Welcome to the Hannah Montana Generation of Pop Music

It makes sense that norms are shifting in this direction as Gen Z’s influence spreads. Raised on social media, with access to once illicit bad-taste touchstones like Rocky Horror just a click away, they’ve largely replaced IRL subcultures with a constellation of aesthetics—cottagecore, dark academia, Y2K—to be performed, then discarded or demoted t... See more

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it ... See more

Girlhood is big business. The ones who are best at it literally treat it as an occupation, modeling or taking suitably candid-looking pictures of themselves, recommending clothes and jewelry and books, going viral on TikTok. They’re performing a way of being that looks joyful, effortless, and adorable. It’s a performance that by definition has a sh... See more

Whereas the millennial women of Instagram — the millennial women associated with the “that-girl” trope — would strike the perfect pose and use filters to enhance their natural beauty, Gen-Zs use their phone cameras to distort the natural ideal of the human face, obscuring their features with emojis, cartoon glitter, surreal lighting and other disto... See more