On the 3rd day of Perezmas, pop culture gave to us…
THREE music careers with meteoric rises!
Plenty of stars found success in 2019, but we wanted to highlight three artists who shot to fame this year: one who came out of nowhere with the biggest song of the year, one we’ve been waiting to break out for years, and one who dominated pop culture from her childhood bedroom.
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Get the deets on the rising stars (below)!
Lil Nas X
THE biggest song of the year didn’t come from Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande or the regrouped Jonas Brothers; it came from an unknown broke teenager from Atlanta who had somehow cracked the code on making an all-time historic hit.
Lil Nas X took an obscure Nine Inch Nails sample, molded it into a trap beat, and added a kitschy take on country-western themes for a genre-defying, unquestionably catchy track which became a meme, then a hit, then a movement.
Old Town Road grew in popularity on its own merits. Lil Nas X didn’t have anyone to promote his single other than himself, so he pulled himself up by his cowboy bootstraps and published it on Tik Tok where it gradually became the soundtrack to a country transformation meme so popular, more young people had heard it than almost any hit by an A-list artist before it even got radio play.
Then there was the fight over whether this counted as a “country” crossover, and the struggle with Billboard made it even more popular as fans got behind the David and Goliath story. Billy Ray Cyrus stepped into his corner next, for a remix and an already classic music video.
But the secret weapon to the song’s continued success was Lil Nas X himself.
The 19-year-old is just so funny, so self-deprecating, so full of joy, he’s just a natural star! And his charming ass came out of the closet at the height of his popularity! Major props for that one.
We hope Lil Nas X hits that magic formula again, but even if he never has another hit, he will have forever put his stamp on pop culture.
Normani
She wasn’t the first Fifth Harmony member to fly solo, but Normani was always our pick to break out as the Beyoncé of the group.
Why not? She has it all: talent, looks, attitude, a one-word name…
Now, after a lot of teasing with hit collabs, the world is finally catching up to Normani’s inner megastar thanks to an absolute banger called Motivation.
The track, co-written by none other than Ariana Grande, debuted at #33 on the Billboard charts, and the music video, in which Miz Kordei provides epic street choreo, racked up 74 million views.
But that was just the soft grand opening.
A few days later was the real coming out party, with an already legendary performance at the VMAs, with onstage costume changes and sexy acrobatics that had the whole house — including Lizzo, Halsey, Hailee Steinfeld, and Sophie Turner — dropping their jaws and picking them back up to sing along.
We feel like we just watched the fuse get lit.
Normani announced in September her first album is finally coming next year, and we cannot wait to see what kind of boom that makes.
Expect big things, y’all!
Billie Eilish
Has any career in music accelerated faster this year than Billie Eilish‘s?
The 18-year-old had hits in the past, like her duet Lovely with Khalid and of course her breakout Ocean Eyes. But 2019 launched the prodigy into the stratosphere.
Her new album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? spawned multiple hits and iconic music videos, including the absolute smash Bad Guy.
Her music has been ubiquitous, showing up in movies and trailers. She was Billboard’s top artist for SIX WEEKS, she performed on SNL, she scored six grammy nominations.
Heck, there’s so much good will for her in music right now, some has even spilled onto her collaborator brother Finneas, whose own solo career is starting to see movement.
More than that, this was the year Billie Eilish became a household name, reaching the level of celebrity where even minor stories go viral. Billie disses Lady GaGa‘s meat dress? It’s a war with the Little Monsters that dominates Twitter for a day. Billie doesn’t know who Van Halen are? It starts a national conversation about intergenerational subjective relevance.
Billie collected a diverse A-list fanbase including everyone from Justin Bieber and Camilla Cabello to Alicia Keys and Dave Grohl to Melissa McCarthy and Julia Roberts.
As the latter said in an interview with Refinery 29:
“Billie Eilish is everything.”
This year, she truly has been.
The most impressive feat? None of this was manufactured by some hitmaker, by a corporate structure. She doesn’t have stylists dictating she needs to get 10 lbs too thin or show off her midriff. Her songs are about depression and suicide, her videos are little experimental horror films she designs and even sometimes directs.
As for the music, it truly is just Billie and her brother engineering tracks with computer programs in their bedrooms, while their parents make dinner down the hall.
We’d say it speaks to the democratization of music in the information age, that she’s an inspiration to all the young girls out there who want to share their voices but keep being themselves… but we’ll let the gazillion think pieces about her do that.
We’ll just wait to see what she comes out with in 2020!
[Image via Billie Eilish/Lil Nas X/Normani/YouTube.]
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