Forget Albums—Pop Stars Measure Their Careers in Eras Now

Earlier this year, Charli XCX starred in “The Moment,” a mockumentary that pits the singer against record-company executives who want it to be “Brat Summer Forever.” The marketing plan seems designed to gall Charli, who has made a career out of hard pivots and clean breaks with past versions of herself. Yet the suits might be on to something. Even on a burning planet, it can’t be summer forever. But it can be in a pop song. The stupid wisdom of “Brat Summer Forever” lies in how it recognizes the tricks that pop music plays with time: with one hand, suspending it and, with the other, marking it out for us in neat segments.

In May, a few months after “The Moment” was released, ahead of a summer without a name—Heat-Dome Summer? Red-Sun Summer? Cyclosporiasis Summer?—Charli made a heel turn that would have confounded the fictional label bosses. “Rock Music,” the first single from her upcoming album “Music, Fashion, Film,” marked the end of Brat Summer and the beginning of something else. “I think the dance floor is dead / So now we’re making rock music,” Charli drawls, digitally elongating the vowel in “rock” into a metallic stutter—a “My Generation” moment for the post-hyperpop age. Some fans welcomed what they immediately dubbed the “Charli rock era,” but others wondered if the whole thing was a joke. Even with its ultraprocessed guitars and occasional bursts of drums, “Rock Music” is not quite rock music. But it’s not not rock music. The song tests how far we’re willing to go along with its account of both Charli’s present and our own. Another single, fittingly titled “Wink Wink,” makes the same challenge from a different angle. “I’m not a bad girl anymore, I promise,” the chorus goes, before immediately undercutting itself with an arch “wink wink wink wink.”

These songs poke at our contradictory desires. On balance, we’d prefer pop stars to exist outside of time, preserved exactly as they were at the height of their powers, or during a particularly memorable season of our own lives. The reunited Backstreet Boys, currently in residency at the Sphere, in Las Vegas, offer a telling graphic in their “Into the Millennium” show: the Boys’ faces frozen into a mountainside—the icy rictus of pop monumentality, playing the hits night after night in Ultima Thule. Artists big and small are used to keeping their material on ice, playing their classic albums front to back whenever they get within spitting distance of a significant anniversary. The first two shows of Jay-Z’s recent three-night run at Yankee Stadium celebrated the respective thirtieth and twenty-fifth anniversaries of “Reasonable Doubt” and “The Blueprint,” a fittingly conservative way for him to return to the limelight amid sexual-assault allegations (which he has denied) and lingering questions about his relationship with Diddy. Fans can receive new material with skepticism, if not outright hostility. In response to the announcement of Olivia Rodrigo’s latest album, one fan wrote on Reddit, “I really hope she didn’t grow as an artist. I want the same exact vibe.”

And yet we do expect pop stars to grow. We want them to keep surprising us, collecting new experiences that we can share vicariously through their music. In 2010, Jay Caspian Kang argued that pop divas need adversity in order to achieve greatness: “To be a true diva,” he wrote, “the singer must make us feel her pain”; she must take us on an “emotional journey.” Some sixteen years later, pop Bildung abounds, thanks largely to online fan communities who can weave the most obscure ephemera into epic tales of redemption. See, for example, the jubilant arc of Dua Lipa—less a purveyor of emotional journeys than of bulletproof club bangers and tasteful book recommendations—whose stilted dancing once inspired the infamous backhanded comment: “I love her lack of energy, go girl give us nothing!” Fans crave these lows, if only to make their idols’ eventual victory on the charts all the more satisfying.

