What exactly makes a "pop girl"?
Pondering the elements that must combine to make a bona fide pop girlie.
I was recently made aware of Tate McRae, a white 20-year old aspiring pop girl who released her debut album in December 2023. Her singles include “Greedy” and “Exes,” and she aesthetically is harkening back to 2000s fashion, specifically by often dressing in athleticwear (no, not activewear and not athleisure). Her style seems to be “sporty girl’s girl.” Immediately, I was struck by her obvious inspiration from early-millennium pop stars; she is dancing DOWN like girls from decades past, and her video for “Exes” has a set that is reminiscent of Britney Spears and Madonna’s “Me Against the Music” video. Dancing is clearly a strength that she and her label want to bring to the fore. Understandable, as she is a trained dancer and a former finalist on So You Think You Can Dance.
And while I was absolutely awed by Tate’s sharp dance moves, I still found myself forgetting her. She has perplexed me since discovering her because I can’t decide what doesn’t make her a capital-P-capital-G Pop Girl in my mind. Yes, she’s still new, and you could argue that alone as a legitimate reason. But other women arguably earned their Pop Girl status with only one or two singles out because something about their songs were simply infectious. Britney, Christina, Gaga, and Beyonce spring to mind.
She’s definitely got the moves down like the greats before her: again Beyonce, Ciara, Janet Jackson, and Madonna. But there are Pop Girls that have gained prominence in the last 15 years who dance little if at all, like Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, and Billie Eilish, so that’s not necessarily a requirement.
So…what are the requirements then? Glad you asked, because I think I’ve cracked the code.
#1. Conventionally attractive
I’m sure you could have guessed this one. The Pop Girl is, with very few exceptions, a conventionally attractive woman. Without getting too granular about specific features, she has a face that would turn heads at any red carpet event. Entrancing eyes, luscious locks, a bone structure that carries makeup well. She has beauty that appeals to the male and female gaze. Her face card is approved for unlimited spending.
In terms of body, she is almost always thin, able to wear midriff-baring or cropped tops for live performances and music videos. It is okay if she has curves — indeed, as of the 2010s, it was encouraged — but the curves must be in the “right” places. Think Sir Mix-a-Lot’s description of his ideal woman in “Baby Got Back”: perky boobs, slim waist, and a sizable booty. Important to note that these features can’t be TOO big; that gets us into Rap Girl territory, and that’s a whole separate post.
The clear outlier you may be thinking of given this criteria is Lizzo. Putting aside her recent lawsuit, I would like to include her as an exception to this rule. I consider Lizzo to be a Pop Girl because, while she doesn’t have a body that meets societal beauty standards, she has a face that does. Her mainstream appeal, particularly with how commercial her music is, has made her popular enough with the public to enter the Pop Girl conversation.
I also want to make clear that the criteria for Pop Girls I’m describing here is from observation rather than personal edict. It is of course my opinion, but I am gathering the commonalities I notice between the biggest pop stars and naming them here; I’m not saying you can’t be a Pop Girl if you don’t meet this criteria. These standards are malleable — if enough women defy them or portray another attribute entirely, these standards can change.
That said, Lizzo’s impact on mainstream music is too big to exclude her on the basis of being a fat woman. Even still, her inclusion does not negate the fact that she is the first fat woman to break through in the pop sphere as we’ve known it for decades. Until there are more Lizzos that shatter the fatphobia of the music industry, I stand by this criteria as a primary marker of a Pop Girl.
Going back to Tate as our case study, she clearly fits the bill on this requirement. She has the added advantage of being on the taller side (5’8”); it makes her unique, as a lot of people find taller women attractive.
#2. Makes pop music (mostly)
The Pop Girl has to make pop(ular) music. Seems straightforward, but it’s a little more complicated than it seems. “Pop” music continues to be difficult to define because it borrows from basically every other more refined genre. We’ve had chart-topping pop hits that have borrowed elements from hip-hop, R&B, country, rock, dance, house, and even indie, sometimes utilizing multiple of these at the same time. For me, this is what I love about pop music. As someone who listens to a vast spectrum of genres, pop is the great equalizer that unites people who may not ordinarily like the same song or artist.
But outside of whatever genres it borrows from, pop itself has a specific sound. I can’t think of another way to describe it other than “Top 40,” meaning it sounds like something you’d hear on the American Top 40 chart. It has a repetitive melody, lyrics, or instrumentation that gets stuck in your head, a musical attribute called an “earworm.”1 Because it is produced for mass consumption, the goal of pop music is to encourage popularity, and this is only achieved by making music that is inescapable, either in culture or our own heads.
