Dancing With Ourselves
2020 was the year fandom went underground: Public spaces vanished, isolation became a fact of life, and pop music responded in kind
Twenty years ago in The Village Voice’s yearly poll of music critics, one of the writers quipped about the future: “So who’s going to be paying $300 a seat for the Backstreet Boys reunion at AOL Hard Rock Cafe in 2020?” As it happens, $300 would have snagged you a general-admission pit ticket for the Backstreet Boys’ summer tour at the Jiffy Lube Live venue in Bristow, Virginia, on July 21st. Except this show didn’t happen, and neither did the rest of their DNA tour. Nor did anybody else’s tour.
Instead, the Backstreet Boys combined for one of the year’s most strangely touching music moments: Zoom-harmonizing “I Want It That Way” from their separate homes for Elton John’s Covid-19 benefit in April. They looked awkward, perhaps feeling a bit ridiculous posing as pop idols in front of their couches. And it was ridiculous — that was the beauty of it.
Being a music fan in 2020 was crazy in ways that were totally new, because everything about pop life changed overnight. For so many of us, music is key to how we connect to the outside world. But in 2020, music became the outside world, as public spaces were few and far between. It was a shared experience at a time when we really needed that.
Pop music got lustier and hornier as a direct response. Ariana Grande’s fantastic album encapsulated the year in pop fandom — a sex-crazed fantasy lovingly crafted by, for, and about people who aren’t doing any of the wild and crazy things in the songs. When everyone’s favorite summer sex jam, “WAP,” hit Number One, it replaced Harry Styles’ “Watermelon Sugar,” whose video Harry filmed on the beach in January, right before lockdown. As the intro said, “This video is dedicated to touching.”
Two of my favorite albums this year, by Dua Lipa and Jessie Ware, were shut-in disco fantasies designed to evoke neon glittered-up dance floors fans could only imagine. There was something beautiful about that, like the glitzy Busby Berkeley musicals in the Great Depression — not really escapism, just a shared communal desire.
I kept getting reminders about all the 2020 shows I grabbed tickets for that never happened. Ticketmaster sent me the worst email subject line of all time: “Stephen Malkmus Has Been Canceled.” Paul McCartney called it “rockdown” — a very Paul way to put it — but he spent his downtime on the farm making a spontaneous album that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, just like Taylor Swift did.
The audience had to fill the void, looking for other longdistance ways to share that ritualistic fan experience, from Verzuz battles to Bandcamp Fridays. Rock stars who seemed long lost, or reclusive, or just plain forgotten, came out of the woodwork — like the members of New Order, who haven’t spoken in years, bitching out one another on Twitter. They all knew this was the biggest audience they’d get all year.
Music was part of the year’s cultural upheavals, from the summer’s Black Lives Matter uprising to the victory celebrations when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris beat Trump. Within an hour of Pennsylvania getting called, I was in a Brooklyn park in the Saturday-afternoon sunshine, caught up in the middle of a spontaneous dance party (everyone masked up and nobody uptight about it). There was a psychedelic jam trio playing, the first live band I’d gotten to hear in eight months.
The DJ was blasting “Y.M.C.A.,” the gayest of Seventies disco anthems, as well as the song Trump bizarrely claimed as a campaign-rally theme. Every banger the DJ busted out felt perfect: “Thank U, Next,” “Bodak Yellow,” “Get Ur Freak On,” “Beautiful Day,” “Good Times,” YG’s “FDT,” and of course, Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen.” It all felt cathartic, tinged with a lot of dread and a little hope. In other words, the combination that pop dreams are always made of — and a moment to carry over into 2021.