The idea of artists reinventing themselves every few years, in art and in life, is, of course, not new. Madonna, the original type of the modern pop star, has made her transformation over the decades into an artistic medium just as supple as her music. For a while, this kind of durational performance was mostly the province of Madonna’s artier heirs, such as Lady Gaga. Today, though, even the most milquetoast artists are positioned as the protagonists of grand story lines, their careers measured not in albums but in eras. “What are all of BTS’s eras in order?,” one fan on a discussion forum asks, as if cramming for a test. 2023 was said to have marked the end of Ed Sheeran’s “mathematics era,” possibly because he ran out of mathematical symbols to title his records. An era encompasses both the music and its surrounding lore: in BTS’s case, the ongoing cinematic universe of their music videos; in Sheeran’s, the longer arc of the singer’s transition from middle-of-the road folk balladry to middle-of-the-road R. & B. Even Dua Lipa’s clumsy dancing ended up being part of her pilgrim’s progress: it signalled a slough of despond that fans call a “flop era.” Taylor Swift’s innovation, with the Eras Tour, was to take this bit of fan-speak and make it the motive principle behind her live show. Swifties have long taken Taylor’s emotional journey to be their own. A show that replayed that journey over a single night would be almost unbearably profound.

In the course of its hundred and forty-nine performances, the Eras Tour literally inscribed itself into geological time, the vibrations from the stomping fans registering on the Richter scale. Night after night, Swift would perform for more than three hours, running back her career one era at a time, each one its own world with distinctive sets, costumes, and colors. Curiously, the show’s rapid jumps in time and mood were nonlinear; there was no narrative conceit holding everything together. The effect was less like watching a time-lapse than hurtling across a social-media feed. Swift herself described her vision for the tour in these terms: “You’re seeing something new every fifteen to thirty seconds, and so it feels like you’re scrolling in an algorithm.”

When the Eras Tour started, in 2023, Swift had been at war with the shadowy entities that owned her recordings—first, the bosses of her former label Big Machine Records, then the mogul Scooter Braun, who bought Big Machine, in 2019. Partially out of spite and partially out of determination to wrest back some control over her music, Swift set out on the quixotic “Taylor’s Version” project, rerecording her classic albums nearly note for note and releasing them through her new home label, Republic Records. In 2025, flush with funds after the tour’s end, Swift finally bought her original masters back from Shamrock Capital, the private-equity firm that had purchased them from Braun.

From one perspective, the Eras Tour was a triumphant celebration of the star’s ability to reclaim her own work. But from another, it was something eerier: a necro-pop spectacle, proof of the exhumed past’s continued dominance over the present. As Tyler Foggatt wrote in this publication, the Eras Tour was “a show fit for a late-career Las Vegas residency.” Fans, Foggatt noted, caught the morbid vibe—as one wrote, “This is what I imagine a farewell concert to be. Like, the last show you do in your life.” When I caught the Eras Tour over live stream, I couldn’t help thinking of a line in a song, by the underappreciated psychedelic-rock band Cotton Mather: “Some can make a career out of just trying to say goodbye.”

The morbidity implicit in the Eras Tour has become explicit in other marquee post-COVID pop tours. The performances on the Weeknd’s mega-selling After Hours til Dawn Tour issue from a ruined post-apocalyptic cityscape; the singer, flanked by red-cloaked dancers reminiscent of imperial guards from “Star Wars,” dons a mask and acts out a vague story line that plays his career loosely in reverse. Katy Perry’s Lifetimes Tour, performed on an infinity-sign-shaped stage, imagined a campier apocalypse: a cyborg version of Perry fights an evil A.I. that is exterminating the world’s butterflies, summoning her classic outfits and set pieces along the way. Unlike Swift, these artists use narrative devices to give some connective tissue to the succession of hits. These devices seem to share a conviction, however vague or coded, that the present is a wasteland bereft of life and color. The only hope for redemption is to borrow vitality from the past.

Maybe future historians will look back on the pop mega-tours of this moment and see obvious COVID symptoms. The pandemic, after all, sliced history definitively into an unknowing before, an interminable during, and a maybe-one-day after. The return to a golden age of normalcy was one of the most powerful pandemic-era fantasies. But COVID’s fingerprint on the Eras era may also be more direct. Ticket prices for the top world tours spiked some fifty per cent between 2019 and 2024, significantly outpacing inflation. By the time venues reopened, touring artists were returning to a market where live shows had become more of an exclusive luxury product than ever before. Perhaps the only way to give fans their money’s worth was to make the cataclysm they’d lived through feel like an epic shared history.

