2010s: Fragmentation and the Feed

If the 2000s were the decade hip-hop became the industry, the 2010s were the decade it became the air. It was the most-streamed music on earth, the sound of advertising and film trailers and video games, the language teenagers used to talk about grief. It won a Pulitzer Prize. It also splintered into more shapes than any one listener could follow, which was the point.

The first half belonged to three writers. Kanye West opened the decade with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in November 2010, a maximalist apology built out of choirs, prog-rock samples and a thirty-five-minute film, and then spent the next six years dismantling it: the industrial screech of Yeezus in 2013, the unfinished, endlessly edited gospel-rap of The Life of Pablo in 2016. Drake turned the rapper into a mood: Take Care in 2011 is an album about being lonely in a nice hotel, and he spent the decade putting more songs on the Hot 100 than anyone alive. Kendrick Lamar wrote the decade's great novels, good kid, m.A.A.d city in 2012 and To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, then took the Pulitzer for DAMN. in 2018. J. Cole made 2014 Forest Hills Drive with no guest features and went platinum anyway.

The second half belonged to Atlanta and to the drum machine. Trap had been building since the early 2000s, but in the 2010s its skittering hi-hats and 808 sub-bass became the default rhythm of pop music worldwide. Future turned lean and heartbreak into a genre on DS2. Migos made the triplet flow a national accent with Versace in 2013 and Bad and Boujee in 2016. Young Thug sang in a language he seemed to be inventing live. Gucci Mane came out of prison and reinvented himself. Travis Scott built cathedrals out of reverb on Rodeo and Astroworld. Producers became stars: Metro Boomin, Mike WiLL Made-It, Zaytoven, Southside.

Underneath that, SoundCloud grew its own scene, and it was young, fast and in pain. Lil Uzi Vert's XO Tour Llif3 in 2017 was a suicide-note chorus with a pop hook. XXXTentacion, Lil Peep and Juice WRLD made emo rap out of guitar loops and anti-depressant lyrics, and all three were dead before the decade ended: Peep in November 2017, XXXTentacion shot in June 2018, Juice WRLD of an overdose in December 2019. Mac Miller died in September 2018, weeks after making the best record of his life. Nipsey Hussle was murdered outside his own store in Los Angeles in March 2019.

Women reclaimed the room. Nicki Minaj spent the decade out-rapping most of her peers. Cardi B went from reality television to Bodak Yellow to Invasion of Privacy, the first solo woman to win Best Rap Album at the Grammys. Megan Thee Stallion, Rapsody, Noname, Little Simz and Tierra Whack were all working by 2019. And the alternative wing stayed loud: Run the Jewels, Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples, Brockhampton, Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, Griselda in Buffalo. Drill travelled from Chicago to London to Brooklyn. By 2019 rap in English was a global dialect with regional accents everywhere.

Pop in the 2010s had no center and every center. It swallowed EDM, then trap, then reggaeton, then bedroom recordings made on a laptop by teenagers. What held it together was a small group of producers and a very large group of listeners choosing songs one at a time.

Adele bookended it. Her album 21, released in early 2011, was the best-selling album of the decade in America, a break-up record sung with the force of a gospel singer and no interest in fashion at all. Its follow-up, 25, sold 3.38 million copies in its first American week in November 2015, the biggest sales week ever measured. She proved a thing everyone had forgotten: if the song is good enough, people will still buy it.

Taylor Swift left country behind on Red in 2012 and went fully pop on 1989 in 2014, which won Album of the Year. Then she pulled her catalogue off Spotify in November 2014 over free streaming, put it back in 2017, and spent 2019 in public war over who owned her master recordings. Beyoncé dropped a self-titled album with no announcement in December 2013 and changed how records are released, then made Lemonade in 2016, a film and an album about betrayal, Black womanhood and the American South. Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande all built and rebuilt themselves inside the decade.

