There’s no logic or internal rhythm to a pandemic—there’s just wondering what might happen next. I started medical school a little more than a month ago, and it’s the strangest feeling, flipping through flash cards in my quiet apartment every day, knowing what’s lurking right outside my door. But then, even without a pandemic, I’m not sure that there would be a whole lot of logic or rhythm to the beginning of medical school.
In the confusion, I’ve been turning to the only kind of art that has ever helped me in times of stress: pure, uncut, straight-to-the-heart pop music. It’s my favorite kind of music and always has been. I’ve always found it comforting and loved its brightness and noise, its tackiness and beauty. I make no distinctions between pop songs that are full of nuance and pop songs that are dumb as bricks—I love them all the same. They all matter.
Pop is by and large a fairly happy genre of music, but generally speaking, I don’t look to pop for joy—I look to pop for clarity. A well-constructed pop song takes no thought to understand it and no effort to internalize it. It just becomes a part of the listener, as if it’s always existed. Pop music isn’t effective through thought and logic, but through instinct. That quality of absolute directness was something I usually took for granted in my favorite pop. I was focused on its beauty, its brevity, and the way it communicated emotions in such stark terms. The content mattered to me a lot more than the form and function of the music did. But lately, when it feels like so much in the world is full of ragged edges, pop’s clean lines have felt like a balm. I can’t stand to listen to anything else these days.
The basic format of pop music is based on one idea: relentlessness. We think of pop as light, fluffy fare, but if you’re listening closely, you’ll notice how intense the structure of a pop song really is. The performers will sing a line and play a riff over and over again, until that melody is absolutely drilled into the listener’s brain. The drums pound with no mercy and the vocals are digitally scrubbed of any human flaws. It’s Novocain for an overactive mind.
There’s nothing better for stress than a relentless, pulsing beat to lull me into a rhythm that feels manageable. I spent the first few weeks of medical school listening to the Britney Spears album Blackout on repeat. It’s a brilliant album, maybe one of my favorites. Her voice is bionic throughout it, pitched far beyond a human sound, and the music alternates between saccharine sweetness and a pneumatic-drill-like intensity. Listening to Blackout is like a brain freeze—perfect for a hot summer full of anxiety. I’ve loved this album for years, but until now I never appreciated its four-to-the-floor robotic precision. A pop drumbeat, it turns out, is the perfect way to create order out of chaos.
Of course, all of this is the completely wrong way to listen to an album like Blackout. Pop music isn’t meant to be listened to particularly intently, with a close ear for subtle changes in pitch or tempo. Britney Spears belongs in a stadium, not in headphones in my small bedroom. Pop shouldn’t be passive. It’s kinetic, dynamic, meant to be engaged with, meant to be danced to—it doesn’t soundtrack the listener’s life, it’s supposed to be embedded into it. You hear a #1 song on the radio in the car, at a wedding, in the grocery store, in a movie trailer, and it becomes a part of your life. The song integrates itself into the cultural lexicon that way. You don’t know a stranger, but you both know “Uptown Funk.” And whether you realize it or not, that shared knowledge creates a thread that ties you two together. You might not know the layout of a new city, but you hear “Call Me Maybe” at a store and it makes the place feel more familiar. Pop, in other words, is a shared experience—its ubiquity is part of the art.
I haven’t been to a wedding or a movie theater in a very long time. I miss those shared experiences so much that it sometimes hurts to think about. I haven’t heard pop music the way it was meant to be heard—out in the world, connected to other people—since March. And yet, I keep clinging to pop music. The glossy perfection with which it all comes together sometimes feels like the only thing that makes sense.
Asif Becher is a member of the class of 2024, planning on going into psychiatry. In her spare time she enjoys music, writing, baking, and trying to get her cat to stop ignoring her.