From the death of Britpop to ‘Brat’: how has music evolved in 25 years of the 21st century
For the current living generations, the turn to the 21st century was the first taste of a new millennium, full of expansive new horizons, revolutions, and fresh promises. Those hopes weren’t baseless—after all, the decades preceding had increasingly been brooding with a sense of power to the people, from the free-loving spirit of the 1960s to the political and industrial takeovers throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.
Of course, all of these respective eras were reflected in and soundtracked by some pretty seismic songs, whether it was teen summer tunes or the all-out brazenness of Britpop. Looking back over the musical chronology of the 20th century, it’s fascinating to explore the sonic revolutions that sounded to the beats that now make up the stories in the history books and how exactly it shaped the audiences of its moment as well as into the future.
Obviously, the 21st century had some pretty heady expectations to live up to, especially following a time period that had spawned stars now critical to the lifeblood of music, such as The Beatles, Madonna, and Elvis Presley. But now we’re a quarter of the way down that track, it seems an appropriate time to stop and take stock – how has music evolved in the first 25 years of the 21st century?
Whether the ‘new’ millennium now being a quarter done makes you want to collapse in an existential spiral or not, it’s still true that the natural beats of life have created a new musical timeline down which we can track our most popular listening habits of the past two-and-a-half decades. But in case you’re in need of the reminder, we’ve rounded up this handy whistlestop guide of the sonic highlights of the last 25 years, taking in everything from the downfall of Britpop to the birth of Brat.
2000-2005: the dying breaths of Britpop, reality TV takeover, and the hip-hop revolution
They say first impressions are the ones that count, but in that case, the 21st century would have been doomed from the outset because, despite all the promises of new beginnings, the new millennium started in a bit of a slump. Still reeling from the fatal fracture of the blazing Britpop era of the late 1990s, the earliest musical period of the 2000s was pretty downtrodden, knowing it simply couldn’t live up to the stratospheric laddish-ness of the years before.
The rumblings of the great Oasis war aside, it was clearly time for some fresh sonic blood to rejuvenate the masses. That came in the form of a takeover across two fronts – the launch of reality TV. As much as the Saturday night talent shows may have become somewhat chronically cringe-inducing in our view now, it’s worth remembering how much of a commandeering force they ploughed through the music industry when they first began, for better or worse.
Will Young and Gareth Gates of the 2002 inaugural series of Pop Idol are the most pertinent of all the examples. Roll your eyes all you want, but the fact remains that the pair’s music exports off the back of the show formed the first pieces of chart history for this new era, with Young’s winner’s single ‘Anything is Possible/Evergreen’ becoming the best-selling song for any debut artist ever, and being the most successful song of the century up until 2015. But away from the shiny gleam of the polished TV studio lights, at this time, there was another revolution brewing – except this one had quite a lot more edge.
Hip-hop wasn’t exactly a new force in the music industry – it had existed for some 30 years before – but the turn of the century marked a new breath of life for the genre, which it would never again turn back from. During the early part of the 2000s, hip-hop took a decidedly sharp turn towards the pop realm, with artists like Jay-Z and Eminem taking their tunes to chart heights that had never been witnessed before. It was a huge moment for the genre in assuming a more mainstream appeal and a movement that increasingly bore its influence as the pop music wheels moved on.
2005-2010: R&B is here to stay, a soul infusion and indie sleaze
With the hip-hop vote of confidence, it was high time for American artists to take back some control of a scene that had been dominated by quintessential Britishness for so long. After the legwork hip-hop had put in throughout the first half of the decade, the latter part of the noughties was when a new fusion of popular R&B really began to shine.
Of course, much of the foundations for this had already been laid in the late ‘90s by the likes of Destiny’s Child, Lauryn Hill, and so many others, but it was in 2007 that artists including Sean Kingston and Rihanna came forward to carry on that torch. Particularly in the latter’s monster hit ‘Umbrella’, it was the signal once and for all that R&B had found its sticking place, as the song became the longest-running UK number one of the century to that point, scoring ten weeks at the top.
Rihanna’s blazing girl power must have had some effect because, over in the British camp, a soul infusion was coming to life via the country’s female artists. This was the era of Amy Winehouse’s seminal Back to Black and Adele’s debut 19 hitting the airwaves, providing the pop canon an antidote that hailed back to the classic sounds of the ‘60s through smooth soul and swelling jazz.
But this also represented a battle of the sexes, of sorts, as concurrently, a juggernaut of indie sleaze was beginning to chug into action. In many ways, it was the long-awaited younger sibling to Britpop, but the male-dominated emergence of bands like the Arctic Monkeys and The Libertines became a new symbol of laddish aspiration and embodied the age-old gleam of being a bit of a dickhead. Politically, this was a time of depression and recession, but the romance and naivety of the tunes dominating the charts would have made you believe that these guys were on top of the world.
