whose negative space forced the listener to lean in and take notice.
“Let me live that fantasy,” Lorde sang with a knowing irony — that even as a buzzy artist signed to Universal, she’d likely never reach those heights. Incredibly, she did: From its initial release in November 2012, “Royals” slowly made its way up charts and playlists across the globe. By late 2013, it had not only topped the Billboard Hot 100 for nine weeks, but also reached top five on alternative and hip-hop/R&B radio — becoming a truly post-genre hit.
If Lana Del Rey was the first figurehead in pop’s trajectory towards moodier, more hip-hop-inflected territory over the 2010s — scoring her own first two top 40 hits in 2013, after her splashy 2011 debut and subsequent backlash the next year — Lorde took it to another level. Her debut album Pure Heroine more than delivered, bringing her tales of teenage ennui to a mass audience, while only hinting at the potential she’d unlock with 2017’s sweeping Melodrama. Though Lorde wouldn’t maintain her brief position as a singles-driven hitmaker, she’d become even more beloved as a cult pop artist.
“Post-genre,” “alt-pop” — these were labels that had never been applied to mainstream pop even as late as 2010, that have now become the norm for an entire class of streaming-era artists who aspire to cultural cachet over traditional pop stardom. “Royals” was one of the decade’s most minimalist hits, but it dared to dream big — leaving a long-term impact even Lorde herself could never have imagined.
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2014 here, or head back to the full list here.)
BTS‘ Jin has cooked up a Thanksgiving treat for ARMY. The singer dropped a new version of his solo track “Falling” on Tuesday (Nov. 26), spicing the finger-snapping, whistle pop tune with some additional vocals from collaborator and ONE OK ROCK lead singer Taka. The B-side from Jin’s recently released debut solo album, Happy, finds […]
One hundred shows over two years, waterfalls, pools, pyro, designer gowns, a career-spanning setlist and a one-of-a-kind vanishing act. Adele‘s epic Weekends With Adele residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas wound down on Saturday, but the singer is still reminiscing about the epic time she had in Sin City.
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“Well what an adventure! Las Vegas you’ve been so good to me. This residency went on to mirror what 30 was about – lost and broken to healed and thriving! Seems so fitting in the end,” the singer wrote on Instagram on Monday (Nov. 25). The post was accompanied by a video chronicling the great adventure, featuring footage from the glamorous shows, including the tear-filled superstar summit last month when Adele met Celine Dion and the two shared a tear-stained moment.
Cued to 30‘s “Cry Your Heart Out,” the brief clip is a primer for anyone who didn’t make it to the glamorous twice-a-weekend gigs that Adele said she cherished, but is also ready to put in her rear view. “The only thing left to do in this case is move on,” she wrote. “These 100 shows have been so easy to love. They were all completely different because I got to really be with every single person in the room every night.”
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She concluded, “I’ve loved every single second of it and I am so proud of it! I will miss it terribly, and I will miss YOU all terribly too. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! See you next time 🪐”
After kicking off the residency in November 2022, Adele — who typically goes off-the-grid for an extended period between albums/tours — informed the audience at her final show over the weekend that the future is wide open for now. “I don’t know when I’m next going to perform again,” she said. “I will miss it terribly, and I will miss you terribly.” She also added, “I’m not doing anything else. I’m actually s–ting myself about what I am going to do. I don’t have any f–king plans.”
Previously, Adele said she needs to take a break when her residency ended, with plans to temporarily step away from music. Adele added that she wants to take “a big break after this, and I think I want to do other creative things, just for a little while.”
Check out Adele’s tribute to her Vegas residency below.
Kelly Clarkson is going to keep dancing at the “Pink Pony Club,” taking on the Chappell Roan hit for her latest Kellyoke cover during her daytime talk show on Monday afternoon (Nov. 25). Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Dressed in a pink sweater dress, Clarkson belted […]
Rosé is less than two weeks from dropping her debut solo album, and the BLACKPINK superstar is adding to the hype by dropping the track list on Monday (Nov. 25). Rosie is set to arrive on December 6 via Atlantic Records/THEBLACKLABEL and features 12 tracks. Among the song titles are “3am,” “Two Years,” “Toxic Till […]
Gracie Abrams has had the adventure of a lifetime opening for Taylor Swift on the singer’s Eras Tour over the past year. But with the end of the global outing just two weeks away, Abrams took some time on Sunday (Nov. 24) to reflect on the latest chapter in her wild ride. “Torontoooooo ❤️💔 I […]
Everyone has that one music video that they go back and watch over and over again. That’s certainly true for Chappell Roan, and her pick might surprise you. In a post to her Instagram Stories on Sunday (Nov. 24), Roan shared a clip of “my fav music video” — a Sims version of Lady Gaga’s […]