I have a grudging respect for Meghan Trainor. In a sea of modelesque pop stars and attempts to co-opt R’n’B/Hip Hop trends, this woman has remained the unabashed musical standard bearer for white, suburban mothers. Her doo wop inspired, plastic pink, shamelessly lame instincts have and will keep Target playlists well fed until she inevitably gives in and starts doing cover albums and selling some sort of home good. Waffle makers, maybe?
Anyway, for the time being, she’s back!
With the release of her most recent mid-sized hit, I feel like we forget just how big her entry into the pop scene actually was. Because not all of you were there for the callouts and controversy that was ‘All About That Base’. I was. Witnessing the celebrity infighting, the mid-2010s discourse machine, and overwhelming success and rejection of this random 20-something pop singer was a blast. They don’t make culture like that anymore.
Or they do and I’m a grown man now.
To put this into context, let me explain what pop music was in 2014. This was, arguably, the turning point at which the 2000s were truly replaced by what we think of as the 2010s. While the Billboard charts had started incorporating “streaming” as early as 2007, the introduction of YouTube streams and recalibration of overall digital streams in 2013 saw a massive shift. 2014 continued with the explosion of streaming as the dominate force. For the first time ever, there was a drop in digital sales revenue. The hole in the bucket was the rise in platforms like Spotify.
The musical landscape began to actually shift in response to these changes. 2012 had seen ‘Gangham Style’ rise without YouTube streams, 2013 brought ‘Harlem Shake’ to the top with the accompanying viral videos, but 2014 was when standard music began to adjust. Or rather, newer artists began to find success in this new landscape, and navigated it without the baggage of their forebearers.
When you look at the new arrivals from 2013-2015, you see the biggest names and sounds of current pop music showing up. The slow rise of Trap music in the mainstream, which would dominate production in both Hip Hop and Pop until the current turn of the decade. Artists like The Weeknd and Ariana Grande were to begin their ascent, that in both cases, remains ongoing. Even the more established artists were adapting to the new landscape. Selena Gomez dropped The Scene and eventually the EDM style from her first solo album for a silkier style of pop. Miley Cyrus would use the new music landscape to first go ‘Bangerz’, and then unleash a messy but experimental record in ‘Miley Cyrus and her Dead Petz’, halting her momentum in way that derailed her career for the rest of the decade. Beyonce “changed the game with that digital drop” and established herself as THE living legend of her generation, outpacing literally all her competition.
Amongst all of these changes, Meghan Trainor was born.
‘All About That Base’ and it’s defining throwback sound didn’t come out of nowhere. The aforementioned Grande had leaned into similar sounds for her debut album, and Mariah Carey had her last real hit in that same year with #Beautiful, which also had a classic R’n’B vibe. Bruno Mars had established himself as a retro pop artist as well. Even outside of that, ‘Twee’ and ‘Hipster’ styles had aesthetically leaned into a 1960s for inspiration. But the difference between them and her was the aggressive, unyielding, sincerity and corniness of Trainor.
Everything about her situation in pop music feels, in retrospect, manufactured to create the storm of success. Trainor was and still is pretty young for where she is at in her career (she was 21 when this all started) and as such, there was an online quality to her stardom and fanbase. Music as a business was unstable (more than usual, anyway), and here was this young woman who clearly understood how to market herself, had an established aesthetic and brand to sell, wrote music that was catchy and radio friendly, and all of this came on the backs of years of artists establishing the trends she rode in.
Adele was the first larger white woman in a long time to break through to the level she did. Marina (and, at the time, the Diamonds), along with a host of indie pop girls, was establishing a pop sensibility with a throwback aesthetic. Club dominance through the late 2000s had left the early 2010s eager for a throwback sound. All Meghan Trainor had to do was play her part right.
From her first hit, this was a woman who established herself as something different from her competition. While Grande was playfully girlish on ‘The Way’ and ‘Baby I’, she shined with the suggestion of maturity. That was something that the baby doll aesthetic of ‘All About That Base’, ‘Lips Are Moving’, and ‘Dear Future Husband’ all lacked. To this day, Trainor is glitter and pigtails. Barbie’s cousin. There’s nothing mature about her aesthetic, style, or lyrics, despite getting more adult.
It was a phenomenon. Clearly over her head, the new pop star and her team positioned the song as a body positivity track and emphasised this by featuring plus sized performers in the music video and live performances. But this was 2014. Discourse as we understand it now was taking shape.
