Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars: In 2017, Ed Sheeran and Kendrick Lamar Showed How ‘Monoculture’ Was Relative
(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 Kendrick Lamar and Ed Sheeran were different pop stars for different pop listeners in 2017, and find our Greatest Pop Star picks for every year up to present day here.)
There’s more information at our fingertips than at any point in human history, but it’s still possible to insulate yourself from certain realities. This isn’t a novel observation. You could arrange your life in such a way that you wouldn’t have known that Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” was the most successful song of 2017. (My cousin went most of the year hearing snatches of it in cabs and at bars, thinking it was a solid Justin Timberlake record.)
Foreground hip-hop — Black music — read the sites that cover that, stick to the good bars and clubs, turn off your radio (or just listen to the right stations), and you’re pretty much there. (Assuming you have the autonomy to do so — young people, the ones pop is marketed to most heavily, are oftentimes subject to the whims of whichever world they’ve been born into.) The dominant narratives are, by now, starting to catch up to your worldview — Sheeran was snubbed at the Grammys — and anyway, you’ve loved rap your whole life: the Grammys don’t mean s–t.
So in that case, who defines 2017? Easy. Kendrick Lamar. The hype leading up to the release of DAMN., the album that confirmed Kendrick as a pop star, is unquenchable. The release of “The Heart Pt. IV” in late March and ensuing speculation about Big Sean subliminals eats up days on the timeline. I worked at Complex during the rollout, and each song and video was an event, a text to be close-read; the release-night coverage of the album was our biggest night in music. Sheeran dominated, statistically speaking, in the most anodyne spaces, but Kendrick’s superstardom felt more impactful than numbers.
Why mourn the death of an imagined monoculture, when there was only the appearance of unified areas of interest, everyone tuning in to the same thing? MTV, it should not be forgotten, didn’t play videos from black artists from its launch on August 1, 1981 until March 2, 1983, when it added “Billie Jean” into rotation. And even four years after the network added Run-DMC’s “Rock Box,” in 1984, “the channel programmed less than ten rap videos total,” as Dan Charnas reports in his book The Big Payback. Culture is shaped by executives who have largely been straight white men. The only sensible thing to do when someone approaches you about the monoculture is to go looking for everything that was ignored to manufacture homogeny.
If you want to know what you missed while you were streaming “Shape of You,” go talk to the Pulitzer committee. Which, of course, is perhaps just a shell game of swapping one sort of cosign for another. But still.
(Read on to our Greatest Pop Star of 2018 here, or head back to the full list here.)