The edges were more interesting than the middle, and the middle kept borrowing from them. Lorde arrived at sixteen with Pure Heroine in 2013 and made minimalism a teenage language. Lana Del Rey invented a whole cinematic America and then wrote her best record, Norman Fucking Rockwell, in 2019. Carly Rae Jepsen turned a novelty hit into a cult career. Charli XCX, the PC Music producers and SOPHIE built hyperpop out of shattered glass and pitched-up voices. Robyn's Body Talk in 2010 taught the decade how to cry on a dancefloor. Billie Eilish closed the decade whispering into a microphone in her brother's bedroom and swept the 2020 Grammys at eighteen.

And pop stopped being American by default. PSY's Gangnam Style in 2012 was the first genuinely global internet song. BTS put a Korean-language album at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2018. Despacito ran the world in 2017 and Latin pop never went back into its box. The lingua franca of pop was now streaming, and streaming does not care what language you sing in.

R&B in the 2010s got quieter, weirder and much more personal. The template was set early: fewer drums, more space, singing that sounds like thinking out loud. The Weeknd posted House of Balloons for free in March 2011, a record about drugs and hotel rooms that sounded like a hangover, and half the decade's production followed it into the dark.

Frank Ocean is the pivot. Channel Orange in 2012 is a set of short stories about money, faith and unrequited love, released days after he wrote publicly about falling in love with a man, which changed what was sayable in a genre that had rarely allowed it. Blonde in 2016 went further out: guitars, silence, a voice pitched up and down like a memory being edited.

Around them a generation built a new vocabulary. Miguel made rock-shaped soul on Kaleidoscope Dream. SZA's Ctrl in 2017 was the sound of a young woman arguing with herself and became the decade's most quoted breakup record. Solange's A Seat at the Table in 2016 was calm, furious and beautifully arranged. Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer in 2018 was a queer science-fiction pop record with Prince's fingerprints on it. FKA twigs, Sampha, Kelela, Blood Orange, Kaytranada and the Internet blurred the line between R&B and electronic music until it stopped mattering.

The old church stayed standing. D'Angelo returned after fourteen years with Black Messiah in December 2014, released early because of Ferguson, and it won Best R&B Album. Alicia Keys, John Legend, Usher, Erykah Badu and Mary J. Blige all kept working. Ella Mai, H.E.R., Daniel Caesar, Khalid, Kehlani, Bryson Tiller and Summer Walker carried the sound into the streaming era, where a slow song with a lot of space is very good at being played on repeat.

Indie began the decade in the biggest room it had ever played. Arcade Fire's The Suburbs won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2011, an award nobody expected a Montreal art-rock band to win, and for a moment the blog-era class looked like the new mainstream. LCD Soundsystem played what they said was a farewell show at Madison Square Garden that April. Bon Iver won Best New Artist a year later.

Then it dispersed. Tame Impala turned psychedelia into a solo project made in a bedroom in Perth and ended up at the top of festival bills. Vampire Weekend made their densest and best record, Modern Vampires of the City, in 2013. The National perfected a specific kind of adult dread. Beach House, the War on Drugs, Sufjan Stevens, Father John Misty and Angel Olsen each found a different way to be sad at length and in high definition.

The most important shift was who got to make it. Recording moved into bedrooms, distribution moved to Bandcamp and streaming, and a generation of young women and queer artists took over the guitar: Mitski, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Japanese Breakfast, Big Thief, Courtney Barnett, girl in red, Clairo. Baker, Dacus and Bridgers made boygenius together in 2018. This is the algorithm's secret weapon, and it is true, but the songs came first.

Britain and Ireland kept the noise going. IDLES, Shame and Fontaines D.C. made post-punk that sounded like a pub argument you would want to be in. Wolf Alice won the Mercury Prize in 2018. Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine came back and found a huge new audience, because shoegaze turns out to be perfect music for headphones and anxiety.

Rock was not the main channel any more, and it took most of the decade for everyone to admit it. This was not a death. It was a demotion that turned out to be creatively useful. Freed from having to be pop, rock bands got weirder, heavier, quieter and more specific.

