Over the last thirty or forty years, the audience addressed by pop lyrics has shifted, as have its imperatives; whereas the collective was once asked to dance and get down, it is now the individual and his (or, rarely, her) romantic and sexual struggles of which resolution is demanded, sometimes right here in this club. The experience which pop music takes as its subject has narrowed, in other words; the club, in which the dramatic narratives of well-near all pop music take place, is no longer primarily a site of collective experience, but instead a place in which individuals gather only to pair off. This pairing-off was always occurring, of course, but the group jubilation present before the pairing-off was once the subject of glorification in its own right; the possibility of this individuation (into pairs) was once the background of collective joy, rather than its goal. (I must here specify the weakness of my claim: I am saying that the collective subject has waned in prominence, not that there has been a stark transition from solely collective to solely individual subjects; this allows for the continued existence of subcultures, like raves, in which the collective experience remains an essential component.)

The most obvious factor driving this development is increasing permissiveness with regard to subject matter; the wholesome collective joy is neglected in favor of the newly public private pleasures. It is also notable, however, that the actual audience of pop music has shifted just as the generic subjects of its lyrics have: music has become a radically individual experience, most often played to an audience of one. It should come as no surprise, then, that the collective experience has vanished from music’s lyrics as drastically as the collective experience of music has vanished from life (exaggerated for parallelism).

This post will take the form of a lament, not comment, insofar as the individuation of pop’s subject matter manifests the liberalization (not liberation) of sexuality. The single, fixed joy involved in the experience of music and endorsed by its lyricists—the collective get-down—is destroyed, disintegrated into a multitude of uncertain, transactional or even predatory joys. (T-Pain isn’t trying to get you drunk, baby, he’s just trying to get you tipsy enough.)

The difference is, to make a perhaps bizarre leap, much like that between the rhetoric of conservatives and liberals. In conservative rhetoric, the collective good of patriotism obscures awareness of the transactions constantly taking place, usually at one’s expense; “the patriotic American believes that America is fundamentally good as it is.” In the rhetoric of disco and older pop, the collective joy obscures, or at least refrains from passing comment on, the individual joys being taken and given, often in a transactional or predatory manner. The comparison to conservatism might lead one to think this eclipsing of the transactional is a bad thing; on the contrary, because one can hardly say that the newly frank discussion of these transactions has lead to progress, nostalgia for the days in which a happier and more inclusive kind of joy was lauded doesn’t seem unjustifiable—especially in a medium like pop music, where one can almost unashamedly have faith that the espousing of collective joy can, temporarily, bring it into being.