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With Coachella in full bloom amid the California desert, the music industry is officially back. Still, it’s been a very tough two years for the industry in general, but especially so for young, independent artists. Without big record deals and huge fan bases to pull them through, many have spent the last couple of years slowly building careers on social media while reflecting on somber themes like solitude, fear, and, naturally, vulnerability.
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Ali Angel is one artist who found success throughout the pandemic, but she acknowledges it came at a cost. “It’s been a rough couple of years collectively which, if anything positive has come of it, has brought us all together as a community because we have something to relate to that has directly impacted all of us on this planet,” she says. “Artists have a role to uplift and bring us out of the darkness when things like this happen. We can write sad songs too, but I think what people really need is light, fun, inspirational, and positive music vibrations to get us collectively to a higher place.”
Not everyone has been so cheery. Former Disney star Olivia Rodrigo, for example, scored a massive hit with Driver’s License, a first-person account of a very vulnerable young girl driving through the neighborhood of an ex-boyfriend who has already moved on. We have all grown inured to the Muzak-ubiquitous emotified covers of former hit songs, and late last year, one of the industry’s biggest acts, Adele, dropped an album that turned out to be an alternately weepy and defiant recounting of her marriage ending. Its first single, Easy on Me, is the singer’s attempt to explain adult vulnerability to her young son.
By last month, Pet Shop Boys frontman Neil Tennant seemed unimpressed with the mass outpouring of personal feelings, bemoaning the “narcissism” of popular music. Angel, however, sees it differently. “I think artists in general have to be a little self-absorbed,” she says. “We are all putting art out with the belief that it’s worth consuming, enjoying, and paying attention to; we aren’t doing it to continue hiding under a rock.” She attributes Tennant’s criticism to something of a generational misunderstanding — a sentiment that Tennant himself allows as a possibility.
Continues Angel, whose music ranges from emotive to whimsical: “There’s always shifts and gaps in the way each generation expresses themselves that is a bit foreign to the one that came before them. I think we often interpret one another’s expressions negatively because we don’t understand where the other is coming from. But in reality, we’re just doing the same thing as the generations before us: evolving.”
What’s different, she says, is that social media has amplified all of that vulnerability to a volume that would have been unthinkable even several years ago. It’s not that artists want to over-share; it’s that they have to give more now. “We have to be content creators, we have to look great while doing it, and we have to post constantly,” she observes. On a positive note, she says that all that sharing has made fans much more sophisticated. They spot inauthenticity immediately.
Nowhere has vulnerability been expressed more than in previously taboo sexualities. Angel, who identifies as part of the LGBTQ+ community, says it’s “definitely become trendy to be gay/queer” these days, adding with a laugh, “It’s about time!” She’s been inspired recently by the proliferation of “funky cool queer” artists, though Angel, who prefers analog recording equipment and still hires real musicians to play brass and piano on her tracks, finds herself relating to the past just as much — if not more.
Dusty Springfield, for example, was the embodiment of sullen vulnerability for much of the 1960s, with tear jerkers like I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore and Don’t Forget About Me. Angel grew up singing Springfield’s hit, Son of a Preacher Man, around the house and covered her song, Spooky for an Instagram video. Springfield was gay, though her sexuality was a guarded secret during her lifetime. For Angel, it’s made the British singer that much more of an inspiration.
This year, Angel missed seeing the Grammys because of a planned recording/production session, but she was happy to see multi-genre sensation Jon Batiste win an award, as did Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga’s unlikely album, which was right up her alley. “My favorite parts of the show are usually just seeing the fun collaborations on stage between two unlikely artists performing together,” she says, adding that it was no surprise when Olivia Rodrigo won best new artist this year, in large part thanks to the success of Driver’s License.
Which seemed to prove a point: confidence and social media swagger may be the price of entry into the music business these days, but for a young female artist, nothing still connects with audiences like genuine and authentic vulnerability.
