WHAT POPULAR MUSIC GAVE UP DOING

National Review

 

What Popular Music Gave Up Doing

By Dan McLaughlin

February 10, 2026 5:57 PM

 

Others here have sufficiently covered the political controversies around Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show. It put me in mind of another problem: the weakened state of today’s popular music. Because Bad Bunny’s show, musically speaking, was remarkably boring.

 

Now, I’m 54; I have long since reached the age where I expect that a diminishing share of popular music will appeal to me, and an increasing share will be stuff whose appeal I don’t even really understand. It comes for us all. Even with that caveat, the state of the current scene is pretty sad.

 

As I grew from childhood to young adulthood through the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties, there seemed to be one constant: Each succeeding wave of music would be louder, more vigorous, more raucous, and generally harder-rocking than what preceded it. It seemed, to me and I suspect to much of my generation, that this was how things would always be. Our parents, and the parents of the children of the prior few decades, all thought that our music was an infernally loud racket. In time, we’d expect to grow up and conclude that our kids’ music was, too. The disco era was a bit of a detour from that, but disco produced a reaction and didn’t have staying power, plus it arose right alongside the age of punk rock; harder-rocking new sounds such as those of Van Halen, AC/DC, and Judas Priest emerged side by side with the disco era. The rise of grunge and gangsta rap in the first half of the 1990s seemed a natural continuation of the trend.

 

Somewhere around the turn to the 21st century, that process began gradually reversing itself, and it really became pronounced in the decade of the 2010s: As a whole, popular and mainstream new music got softer and more tame. New artists who didn’t fit that mold — and you can still find them — tended to exist further and further on the margins of what was widely promoted and mass-consumed. Sure, the lyrical content of music and the visual presentation of pop stars still sought to eternally up the ante of shock value, but the underlying music was another story. Guitars got scarcer, and beats got softer.

 

We could debate why this is. Perhaps we reached an endpoint where it wasn’t really possible to turn the dial past eleven. Perhaps it’s yet another sign of feminized culture that no longer aspires to the big, masculine, stadium-filling sound of classic rock. (I suspect, not having spent time with it, that Bad Bunny’s music suffered somewhat from being unsuited to the acoustics of a vast outdoor venue.) Certainly, the industry itself has changed: Album sales cratered, music television died, radio playlists got far less diverse, and listeners switched to streaming. Technology, too, has made it easier and cheaper to create music without involving musicians who play real instruments; money spent on touring with them can now instead go to dancers, who work cheaper.

 

Either way, the thing Gen X never expected was to end up in middle age asking why those kids and their music aren’t making enough noise.