Last weekend, during a particularly grueling Sunday reset in my sunroom, I accidentally allowed an algorithmic playlist to pollute the airspace of my home. I was just reaching for my phone to banish what I assumed was another aggressively pedestrian club track by Charli XCX, when I heard it: a distinct, undeniable reference to an independent filmmaker. I froze, my matcha whisk suspended in mid-air. For the first time in my adult life, I felt a glimmer of hope for the Billboard charts.
There is something deeply exhausting about the way modern pop stars expect us to care about their club nights and breakups without providing a properly formatted bibliography. For decades, we have allowed singers to release three-minute vocal expressions of emotion, completely untethered from the rigorous visual language of a male director who peaked in the 1970s. We let the working classes dictate the charts, resulting in generations of music engineered for exercising, commuting, and distracting oneself from the crushing reality of wage labor, rather than experiencing the crushing existential dread of a European protagonist.
But now, according to the latest trend pieces, we are witnessing the dawn of "Auteur-core." Finally, recording artists are doing the bare minimum and name-dropping the filmmakers who are vastly superior to them. When SZA titled a track after Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, she was not merely writing a revenge anthem. She was acknowledging her place in the cultural hierarchy, correctly identifying that her own heartbreak is only compelling if it reminds the listener of a much better movie.
We must stop treating singers as primary creators. At best, they are translators, converting the towering achievements of cinematic auteurs into a simplified, rhythmic format that the general public can digest. By explicitly naming the filmmakers in their lyrics, these artists are finally providing the necessary citation for their emotional labor.
Naturally, the greats always understood this necessary deference. David Bowie possessed the good grace to realize his music was merely a promotional vehicle for Stanley Kubrick references. Bowie knew that a pop song is, at its core, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the intellectual heft of a man behind a camera. It is a tragedy that it took half a century for the rest of the Top 40 to catch up to this basic reality of the entertainment ecosystem.
I brought this up during a private lunch on Tuesday with a mid-level distribution executive at A24, and we both agreed: if you cannot provide a syllabus for the hook of your pop song, you simply have no business being on the radio. Why should I, a homeowner with a dedicated screening room, be subjected to an artist's raw feelings when those feelings haven't been properly filtered through the lens of a recognized genius?
When a 22-year-old pop star sings about crying in a nightclub, she is fundamentally stealing valor from the independent directors who invented female suffering in the nineties.
In a just world, the directors being referenced would be collecting the lion's share of the publishing royalties. If Charli XCX is going to evoke the chaotic energy of a Lars von Trier film to sell out arenas, it is only fair that von Trier receives eighty percent of her touring revenue. The fact that musicians are allowed to keep the money generated by reminding us of films they didn't even direct is a glaring loophole in international copyright law.
I refuse to sign any vocalist who cannot immediately identify the French New Wave influences in their own basslines.
We have all become far too comfortable letting young people enjoy melodies without making them do the assigned reading. When my teenage niece tried to play a Top 40 station in my car last month, I immediately pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway and demanded she explain the Truffaut homages in the chorus she was humming. She couldn't, of course, because the public school system has entirely failed her generation. I left her by the shoulder of the road to think about her choices. It was a small joy, knowing I was enforcing some basic standard of rigor.
It turns out that pop music, long the refuge of the unserious, might just be salvageable if we strictly require it to be an advertisement for the film industry. If today's chart-topping vocalists are finally willing to step up and serve as unpaid marketing interns for the directors of the world, then I will gladly let them sing. But until every album on the charts comes with a mandatory written exam on the history of cinema, I will be keeping my headphones securely disconnected, sitting in absolute silence until the opening credits roll.