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So what does pop in 2013 look like? A lot like Pharrell, it seems. Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” continues to hold the number one spot, while Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” hangs in at number four after 17 weeks on the chart, many of them at the very top. Both songs are heavily indebted to the smooth-edged sounds of 70s soul and disco (some may say a little too indebted), and both have found audiences that span a broad range of tastes and demographics, from hipsters to hip-hop heads to the most mainstream of mainstream listeners, proving that the kind of wide-spectrum consensus many people thought had been destroyed by the splintering effects of the Internet still lives on. (Bruno Mars’s “Treasure,” at number seven, proves the continued viability of that particular retro approach.)
Further down, Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” (at number two) and Jay Z’s “Holy Grail” (at number five) embody the synergistic collision of pop and rap that’s been one of the year’s defining musical aspects. Jay and “Holy Grail” guest star Justin Timberlake have been commingling the two genres for a while, and this year have been collaborating on a deeper (but highly successful) level. “We Can’t Stop” was produced by Mike Will Made It, whose previous hits with Juicy J, Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz, and Future were already starting to impact pop radio before Cyrus tapped him for a single that “feels black,” and whose controversial, twerk-centric video became a flashpoint for discussion about white pop’s co-opting of black hip-hop culture.