The big guitar records still landed. The Black Keys turned a blues duo into an arena act with Brothers in 2010 and El Camino in 2011. Arctic Monkeys reinvented themselves as a late-night lounge band on AM in 2013 and got the biggest audience of their lives. Foo Fighters made Wasting Light on analogue tape in Dave Grohl's garage and won Best Rock Album. Jack White, Queens of the Stone Age and Radiohead all made strong records to smaller and smaller mainstream fanfare.

Garage rock got noisier and more prolific, and the names to know are Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees releasing albums faster than anyone could buy them, Parquet Courts talking their way through American politics, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard putting out five albums in one year because they felt like it. This is rock as a hobby that got out of hand, in the best way.

Two moments define the decade's mood. In September 2014 U2 pushed Songs of Innocence into 500 million iTunes accounts without asking, and the world reacted like it had been burgled: the biggest rock band alive discovered nobody wanted a free album from them. In January 2016 David Bowie released Blackstar, a jazz-inflected record about mortality, and died two days later. One was rock as an imposition. The other was rock as a last word, and everybody understood which mattered.

The emo revival is one of the decade's quiet successes. Bands who had grown up on Midwestern nineties records brought back the twinkly guitar lines, the confessional lyrics and the maths-rock time signatures, and did it in basements and on Bandcamp with no industry help: Modern Baseball, the World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Foxing, Sorority Noise, Tigers Jaw, Tiny Moving Parts. American Football reunited and it did not feel like nostalgia. Pinegrove's Cardinal in 2016 folded country twang into it.

Pop punk had its third act. The Story So Far, Neck Deep and State Champs played it straight; Paramore went alt-pop and made After Laughter, a record about depression that sounds like an eighties party; blink-182 carried on without Tom DeLonge. The Warped Tour, the genre's summer home since 1995, ran its final full cross-country tour in 2018. By then pop punk was already leaking into hip-hop, and Machine Gun Kelly and Yungblud were building the crossover that would define the early 2020s.

Hardcore and its heavy cousins mutated in every direction. La Dispute and Touché Amoré made post-hardcore that read like memoir. Code Orange used samplers and industrial noise. Knocked Loose made a genuinely frightening record in 2019. Bring Me the Horizon went from deathcore to arena synth-rock in ten years. And Turnstile, out of Baltimore, made hardcore you could dance to, which turned out to be the most influential idea any of them had.

Metal spent the decade in two conversations at once: the legends saying goodbye, and a huge underground getting the best distribution it had ever had. Streaming and Bandcamp were extraordinarily good for extreme music, because the audience is devoted and geography stopped mattering.

The farewells came fast. Ronnie James Dio died in May 2010. Slayer's Jeff Hanneman died in 2013 and the band toured its last lap. Lemmy died in December 2015, days after his seventieth birthday. Black Sabbath made 13 in 2013, their first album with Ozzy Osbourne in thirty-five years, and played their final show in Birmingham in February 2017. Chris Cornell died in May 2017 and Chester Bennington of Linkin Park two months later, and the grief in the heavy-music world that summer was enormous and public.

The new class was strange and excellent. Ghost, a Swedish band in Catholic costume playing pop songs about the devil, won a Grammy for Cirice in 2016 and ended the decade headlining arenas. Deafheaven put shoegaze inside black metal on Sunbather in 2013 and started an argument that lasted years. Gojira, Mastodon, Baroness, Pallbearer, Power Trip, Converge, Zeal and Ardor and Blood Incantation all made records that mattered. Sleep released The Sciences on 20 April 2018, a date chosen for the joke, and it was their best.

And then Tool, who had not released an album since 2006, put Fear Inoculum out in August 2019 with a title track over ten minutes long. It went to number one. The same month, their catalogue finally appeared on streaming services, and a generation who had only heard about them got to find out what the fuss was.

For about four years, dance music was the biggest business in American pop. Skrillex won three Grammys in February 2012 for a sound built out of digital screeching. Avicii's Levels in 2011 and Wake Me Up in 2013 put folk melodies over four-to-the-floor kicks and sold everywhere. Swedish House Mafia, Calvin Harris, Zedd, Martin Garrix and Marshmello filled Las Vegas residencies and festival fields. Major Lazer's Lean On in 2015 was streamed more than almost anything ever had been.