A Pop Girl, therefore, is a woman who makes music that does just that. Ariana Grande (or arguably, her production team) is a master at this. Most recently, she dropped her new single “yes, and?” and after one listen, I was humming the melody for at least 24 hours afterward. Nearly all of her singles releases have this quality as well. Other artists that have perfected this include Lady Gaga, Dua Lipa, Rihanna, and (much to my chagrin), Taylor Swift.
But, there are Pop Girls of past and present who have gained popularity despite making music that was more another genre than pop. Ciara comes to mind, as she built her career off of the ATL hip-hop boom of the mid-aughts. Her sound stayed very close to hip-hop, crunk, and even R&B roots, and she was still able to amass mainstream popularity because of how huge that style of music was at the time. In the latter half of the 2000s, she began to venture more into true pop sound.
An artist who had the opposite trajectory in terms of sound was Ciara’s predecessor, Janet Jackson. Janet started her career with catchy ‘80s synth pop that also fused R&B, rap, and rock among other things. Like her brother, this sound catapulted her to pop icon status. But, in the ‘90s and ‘00s, she took her sound further away from boom-boom-pow pop and grooved more into the R&B space. Similar to Ciara, Janet was able to maintain mainstream popularity with a less-pop sound because R&B was hugely popular in the ‘90s. Yet, no matter what her music sounded like, the way she carried herself was undeniably that of a superstar Pop Girl (more on this quality later).
Tate McRae definitely fits within the pop music sound. As I type this, the hook2 of “Greedy” is playing on repeat in my head, but only because I recently listened to it. Unlike her peers and predecessors, her songs don’t stay in my head. What’s more, I don’t find my body reacting to her music when it’s on. When I listen to Janet, Ciara, Rihanna, and others, I at the very least will move my body in tune with the music. If I’m in a good mood, I’ll sing along. Tate’s current single don’t exactly inspire a dance break or karaoke moment, no matter how impressive her moves are.
#3. Feminine
Probably the most straightforward attribute, the Pop Girl is unabashedly feminine. The biggest Pop Girls embrace a dripping, womanly sexuality that is palpable with every hip thrust and saunter. One example that leaps to mind is Britney Spears. She was packaged and promoted to be a sex symbol, so much so that she became the standard of female sexuality in pop in the ‘00s. Before her, Madonna sold herself in the ‘80s and ‘90s as a feminine provocateur, pushing the social taboo around being overtly sexual in music performances and videos. Janet Jackson, too, paved the way for the pop sex kitten, purring and moaning on interludes and teasing male fans the world over.
While Pop Girls may toy with gender roles in music videos by dressing in traditionally masculine attire, they do so mostly to titillate. The aesthetic gender swappage rarely serves any activism from the artist that may actually threaten patriarchy, although the Pop Girl may still question double standards between men and women to bite back at critics elsewhere in her catalogue (looking at you, Taylor Swift). While they cater to female fans, they must still maintain enough femininity to appeal to fantasies of men, whether they recognize they are or not. This is because the Pop Girl historically has been cis and straight.
However, femininity is not embodied simply by aesthetics; it is also carried in aura. Two artists that complicate this criteria are Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. Billie stated that when she was underage, she purposely dressed in bagger clothes to de-sexualize herself due to insecurities about her own body. Once she surpassed 18 and began stepping out to promote her second album, she started wearing more feminine clothing. She told Vogue in 2021 that she “felt more like a woman, somehow.”
But even when covered up, she explored themes like love, heartbreak, longing, and mental health from a feminine place. There is a playfulness, a softness, an expression of feminine wiles in Eilish’s music that reminds us her vantage point is in line with the cultural experiences of femmes.
Olivia Rodrigo expresses herself similarly, though her music is tonally very different from Billie’s. The two are about the same age and both rose to prominence just shy of turning 18. Olivia never hid her body to the degree that Billie did, but her style is far from anything you’d describe as “sexy.” Her image and music are age-appropriate, as in she is refreshingly youthful in a way that pop stars of the past never were at her age. Even still, her music takes an angsty, witty approach to femininity, describing the tribulations of love, dating, and heartbreak in a way that resonates with Millennial and Gen Z femmes alike. The quality of Olivia’s music captures the insecurity, suppressed rage, and yearning of young womanhood with precision.