Then again, too much history all at once can give you amnesia. History, the late literary critic Fredric Jameson did not quite say, is what hits you in the head. Overwhelmed fans reported blacking out at the Eras Tour, all memories of the night dumped. (Swift later joked that she was delighted to hear this: “I think we did it!” she said on Travis Kelce’s podcast.) All the more fitting, then, that amnesia is the central theme in Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine Tour, under way this summer. The narrative frame for the tour, Grande’s first since 2019, is a gloomy sci-fi conceit reminiscent of those of Perry’s and the Weeknd’s shows. In a series of video interludes that break up the performance into acts, Grande plays Peaches, a woman who wants to undergo a procedure to erase her painful memories. (Grande has explored this character before, both in music videos and in the 2025 short film “Brighter Days Ahead,” a companion to her 2024 album and a tribute to Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”) Peaches, we gather, is a singer, and we are encouraged to imagine Grande’s live performance as an enactment of Peaches’s memories.

It’s hard not to see the whole concept as an allegory for the tragedy that has marked Grande’s own life. Between the deadly suicide bombing at her concert in Manchester, in 2017, and the 2018 death of her close friend and ex-boyfriend Mac Miller, just months after the two separated, she no doubt has more than her share of things she’d rather forget. Still, the Eternal Sunshine Tour is bullish on the past. At the climax of the show, having seen the value in her past experiences, Peaches decides that she doesn’t want to go through with the procedure. (It’s essentially a heady reiteration of her breezy 2019 single “Thank U, Next.”) After a few more songs, the show concludes with Grande being beamed up into a giant ring-shaped screen suspended over the stage, where she vanishes; on the screen, Peaches and her older and younger selves have a final reconciliation. It should have been morbid or cheesy, but the visual delight of seeing the singer lifted into the air—all while she riffs acrobatically over “Supernatural”—obliterates any skepticism. The sheer vocal power Grande calls from somewhere in her fragile-looking body lifts the gloom and lets the sunshine in. For a moment, the past seems not to weigh on the present but to float above it like a halo.

Or maybe it keeps playing on a loop. Whereas Grande’s assumption is the most visually astonishing part of the show, the most compelling musical performance of the night comes during “Eternal Sunshine.” Grande begins the song by looping a series of vocal lines, a cappella and live. As the loops build, the lines glance off one another, ricocheting back and forth—an on-the-nose but effective arrangement for a song about being in a holding pattern. “Get me out of this loop,” she sings at one point—and, later, “I try to wipe my mind.” Another allegory briefly peeks through: maybe the cycle she’s trapped in is nothing less than the greatest-hits reel itself, the imperative to keep playing the old songs. Maybe it would be better to give us nothing than to give us the triumphal procession of one era after another.

One era after another is not a bad way to describe the narrative arc of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” a song that arrived in 1989, right at the supposed end of history. The late poet and scholar Joshua Clover wrote about the queasy sublimity of that song’s vision of history, how its speed run of the previous four decades’ events ends up making the present feel inert and paralyzing: “This experience of immutable endlessness, of exploded time and a superfluity of history in the face of which meaningful action is impossible—this is the secret sense of the period in pop music.” Today’s period-obsessed pop feels this stasis, too. Its most arresting images reflect Clover’s sense of immutable endlessness: Swift’s amnesia-inducing feed of memories, Perry’s infinity-shaped stage, Grande’s ascent to the big circular screen in the sky.

And then we have Charli, whose new songs take the endless void in stride. “Spring, Summer ’26 / When the world is gonna end, no hope for any of it,” she sings over spare guitar and drums, in her new indie-rock mode. “Yeah, we’re walking on a runway that goes straight to hell / Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion, or film.” The chord progression loops without resolving, only briefly grazing the tonic in passing: walk, walk, turn, walk, walk, turn. The end is nigh, but endlessly deferred. It’s a slow apocalypse, but it’s also a fashion show. ♦