To say pop has grown flatter and disposable is not quite what is happeneing. What sustains the register of the TikTok hook, beyond the talent of individual practitioners, is an infrastructure that the streaming logic has not entirely absorbed. Bandcamp Fridays for independent artists, the persistence of vinyl pressings and continuation of small labels such as Stones Throw and Backwoodz Studios are the working conditions under which the album as a unified statement can still be made.

 

The numbers are smaller, but the relationship between the artist and the listener is closer to the one Tribe could presume in 1993 than anything available to a major-label pop act today. A few thousand people who actually want what the music are making turn out to be more useful than a few million who happened to encounter eight seconds of it on Tiktok.

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London has its own variation of these independent conditions. The jazz revival that runs through Shabaka Hutchings and Ezra Collective is not strictly a hip-hop story, but it shares the same conviction about the long form and the same suspicion of the chart's attention economy. Loyle Carner and Little Simz inhabit registers that would have been entirely legible to a Native Tongues listener, and they have managed to build careers without sacrificing the patience that the register requires. Sault as a whole have released entire albums for free on the assumption that the audience capable of receiving them will find them; the assumption has proved correct. None of this constitutes a movement in the older sense, but it constitutes something.

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There is a tendency to describe such artists as the keepers of an authentic flame, which is precisely the description they should be spared. Authenticity is a marketing category masquerading as a virtue, and most of the figures one might cite would reject it on first principles. What they share is closer to a disposition: an unwillingness to treat the song as a unit of engagement rather than as a piece of work, and a corresponding assumption that the listener is engaged in the same activity from the other end. However, this is not a moral position. It is what is required to make a certain kind of music, and the kind of music it is required to make is the kind that the broader culture has decided it no longer particularly needs.

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The question is then not whether the boom-bap aesthetic or its descendants will reclaim the centre, because the centre as a place has effectively dissolved. The question is whether a generation that has grown up entirely inside the streaming grammar will, at some point, want something else, and whether the apparatus for delivering that something else will still be standing when they go looking.

 

The evidence so far is encouraging. Modal Soul streams more now than it did in 2005. The audience is finding the work that has been there all along.