In both aesthetic and lyrical content, Tate McRae is certainly feminine. She has a softness in her voice and eyes. She is clearly interested in appealing to femme experiences as well as displaying feminine playfulness in her music. With women/femmes being the biggest consumers of pop music, she certainly can’t be successful without marketing herself to them.
#4. An “It” factor
Beyonce. Madonna. Britney. Christina. Gaga. Ariana. Katy. Janet. Taylor. Rihanna.
All of these women are household names known by first name alone. Unless you are seriously tapped out of pop music or unfamiliar with pop stars who broke through in the 20th century, you know who each of these women are. Chances are, one of their songs immediately pops into your head upon hearing their name. You know how they look, have a general sense of what their style is, what their voice sounds like. The reason you know this is because each of them has that "It” factor, that intangible element that captivates audiences. They have aura, charisma, charm, energy that makes them bonafide stars. We’ve arrived at the one element that I feel has Tate McRae falling just short of a Pop Girl for me.
Let’s go over a few examples. Firstly, Beyonce.
Yes, Beyonce.
Beyonce, even as the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, has always shone brightly in the music scene. She of course has the vocals, but as her solo career forges on, she has set herself a cut above her peers in terms of attention to detail. The meticulousness with which she plans every tour and performance is a sight to behold. (She really is queen of the Virgos, but I digress.) She has a way of capturing the popular sound of a given era and owning it in a way that feels authentic. She also upholds a mystique by being intensely private, curating her image in a way that shares just enough of herself for fans to relate to, but not enough to make her truly vulnerable to personal critique. Put simply, she’s a renaissance painting in her beauty and pursuit of perfection.
Another example of a woman with the “It” factor is Britney Spears. Britney had a way of straddling the line between innocence and salaciousness in her pop star persona. Being blonde, white, and Southern, she appealed to the “girl next door” stereotype that (white) Americans saw as the standard of womanhood. But, with a commanding sensual presence, she complicated expectations of what that stereotype was “supposed” to be, thrilling and enraging audiences alike. Although many projected the “dumb blonde” stereotype onto her as well, she’s proven over the years to be wittier than society has given her credit for. You couldn’t pin Britney down, and perhaps that’s why mainstream media tried so hard to destroy her in the ‘00s.
Although we mourn it now (we’re never getting another album, y’all), Rihanna’s decade-long career as a Pop Girl is still holding up remarkably well. Similarly to Beyonce, Rihanna could own any popular sound or genre sound believably. Some would argue that she was ahead of her time with certain musical movements, most notably with the use of afrobeats on Anti that we still hear in pop music today. Rihanna as an artist had a swagger that simply could not be replicated. Always ready to switch up her hairstyle or fashion to match an album era, Rihanna literally said fuck your rules, I do what I want.
I could go on about every other star I named, but this element is the final piece of the puzzle of the Pop Girl. In a landscape of sugar, spice, and everything nice, a woman needs a special dose of Chemical X to catapult her into the echelons of pop icon status. What’s in that special sauce is different for every artist, but they need that je ne sais quoi to earn the title of Pop Girl. Some of the inductees into this Hall of Fame had that quality from day one, like Lady Gaga or Billie Eilish, while others gained it over time, like Ariana Grande or Katy Perry.
The latter journey is potentially what could happen with Tate, but the couple of singles she has out now are too by-the-book to induct her now. She has to find herself as an artist, dig deep within to find what makes her unique. What does she have that the other girls don’t? For now, it’s too early to tell. If I’m being honest, I currently see more potential in someone like Renee Rapp, who oozes a kind of brassy-yet-charming quality in interviews along with great vocals.
If this inventory of Pop Girl criteria is any indication, you can try to create a pop star in a lab, but the fact is that some of us are just built different. As cliche as it sounds, some people are born to be stars. And for better or worse, those are the ones that become legends.
Looking up the definition of an earworm, I discovered that apparently there was a study by the American Psych Association on the phenomenon. It found that Lady Gaga songs were most frequently named as giving listeners earworms.
A “hook” is a short lyrical sound bite that is the most memorable part of a song. It’s usually the part that contains the title, but not always. In short, it’s the lyrical component of the earworm. Examples of hooks include “thank u, next,” “umbrella-ella-ella, ay, ay, ay,” and “watch me / daaaaaance, dance the night away.”