I admit, I went into this with some negative preconceptions, but I think for the most part I was pleasantly surprised. I’ve heard a bunch of these songs recently, mostly in the background as a part of working with kids (specifically for Tate McRae, with teen girls), and in that context I found the songs pretty lacking. That doesn’t mean bad—I’d occasionally find myself tapping a foot to the beat, or having a preference for a couple of the songs—but I could listen to the same song four or five times without ever building up a recognition for the song. So many of the songs just sounded so bland and vague, so much like… well, like generic contemporary teen girl pop.
Listening through the music more deliberately, and hearing the songs in the contexts of their albums, helped immensely. Obviously I am predisposed toward this because it is the thing that I have come to prefer, and because it is the method with which I have by far the most practice, but even knowing that I can’t resist from saying that I think there’s something just better about listening this way. It does give more context to listen to the album. It does situate the music differently, and it primes the listener differently.
Anyway, point is that I ended up actually enjoying Tate McRae a fair bit. I think she still falls victim to a lot of the things that she would stereotypically obviously fall victim to as a young pop star: her lyricism can be overly on the nose and trite; her first record was amateurish, and not in an endearing way, and one can’t help but wonder how much of improving her chops was personal ability and how much was having more reach and thus better producers (I think it is a given that both of those things happened); it seems to me that, as it can so easily be, getting attention is as much or more of a driver than making interesting music, and so there is a level of performative provocation that I find more distracting than endearing.
But I don’t want to make it sound like I wasn’t endeared to her at all, because that’s not true. I think for the most part she puts out solid and enjoyable pop music that is clearly in line with the movements of its time, and that’s fine and well. Solid B. Exactly what “solid B” means is something of a frustrating question for me at this point, because I’m looking over my B rank artists and how they’re all placed and so much of it feels wrong and bad, but what can you do. I’ve complained about that plenty already, and I’m sure I’ll complain about it plenty more. Oh well.
Tate McRae complete, now listening to: Car Bomb