I cannot emphasise enough inescapable the discussions of eating disorders in regard to ‘All About That Base’ and other songs of that nature was. Often paired with ‘Booty’ by Jennifer Lopez and ‘Anaconda’ by Nicki Minaj, the guidelines were simple. Weren’t these…body shaming? Trainor’s song described the reasons for being proud as being still attractive to the men she liked. Misogyny, right? Minaj screamed “fuck those skinny bitches” with enough verve to cover the while discourse landscape and pulled Taylor Swift into it for some reason. Jennifer Lopez was needed to establish a pattern, even if her song had no substance. Booty is just ass, both thematically and quality wise. Trainor’s case really wasn’t helped by making statements about failing at anorexia.
Success for her was immediately followed by backlash, but it really didn’t stop that same success. Because, purely on charts, every single from ‘Title’, the album she released in 2015, hit the top 20. All but ‘Dear Future Husband’ were top ten hits. ‘All About That Base’ went diamond, a feat many bigger acts have never accomplished, including Grande. All that was needed was a successful second album to establish her as a hitmaker.
Things get dicey here.
‘Thank You’, released in 2016, was a successful second go at it. Much like Ashlee Simpson’s second album, by all metrics it followed through on the hype of ‘Title’. The record produced two major singles, went platinum, and introduced a new song and style of music to the Trainor brand. She was arguably a trendsetter with ‘No’, considering how 2000s influenced pop has become somewhat of the norm. But I think it is safe to say that this is a failure of an album and a rebrand.
The sophomore slump happens to most artists, and the quality of their team can be seen in how they handle it. For some, the second album dipping in popularity represents a need to rebrand. Usually they go sexual (the Diirty route), but always they reach for some form of unassailable pop stardom. Look to Mariah Carey, who saw a dip with ‘Emotions’ (1991), only to break records with ‘Music Box’ (1993).
Meghan Trainor wasn’t able to do that.
If ‘Thank You’ was a muted success in comparison to ‘Title’, the 4-year break that led to ‘Treat Myself’, the pandemic pop album that managed to tie itself to the sinking ships of the Pussycat Dolls reunion and the mess that has been late-stage Nicki Minaj, is an abject failure. Two years of teaser tracks led to only one song that failed to crack the top 40, and of the “new” material, only the Minaj collaboration managed to crack the bottom of the Hot 100. This is the album that should have killed her career.
Trainor described the album as her attempting to adapt to the music industry as it stood in 2020, and in many ways, it’s successful in that the music sounds like the pop music of the 2010s. Julia Michaels may have no writing credits on this album, but you cannot convince me that songs like ‘Here To Stay’ weren’t ripped from her journal of mediocre lyrics. Where the music isn’t banal, it’s obnoxious, or derivative, or just strange. The best stuff on the album really doesn’t feel like her. ‘Wave’, for example, is a strange track that doesn’t fit on the album. Clearly an experiment for the artist, she sounds the most relaxed and comfortable vocally, and production wise…it’s laptop commercial music. But it’s decent for what it is, and I can imagine a scenario where she developed this into something specific and unique to her. But it wasn’t developed, and even stranger, the album didn’t kill her career.
Returning to that grudging respect I mentioned before, let’s return to the foundation of what made Meghan Trainor famous in the first place. She was a woman making radio friendly, silly pop music who had the benefit of an uneasy pop scene to grab onto. The transition period was good for her, because her music was catchy and accessible enough for suburban audiences to latch onto, but was buoyed by her youth and attachment to evolving trends.
Oh look, it’s TikTok.
Meghan Trainor’s re-ascension into mid-tier pop princess status can only be understood as a TikTok success story. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say that almost from the moment ‘Treat Myself’ flopped, she began laying this groundwork. She essentially transitioned to an influencer, and in many ways, this is no different from the trend of struggling popstars heading to reality television, except it’s been successful.
Where a singer like Christina Aguilera will release a song while judging ‘The Voice’ and maybe a million people will watch her perform it live, a snippet from Trainor was able to garner millions of views across thousands of videos. TikTok as a platform doesn’t just offer a space for music to be showcased, it intrinsically allows you to soundtrack people’s lives, much like the radio has done for decades. iTunes and Spotify offered access, but this is an app that offers curation. Unlike YouTube, which limits access to this sort of material and requires a certain level of skill, TikTok has built a culture where music is everything.
I don’t want to overstate the influence of TikTok, or any app, but this is unmistakeable. ‘Made You Look’ likely would never have been a hit without this kind of easy, accessible word of mouth. Meghan Trainor became someone a lot of people saw daily on an app, and leveraged that to sell herself back to the general public. The same way Sam Smith is currently doing, to more success. But the respect I have for Trainor is that she has had every opportunity since 2016 to give up. The world steadfastly told her she was no longer needed. Instead, she regrouped.
Rebranding sometimes doesn’t work, and you just need to give the people what they want.
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This was so good!