Millennials' Favourite Pop Stars Are Falling Off

Millennials – old enough to recall Daily Mail tear-downs and shocking Barbara Walters interviews, but young enough to have spent their weekends on Twitter desperate for a response from their favourite artist – spearheaded the shift to a world where being a fan meant more than knowing the song playing on the radio. Adele could be your actual friend (on Myspace). Katy Perry didn’t just make fun bops, she also had a fun life! (At least according to Instagram.) Rihanna would post the world’s hottest selfie, inspire you to copy her tattooed chest piece, and beef with other celebs on the TL in the space of a week. Now that’s serving culture – and the culture was enough!

Then the 2020s came along. Gen Zs arrived to the discourse, and with them came a sharpened moral compass and a plea for all of us – including celebrities, whom younger Gen-Zers have never known outside of abridged online proximity – to do better. Today, the up-and-comers behind Spotify hits almost always come with a #relatable TikTok profile complete with hashtagged calls-to-action in their bio. Gen Z, in all of their earnestness, expects authenticity, transparency and a backbone from every brand that they purchase, the creators they follow, and the artists that they stream. The new gen of pop stars are officially moving in – but not all previous tenants are leaving without a fight. 

Nicki Minaj was the last icon in a hip-hop landscape that pretty much only allowed the success of one female rapper at a time, and her bars defined bad bitch-ery across the entire 2010s (find me one millennial that doesn’t know every word to “Monster”). In the 15 years since Minaj’s verse on Young Money’s “Bed Rock” marked her first Billboard Top 5 breakthrough, we’ve gotten over ourselves. Female rap inspires enough love from the general public that “anthems for baddies, by baddies” could be its own subgenre. Between break-out stars like Flo Milli, Sexyy Red and Doechii, fans are spoiled for choice.

For Nicki, this might be the feat of a lifetime: Imagine shaking up the scene so much that demand for more women in rap skyrockets! Imagine opening hundreds of doors through the sheer impact of your unprecedented success! The feuds of her early career with rap veterans like Lil Kim (remember “Stupid Hoe”?) would no longer burden her successors. There was finally room for everybody – and Cardi B’s decade-defining debut “Bodak Yellow” in 2018 marked the dawn of a new world for female rappers, becoming the second ever solo hip-hop number No. 1 single by a female rapper. 

Nicki has since clashed with a sizable portion of industry up and comers: Latto, Yung Miami, Stormi Webster (yeah, like, Travis Scott’s and Kylie Jenner’s actual baby) and most memorably, Cardi herself. Nicki’s 2019 features on Doja Cat’s “Say So”, Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer”, plus her 2023 team-up with Ice Spice helped to quiet suspicions of Nicki tactically trying to tear down threats to her rap girl throne, but her recent 180 on the Meg co-sign does nothing to dispel accusations of jealousy from the devoted fans of other rap girls.

It all started with the release of Megan’s latest track “HISS”, containing the line “these hoes don’t be mad at Megan / these hoes mad at Megan’s Law” – a reference to federal registration that requires law enforcement to make information about registered sex offenders publicly available. It is widely assumed that this is a brief if pointed shot at Nicki’s 2019 marriage to Kenneth Petty, a registered sex offender who was convicted for the attempted rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Nicki spent the next three days on a Twitter and Instagram Live rampage before releasing the diss track “Big Foot” on Monday (Megan is a US shoe size 9), which disparages Megan’s deceased mother and wrongly accuses Megan of lying about being shot by rapper Tony Lanez, who is currently serving ten years in prison for the offence. Since then, stan wars between the Barbz and the Hotties have raged on. Nicki fans have doxxed the gravesite of Megan’s mother, and Nicki has lost over 175,000 followers on IG alone – while Megan’s gained 228,000.

Nicki’s less-than-gracious undoing of her legacy harkens back to her own words for Lil Kim in “Stupid Hoe”: “Stupid hoes is my enemy / stupid hoes is so wack / Stupid hoe shoulda befriended me, then she could've probably came back”. The sad irony is that Nicki has fared pretty well through the test of time, co-current to the many mega-star rappers that have gained traction in recent years – her track “Barbie World”, featuring Ice Spice, debuted to 16.2 million streams in 2023.