It burned out fast, as booms do, and what remained was better. Disclosure's Settle in 2013 brought UK garage back into pop. Jamie xx made In Colour, a record about the memory of raving. Flume, Kaytranada, Four Tet, Floating Points, Jon Hopkins, Caribou and Bicep built dance music you could sit down to. James Blake turned dubstep's low end into chamber music for a cracked voice.

Underneath that, techno got its history back. Berlin's clubs became cultural institutions, formally recognised when a German court ruled in 2016 that Berghain counted as a place of culture rather than entertainment. A new generation of DJs made the scene's queer and Black roots visible again: Honey Dijon, the Black Madonna, Peggy Gou, Nina Kraviz, Charlotte de Witte. Chicago footwork went global with DJ Rashad's Double Cup in 2013, and his death the next year left a hole.

At the experimental end, Aphex Twin returned with Syro in 2014 and won a Grammy. Arca, Oneohtrix Point Never, Holly Herndon and SOPHIE built the deconstructed-club sound: music that sounds like a machine having feelings. Flying Lotus, Thundercat and Kaytranada tied electronic music back to jazz and funk. And in 2013 Daft Punk did the opposite of all of it, hiring session players from the seventies to make Random Access Memories, which won Album of the Year.

Country radio in the early 2010s had one idea and played it constantly: a truck, a dirt road, a girl in the passenger seat, a hip-hop drum pattern underneath. Florida Georgia Line's Cruise in 2012 is the template, and Luke Bryan and Jason Aldean built stadium careers on it. Sam Hunt took it further on Montevallo in 2014, half-singing and half-talking over programmed beats, and Body Like a Back Road in 2017 sat on the country chart for months.

The pushback came from two directions. In 2015 a radio consultant told an industry newsletter that women were the tomatoes in the salad of country radio and should be played less often, which became known as tomato-gate and made explicit a bias everyone already knew was there. And a run of writers simply made better records: Kacey Musgraves, whose Same Trailer Different Park in 2013 won Best Country Album and whose Golden Hour won Album of the Year in 2019; Chris Stapleton, whose Traveller in 2015 was an obscure songwriter's debut until a duet with Justin Timberlake at the CMA Awards made it a phenomenon; Miranda Lambert, Eric Church, Ashley McBryde, Maren Morris.

Outside Nashville, Americana became its own economy. Jason Isbell wrote Southeastern in 2013 about getting sober and won two Grammys for The Nashville Sound. Sturgill Simpson made a psychedelic country record and then a letter to his newborn son. Tyler Childers, Colter Wall, Margo Price and Brandi Carlile all found large audiences without country radio, mostly through streaming and word of mouth. The Highwomen formed in 2019 to make the point about who gets played.

And the decade's biggest country-adjacent story was not country at all, officially. In March 2019 Billboard removed Lil Nas X's Old Town Road from its country chart, saying it did not embrace enough elements of today's country music. The song then spent nineteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100, the longest run in the chart's history. Ken Burns' eight-part documentary on country music aired that same autumn, a reminder that the genre's borders had always been policed and had always leaked.

The decade opened with the nu-folk boom, which was in some ways a hangover from the 2000s. Mumford and Sons played waistcoats and kick drums to stadiums and won Album of the Year for Babel in 2013. The Lumineers, the Avett Brothers and First Aid Kit filled the same space. Advertising loved it. By 2015 the banjos had mostly gone back in their cases.

What survived was better and quieter. Bon Iver kept moving, from the choral warmth of his self-titled record in 2011 to the digitally shredded 22, A Million in 2016. Sufjan Stevens made Carrie and Lowell in 2015 about his mother's death, and it is one of the most direct records anyone made in the decade. Gillian Welch, Laura Marling, Bill Callahan, Sarah Jarosz and the Punch Brothers kept the craft alive.

