Perspective: How Beyoncé, Drake and Taylor Swift landed on pop’s permanent A-list
The phenomena of their unrelenting ubiquity is hard to quantify, but we can try. Since 2010, every solo studio album Drake has issued has gone No. 1. Same for Swift since 2008. Same for Beyoncé since 2003. This isn’t inherently athing, but it’s definitely a weird thing, especially if you squint back at that transformative early-’90s moment when their superstar forebears — Prince, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen — were each semi-obsolesced by the rise of N.W.A.
took a new album to No. 1 in the ’90s. As for today’s permanent A-list, its blessed few remain impervious to insurrection, the riddle of their invincibility consecrated by massive sales, endless streams and heaps of trophies. Now, with another Grammy night nearly upon us — the one square on the calendar when the splintered world of popular music tries to gather itself into something coherent — it feels like a fine time to ponder the permanent A-list: how it came to be, and what we stand to gain from living in a soundworld where cultural relevance and commercial dominance feel so tightly intertwined.
Beyoncé is scheduled to glide into the 65th annual Grammy Awards on Sunday night leading the field with nine nods, which also places her in a tie for the most Grammy nominations ever, 88, with her spouse, Jay-Z. Her consistency is hard to dispute. But she ultimately stands apart from Swift and Drake on the permanent A-list in that her music continues to dramatically change shape from album to album, generating a big-tent frisson we’ve grown to depend on.
Swift reached her place with a different kind of ambition. Her quest hasn’t been to discover so much as to please, to delight, to deliver the goods. Since her earliest days as a teenage country songwriting prodigy, the 33-year-old has been acutely aware of her audience’s desires, and she’s fulfilled them relentlessly, resulting in a deliberate, barely changing songwriting aesthetic that continues to tangle time like a pair of cosmic shoelaces.
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