"Be urself": meet teenagers by creating a generation gap in music | The music

IIt's a disconcerting experience to watch your girl's Spotify playlists and realize that you have never heard of any of these artists. You may know that young stars are in the charts, such as Billie Eilish, Khalid and Lauv, but what about Clairo, Khai Dreams, Beabadoobee, Girl in Red, Oohyo, Mxmtoon, Eli, Sundial and Conan Gray?

I would love to tell you that my daughter discovered them because she is a worried musical adventurer, dedicated to obscurity at the cutting edge of rock and pop, but she is not. It does just what millions of other teens and tweens seem to do.

You can see from the figures in streaming. The biggest tracks of Girl in Red have been shown 9 times, 13 times by Khai Dreams. A video of Clairo's Pretty Girl has garnered more than 30 million views on YouTube in the last 18 months: Clairo was sitting on her bed and wearing headphones, mimicking her laptop's webcam while trying a succession of eyeglbades. Sun.

These figures would obviously not give Ariana Grande any sleepless nights, but they seem remarkable given that these artists have virtually no media profile, no radio play, most do not seem to have a recording contract and hardly give interviews. A Google search reveals that Girl in Red is a 20-year-old Norwegian who publishes one-line explanations of her songs ("Do not fall in love with a straight girl"; "Be urself"; "Sad lol" ) and that Clairo – her real name Claire Cottrill – is suffering from juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and provoked some online controversy when it was discovered that her father was a music-related marketing executive, which had resulted in false charges against her. Not a DIY artist, but an "industry factory". But that's about all.

"I think a lot of the artists who create this music are very young," says Josh Edwards, an A & R who's watching closely: he's directing Dodie, an artist who's gone from posting videos online to the Top 10. "Music makes a lot of things online, and you get the feeling that if you put too much of yourself on the Internet, it can be pretty dangerous. "

For lack of a better name, we could call it underground pop, an alternative musical universe that looks like the manifestation of a generation gap: big with teens – especially girls – and invisible to over 20 years old, because there are widely in an online world that pre-teens and teens find it easy to find, but that older people find confusing or laughable. Radio 1 or the rest of the music press does not have to become popular because it exists in an autonomous community of YouTube videos and influencers; some pop artists in the bedroom have found their music broadcast through its use in the context of makeup tutorials or "aesthetic" videos, the latter phenomenon allowing vloggers to publish aesthetic atmospheric videos.

"There is a culture that exists with Internet users to help others exist on the internet," says Edwards. "It's not:" You're scratching my back and I'm going to scratch yours ", plus:" I like this thing, I'm going to share it. "You get people like Emma Chamberlain [an American YouTuber with 7m followers], who recommends songs in videos and has a playlist on Spotify. People like these seem to be able to dive deeper than any I've ever known. Or this music appears as a recommended video if you look at similar things on YouTube. It's very accessible, and many songs are very short, so you can consume a lot in no time. "

You'd be hard pressed to call it a scene, but it's linked to a loose aesthetic. It's richly melodic, but lo-fi and recorded at home. As with the first releases of Eilish, you can hear the influence of Lana Del Rey and hip-hop; oddly enough, it sometimes sounds like the kind of independent music that Sarah Records might have released in the late '80s.

His lyrics tend to be intimate and relevant to his audience – grief, baduality, depression, confusion – and he feels raw and unmediated, untainted by the machinations of the music industry. In fact, it's hard not to see its rise in popularity as a reaction to what Jamie Oborne, the founder of Dirty Hit – the label that brought us 1975 and Wolf Alice, and who recently signed Bea Kristi (Beabadoobee) – A music that has been Red and stylized to death ": an audience that regularly makes fun of a senseless sheep who listens to all that is sold to him, unaware of all that the music industry has decided is within reach and takes things in hand.

"I'm not surprised at all," says Oborne. "It's the same thing as Billie Eilish: it's a positive model, she's not badualized, she does not talk bullshit around the clock, she's not just putting away the pollution. When we first met Bea, I said, "We do not do anything except what she wants to do." She teaches us all how to market her music. "

A video shot during Beabadoobee's first show and posted on his Instagram account seems to say a lot. Kristi is badaulted by fans who look exactly like him: if you had not seen his picture in advance, you would not be able to choose the artist from his audience. Somewhere next to the crowd is a male character. Matty Healy, her partner, goes virtually unnoticed: a pop star with three platinum albums and a handful of Britons ignored in favor of a girl still in school, who last year released a muffled recording that Coffee had made with Coffee – the first song she's ever written – on Spotify and Bandcamp – and watched the streaming figures go crazy after "someone put on a YouTube video".

"In fact, I do not know why it was a success," says Kristi, who wrote Coffee under the influence of Daniel Johnston and Mazzy Star. "I like to think it's because it's something raw. I had no experience, no clue – it's just me and my guitar and my friend Haresh whistling, recorded on a crappy microphone. I feel like something raw is affecting people. She was "a little behind" when the record companies started approaching her, but she finally signed up with Dirty Hit – who just released her Patched Up EP – because "they've allowed me" to do what I want. "

Edwards does not know how many artists will follow this path, saying that they are rather "self-financed, in their own way". Nevertheless, he adds, it will probably not be long before a label attempts to make a new pop artist with a lo-fi aesthetic; when a real "industrial factory" appears, rather than imagined. "There are aspects of what this bedroom world is doing that ordinary pop can not, because it's limited resources, organic, not overproduced or too good and good. Of course, he laughs, that does not necessarily mean that there is not a time when traditional pop will not be tempted.