2010-2015: changing of the pop tides, teenage heartthrobs, and dance domination
One decade down, yet the 2010s began in a hauntingly familiar way to the state of affairs ten years before it – stuck in a musical rut. The sudden death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, in 2009 not only left the world reeling but begged the question of what was to follow, given that the charts were lacking any singular, distinctive voice to continue that canon. New incarnations in the likes of Bruno Mars emerged at that point and have since gone on to be the modern markers of those genres, but at the turn of the decade, that dominance must once again be handed to Rihanna.
Particularly in the UK, the storming, unparalleled success of her hits like ‘Only Girl (In the World)’ and ‘Love the Way You Lie’ bridged the gap between the new force of R&B and the earlier surge of hip-hop, as the Barbadian popstar joined up with rapping gods such as Eminem to deliver these top tunes. The power of this bled into all areas of trend culture – anyone remember those God-awful T-shirts of her face that everyone wore? – but also lit the spark for a new explosion that put pop world domination very much back on the map.
A proper boyband era hadn’t really been witnessed since some 20 years prior in the mid-1990s by this point, but all that changed with the fresh-faced arrival of One Direction in 2010. Undeniably the most successful ever export of the entire reality TV canon, the initial X Factor teen starlets went on to be global pop powerhouses all just in the space of these five years, catapulting boy bands back to the top as the thing of the moment and spurring on a slew of other sleek chart outfits which burned bright, but not for long.
Yet as the unmistakable force of the social media age began to take its tightest grip on society towards the end of this stint, so too did the music take a markedly technological turn. Rather than being terrified of the robot revolution, as had been the case in sonic explorations of the subject in the latter points of the 20th century, dance music greats like Daft Punk and David Guetta were met with a resurgence and subsequently heralded newer artists like Avicii and Diplo to take over the scene. As much as it may have been pounding and over-produced, this was a moment where indie and rock had been somewhat shoved out of the mainstream picture.
2015-2020: DJs reign supreme, another British revolution, and female artists breaking alternatives
As we break into the ten years leading up to our present day, in the beginning, DJs and dance music were very much still in their mainstream prime, with the likes of Drake’s ‘One Dance’ being the blazing example of a tune that harboured the history and roots of R&B and hip hop that came before it, while also being freshly catapulted with the new help of social media and streaming.
But as with most musical eras, this eventually fizzled out in favour of a return to the more stereotypical hallmarks of pop, rock, and indie – and the surge of another British revolution. Love him or loathe him, Ed Sheeran’s acoustic spark reigned supreme over this time, creating a path for other new self-made stars in the pop canon, like Dua Lipa, to climb the ranks.
On the rock and indie stage, things were also beginning to get back on track with the peak of The 1975’s popularity and the emergence of fresh UK faces like Sam Fender to jolt the scene back to life in the face of a faithfully repetitive pop formula. To parallel this, however, was the sudden uprising of a frontier of female artists breaking fertile territory to signal a new alternative age.
The release of Melodrama by Lorde in 2017 and When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? by Billie Eilish were the answers to a music industry at that moment devoid of real grit from female artists, and their respective straddling of electro-pop coupled with an alternative edge was like an elixir of captivation to their audiences. Gone were the days of shiny singing about glossy romances; these powerhouses of young women suddenly dominating the scene stripped back the truth of technological hedonism until they were starkly laid bare for all the world to see.
2020-2025: Pandemic pop, the downfall of bands, and is the future really the past?
Unfortunately, any conversation about the last five years, even in musical terms, has to open with the woes of the pandemic. But without trying to sound flippant about the horrors of Covid, its impact on the sonic history of the 21st century so far is one to be recognised. Arguably leading on from women transcending the alternative scene not long before, the 2020s began in the throes of pandemic pop, through which new female dominators like Olivia Rodrigo and Doja Cat materialised as winners.
What is noticeable in our most recent sonic discourse, however, is that individualistic forces are ruling the roost. Since the turn of the current decade, bands in any form and across any genre having monumental chart success have become practically non-existent, replaced instead by the virtues of TikTok fame and viral talking points. Of course, probably the most animated of all these discussions concerns the rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, from which the former has decisively emerged victorious with his recent stunning Grammy wins for the diss track ‘Not Like Us’.
Apart from some classic sonic rivalries and chirpy earworms in the form of Chappell Roan, the moment we find ourselves faced with in the contemporary music landscape is quite the crossroads. Either we seize the new female pop insurgency powered through the likes of Charli XCX’s anthemic revolution of agency and freedom in Brat, or we trail off down an untravelled road of technological takeover that, this time, truly has some terrifying and unknown repercussions.
We can expect to hear a lot more about the growing use—and threat—of artificial intelligence in music and many other areas of life in the upcoming years. In this sense, it begs the existential question—are we ever going to produce truly new music again? So much of AI is being programmed to learn from what already exists in the world, and as such, the worry is that music will just increasingly be taken over by the same old, and we won’t hear anything authentic anymore.
The first 25 years of the 21st century have laid a blueprint for the sonic scene we are surrounded by, but the next 25 will be instrumental in determining its future.