But the world is watching this drama unfold, and the crown is slipping. Those who weren’t around to personally experience 2012’s more promising iteration of Nicki – the animated, inspiring life force focused on universal girl power – have come to know her for her less than reputable traits: constant fall-outs with other rappers; a harassment lawsuit filed by her partner’s victim, and her defence and continued support of her brother, who is facing jail time for the rape of an 11-year-old girl. Nicki represents everything Gen Z hopes to discard from the industry. They desire an entirely new breed of star: one more sympathetic, bubbly and relatable – someone, in other words, more like Megan.

Nicki, rightly or wrongly, has plausible reason to fear being toppled by new talent. The handover to up-and-comers from millennials’ favourite artists has been a slow but long-running process. The faltering power of Katy Perry, no less than royalty in the 2010s bubblegum-pop scene, was the canary in the coal mine. The 2017 “flop” (Twitter’s words, not mine) of her fifth album Witness in marked a change in our relationship with the unwavering icons who were, once upon a time, all but guaranteed to dominate the charts with every new release. 

Drake has dominated the music scene far longer than anyone thought the kid from Degrassi ever would, but his last album For All The Dogs made significantly less noise. Kanye West, the same guy who got away with comparing himself to Jesus because his music was just that good, seems to be focusing on a budding fetish for public sex and playing dress-up with his girlfriends. The Weeknd remains the streaming giant behind some of 2020s biggest hits, but his work on the catastrophic lead balloon of The Idol was enough to ick-out casual fans in swathes. The last time Justin Bieber had a hit was “Ghost” in 2021. Fair play! But “Ghost” is on Justice, an album padded out with features from cool and current names familiar to Gen Z like Giveon and Burna Boy. It’s a tactical (and respectable) move that builds him a soft landing in the transition from pop-R&B idol to veteran with fading star-power. 

If her streaming numbers are anything to go by, Ariana Grande is still steadfastly A-list, but her decision to take a break from music and pivot back to the screen with her upcoming role in Wicked could also be seen as well-timed strategy to diversify her position in culture and keep fans hungry for new releases. A few more years into her mission for an acting Oscar and we might end up in a world where Gaga is known by younger crowds as an actor first, singer second. Rihanna has all but retired from music to focus on family – although her star lives on through Fenty Beauty, the anticipated release of “Lift Me Up” for the Black Panther soundtrack was a moment that came and quickly went. Bruno Mars may still be a touring titan, but has opted out of mass radio appeal, finding a niche in retro superduo Silk Sonic. Adele’s in no hurry to release her next project – and where the hell did Ed Sheeran go?

Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have excelled at maintaining every sliver of star power by consistently releasing albums and nurturing their intergenerational fan bases, helped along by a meticulous understanding of project planning and PR control. Knowing when to shut the fuck up is today’s most valuable asset as a superstar, but even when things go awry, there’s bonus points in having garnered enough longevity and good-will to smoothe the narrative and get eyes looking elsewhere (see: Beyoncé’s elevator incident; every fragment of the infinite Taylor Swift rumour mill).

Today, fresh and unfiltered pop stars like Reneé Rapp, Billie Eilish and PinkPantheress serve the equal parts bops and relatable energy that stan bases want from their favourites. At the same time, the way we engage with celebrity, and culture as a whole, is incomparable to the landscape of ten year sago. Mono-culture died when we stopped collectively engaging in art harvested from the same sources – TV and cinema has been swapped for thousands of options on streaming platforms, the Top 40 charts for algorithmically-generated playlists. The 2020s are practically incompatible with the concept of one-to-watch – there’s 50 gajillion potentials and no singular pulse to keep a finger on. Why hedge your bets on one of the five pop stars on rotation, when there’s a thousand other micro-celebs who speak to something personal in you?

Slowly, but surely, the major label voices that soundtracked the quarter-lives of millennials everywhere have quietly shuffled off the stage. Miss Minaj might mark the first to be dragged off kicking and screaming. But the desperation to cling to the spotlight is in spite of herself. The deed has long been signed, and the new kids on the block are already re-decorating.