The tradition got re-examined too. Rhiannon Giddens spent the decade proving that the banjo is an African instrument and that American folk music is Black music, on her own records and with Our Native Daughters in 2019, and she won a MacArthur Fellowship for it in 2017. Hurray for the Riff Raff, Valerie June and Yola widened the picture further.

And the elders got their due. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2016, which caused a global argument about whether songs are literature. John Prine made The Tree of Forgiveness in 2018 at seventy-one and had the biggest chart week of his life. Bruce Springsteen sat on a Broadway stage for over a year telling the story behind his own songs. Pete Seeger died in January 2014, which felt like the end of something that had started in 1940.

Jazz spent the 2010s getting younger, louder and much more connected to hip-hop. Robert Glasper's Black Radio in 2012 put rappers and R&B singers on a jazz record and won a Grammy for it. Esperanza Spalding, an upright bassist and singer, won Best New Artist in 2011 and the internet lost its mind, which told you exactly how far jazz had drifted from the mainstream and how quickly it was coming back.

The pivot was Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015, which is as much a jazz and funk record as a rap one: Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Thundercat and Kamasi Washington all play on it. Two months later Washington released The Epic, three hours of big-band spiritual jazz on a hip-hop label, and it worked. Thundercat's Drunk in 2017 did the same thing from the other direction.

London built the decade's most exciting scene, out of youth music programmes and Caribbean and West African rhythm rather than American bebop: Shabaka Hutchings with Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming, Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Ezra Collective, Yussef Kamaal. Chicago had Makaya McCraven and the International Anthem label. New York had Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Christian Scott.

The old masters kept leaving: Dave Brubeck in December 2012, Charlie Haden in 2014, Ornette Coleman in June 2015, Geri Allen in 2017, Cecil Taylor and Roy Hargrove in 2018. And in June 2018 an entire lost John Coltrane studio session from 1963 was released for the first time, which meant the most influential musician in the music's modern history had a new album out fifty-one years after he died.

The strangest thing about reggae in the 2010s is how much of it you heard without noticing. Dancehall rhythms and Jamaican vocal phrasing became a default setting in global pop: Drake's One Dance and Controlla in 2016, Rihanna's Work, Major Lazer's entire career, Justin Bieber's Sorry. Sean Paul had a second commercial life as a guest vocalist. Jamaica exported its rhythm and often did not get the credit.

At home, dancehall's dominant figure spent most of the decade in prison. Vybz Kartel was arrested in 2011 and convicted in 2014, and kept releasing music from inside. Popcaan, Alkaline and later Shenseea carried the sound forward.

Against that, a reggae revival looked back to roots and rockers: Chronixx, Protoje, Kabaka Pyramid, Jesse Royal and Lila Iké made records about Rastafari, history and Kingston's present tense. Damian Marley's Stony Hill won a Grammy in 2018. Buju Banton won Best Reggae Album at the 2011 Grammys while free on bond and barred from travelling to the ceremony, was convicted on drugs charges nine days later and jailed that June, then came home in December 2018 and played to enormous crowds. And Koffee, who was nineteen when her Rapture EP came out, won Best Reggae Album at the Grammys in January 2020, the youngest person and the first woman on her own to take it.

The bigger African story ran alongside it. Afrobeats moved from Lagos to the world across the decade: Wizkid singing the hook on One Dance, Davido, Mr Eazi, Tiwa Savage, and Burna Boy's African Giant in 2019, which made the case that this was not a support act for Western pop but a centre of its own.

The single most important fact about Latin music in the 2010s is that it crossed over without translating itself. Despacito, released in January 2017 by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee and remixed with Justin Bieber that April, spent sixteen weeks at number one on the American Hot 100 and became the most-watched video on YouTube. It is almost entirely in Spanish. The old rule, that a Latin hit needed an English version to travel, simply stopped applying.

Reggaeton had been building in Puerto Rico since the nineties. In the 2010s it fused with trap and went global. J Balvin brought Medellín to the world and made Vibras in 2018, a record that sounds like sunlight. Bad Bunny released X 100PRE on Christmas Eve 2018, a debut that mixed reggaeton, trap, pop-punk and bolero and refused every expectation of what a Latin trap star was supposed to be. Ozuna, Karol G, Anuel AA and Farruko filled the charts.

