Men are either afraid to be popstars, or they just aren’t very good at it. They’re allergic to artifice, focused on preserving unironic sex appeal, and striking the most “authentic” pose possible. The texture of the world changes when a female pop star scores a hit: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”, Beyonce‘s “Formation”, and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls”. The scope of their project–hot blue wigs, signature stamped makeup, titillating press cycles, music videos boasting the GDP of Tuvalu–permeates every corner of pop culture, a gale force tailwind behind the music.
The last decade’s most memorable male pop moments have no such effect. The Weeknd’s cocaine synth pastiche, Justin Bieber’s flaccid gospel inflection, Harry Styles‘ elevator dad rock, any number of the TikTok-famous nonstarters who can’t be bothered with creative direction. Every last one is frictionless American Idol fodder–moody playboys and soft heartthrobs content to traffic radio play and family-friendly brand deals.
Nobody’s up to stopping the planet like Michael Jackson. They’re barely up to singing above a whisper. The R&B-tinged quivering falsetto of Shawn Mendes and the Auto-Tuned crooning of Post Malone are the sounds of a broken, beaten ethos of manhood in the US. I’m both joking and not joking.
It’s hard to blame them for not wanting to bother with the whole charade. The men who weren’t afraid to flirt with persona and world-building received the kind of hate they make documentaries about. Bieber’s Believe era inspired so much male ire that he had to rebrand as a big weed guy to win them back. Plus, rappers were beginning to take up the glitzy torch of character-acting. For singers, a subdued and indie-ish “cool” probably seemed like enough.
Female pop went through its own growth period, clearing space for the intense whisper-singing of Billie Eilish and spare arrangements of Lorde. Still, it wasn’t long before the Old Way found its champions in maximalists like Kim Petras, Slayyyter, and Charli XCX. (Even Lady Gaga came back around.) But men still haven’t found their big-name counterparts, stunted by the perception that giving enough of a shit to go all out and create lasting iconography is corny, desperate, or perhaps most damning of all: gay.
The male pop modus operandi developed into something like this: You shouldn’t seem like you want to be an artist. It should seem like something that just happened to you and you’re doing your best to let the music speak for itself. Or, y’know, sing about doing a lot of drugs.
Looking back, it can seem like we were another species entirely, but things weren’t always this way. Male pop singers–many of whom barely qualified as “singers”–were goofy, irreverent, sexy, and complicated. They wore all kinds of stupid outfits, wore sunglasses indoors, and made instant classic music videos. They didn’t mean to be rude, but tonight they’re fucking you. Every day, they were shufflin’.
But as the death knell of this era sounded, the first thing to die was perhaps the most essential quality of great male pop music: horniness. The controversy around Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” was the final nail in the coffin. As a culture, we decided there was no more room for this kind of unchecked douchebag libido. At the dawn of Trump times, and all the #MeToo consent talk swirling around it, dirty ‘n’ flirty had given way to rapey.
Unfortunately for the dream of the male pop star, the opposite of horny is cucked–and there’s nothing less pop than that. And so, ten years of hazy and strung-out rap-tinged ballads followed.
That is what made 2022’s “Girls”, the room-shaking debut single from the Dare, seem either extremely enticing or extremely regressive, depending on who you were. Opening with a rowdy scream of drunken glee, a monster was reborn: “I like the girls that do drugs.” What follows is two minutes of reckless, blind randiness that never lets up, a burst of noisy and lustful electroclash. “They say I’m too fucking horny, wanna put me in a cage, I’d probably fuck a hole in the wall the guy before made.” OK, dude, relax. We’ll go out.
The most significant point of contention around the Dare is whether or not we as a society actually want this back. That, along with a bunch of meaningless New York noise around “indie sleaze”, is a vague nostalgia genre indebted to bloghouse and Meet Me in the Bathroom indie rock. The Dare’s full-length debut for Republic Records What’s Wrong With New York? eagerly addresses both of these concerns with a shit-eating grin and splashy cymbals.
To address the latter, the album is relentlessly silly and tongue pressed in cheek for a blowjob gesture. “Free your mind, and your ass will follow; free your ass, and you might get laid,” goes the opener (Ha Ha), more explicit in its dancefloor come-ons than anything LCD Soundsystem would ever dare to touch. The record is peppered with euphoric yelps and moans, a James Murphy trademark, but there’s nothing here so emotionally layered as “Dance Yrself Clean”.
That’s not what the Dare is interested in–the projects are diametrically opposed. “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” is the kind of cool, indie detachment that the Dare’s earnest messiness seeks to destroy. When the busy DFA-style percussion of “I Destroyed Disco” falls away for a robotic “now let the disco destroy youuuuuuuu” drop, there’s more 3OH!3 in the air than Fischerspooner. There’s a provocative quality to the “it’s something that could make a bride out of a whore” line on the lead single “Perfume”.” A lyric like this would be radioactive to the biggest names in male pop today, but if Smith’s parties are any indication, it seems like people are kind of over giving a fuck about things like this.
With the mission clear, it remains to be seen whether the Dare’s retro-douchey mentality will stick in the way that collaborator Charli XCX’s Brat vibe was able to. In the same way that Brat tapped into something loud and chaotic missing from pop culture, the Dare seems uniquely positioned to bring back unselfconscious, sexy, uniquely male fun. What’s Wrong With New York? runs the gamut from heartbroken party boy ballads (“Elevation”) to borderline jock jams (“Good Time”). Smith has a monopoly on these markets.
The music is frantically danceable and finely observed, stuffing every free moment with earworms. “Movement”, perhaps the LP’s best song, is a new-wave freakout that builds to a pounding, screaming conclusion that betrays more production talent than the bare-bones “Girls” might’ve suggested. Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs lends a hand on “I Destroyed Disco”, deploying punishing, blown-out bass on another of the record’s finest moments, a glittering piece of white boy talk-rap. “All Night” betrays more commercial and palatable ambitions with its chant-along chorus and comparatively meek approach to a synth banger. Still, even the Dare’s worst is better than some of his contemporaries’ best.
Across its tightly focused–or charitably short–runtime, it’s hard not to be charmed by the whole thing. The critical focus on the Dare’s sonic originality, or place in a hateable social scene, is all beside the point. What’s Wrong With New York? is a gift horse I wouldn’t dare look in the mouth: it’s euphoric, it’s massive, it’s funny, it’s blissfully unironic, it’s finally fucking pop. I wouldn’t overthink it.