Spain sent something else entirely. Rosalía's El Mal Querer in 2018 built a concept album out of flamenco, hand claps, Auto-Tune and a thirteenth-century Occitan novel, and Con Altura the next year put her in the reggaeton mainstream on her own terms. Cardi B's I Like It in 2018, with Bad Bunny and J Balvin over a boogaloo sample, went to number one in the United States, which meant a Bronx rapper, a Puerto Rican trap singer and a Colombian reggaetonero had a joint American chart-topper in Spanish and English.

Gospel had one of its most visible decades since the 1970s, largely because hip-hop kept walking through the church door. Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book in 2016 is a gospel record with rappers on it, full of choirs and thank-yous, and it won Best Rap Album at the Grammys as the first streaming-only release ever to win one. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam opened The Life of Pablo the same year with Kirk Franklin, Chance and a four-year-old preaching, and by 2019 West was running weekly Sunday Service gatherings and released Jesus Is King.

In gospel proper, Kirk Franklin remained the genre's most reliable hitmaker, winning Best Gospel Album at both ends of the decade. Tamela Mann's Take Me to the King in 2012 and Tasha Cobbs' Break Every Chain in 2013 became standards in Black churches nationwide. Tye Tribbett, Travis Greene, Jonathan McReynolds and Koryn Hawthorne carried it forward, and Tori Kelly, a pop singer, made a full gospel album and won a Grammy for it in 2019.

Contemporary Christian music got its biggest crossover in years with Lauren Daigle's Look Up Child in 2018 and the single You Say, which sat on the pop chart for years. Hillsong United's Oceans became the most-sung worship song of the decade. Lecrae put a Christian hip-hop album at number one on the Billboard 200 in 2014. And in November 2018 the long-shelved film of Aretha Franklin's 1972 Amazing Grace sessions was finally released, three months after she died, which sent people back to the greatest gospel recording ever made.

The blues in the 2010s was mostly a story of custody: who was keeping it, and how. B.B. King, the last true superstar of the electric blues, played his final shows in 2014 and died in May 2015 at eighty-nine. With him went the last direct line to the Mississippi juke joints of the 1940s.

What carried on did so at the edges of other genres. Gary Clark Jr. played Chicago blues with a fuzz pedal and a modern rhythm section and got a Grammy for it. The Black Keys built an arena career out of a two-piece blues band from Akron. Alabama Shakes, led by Brittany Howard, won Best Alternative Music Album in 2016 for a record that is really a Southern soul-blues album. Buddy Guy kept winning Grammys into his eighties, and Bobby Rush won his first at eighty-three.

Rhiannon Giddens and the Carolina Chocolate Drops did the archival work: showing where the banjo, the fiddle tunes and the field hollers actually came from, and who has been written out. That is blues history done as scholarship, and it changed how a lot of younger listeners heard the whole American songbook.

Funk was not a scene in the 2010s. It was a resource, and everybody raided it. Daft Punk hired Nile Rodgers, the guitarist who wrote Chic's records, and Random Access Memories in 2013 was a loving, expensive reconstruction of the way people made dance music before computers. It won Album of the Year.

Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars did the same trick with less reverence and more force: Uptown Funk, released in November 2014, sat at number one for fourteen weeks and finished the decade as the biggest song on the Billboard Hot 100 of the entire ten years. Mars followed it with 24K Magic, a full album of eighties funk and new jack swing, and swept the 2018 Grammys with it.

The serious version of this happened in Los Angeles. Thundercat, a bassist who came up in a thrash band and then played on To Pimp a Butterfly, made records that put Bootsy Collins and Herbie Hancock in the same room as trap drums. Anderson .Paak drummed and sang at the same time. Janelle Monáe wrote Make Me Feel with Prince's blessing and it sounds like it. And every trap producer in Atlanta was, whether they said so or not, still working with the low end that P-Funk built.