It's easy to sum up 2015's musical landscape: feels. Vulnerable, heart-wrenching feels, formerly reserved for a niche artist or album, and certainly not for the entirety of the industry's VIP section. Emotions are in, and transparency is a currency. That, or we've all just started to embrace our inner sads because we're all tired of hiding. As proven by artists such as Drake and Adele, keeping up appearances can be exhausting.
Aside from the spoofs, memes and impeccable outerwear, Drake's Hotline Bling and Adele's Hello are renowned for their sad-sack messages. Drake, a millionaire at the top of the hip-hop game, laments over an ex finding her own group of friends after he moves away. Adele calls her ex a thousand times for closure over a relationship she swears she's moved on from. Even Justin Bieber's comeback album gets so deep he tells an ex that his "mom never liked [her]," proving his state of mind is so emotionally driven that he can't separate grown-up conversations from adolescent digs. In short, they're all so … obvious. And we're all eating it up.
For a long time, emotion in music has been disguised with messages of denial, disguised as empowerment. Instead of acknowledging the realities of betrayal, Beyoncé sang that her philandering ex was "replaceable," instructing him to pick up his boxes (to the left). Justin Timberlake warned his cheating former girlfriend that "what goes around comes around," and One Direction once-upon-a-time catered to the fantasy of perfect relationships (see: Little Things and What Makes You Beautiful) as opposed to the realities of them (see: For Your Eyes Only and Love You Goodbye). No wonder everyone was ready to get real.
At the end of 2014, Nicki Minaj released The Pinkprint and arguably set the tone for what would be this emotional year. The album, rich in sexual reclamation, as well as jarring glimpses into the end of a life-changing relationship, shamelessly detailed her heartbreak and painted a picture of the complexities behind the end of what was meant to be a lifelong union. The album was brave, and it bled vulnerability. It was also a breath of fresh air.
But as 2015 began and continued, we saw more artists cater to the versions of ourselves we try to repress. To be sad is to be weak; it gives away that we're human and flawed and are less likely to tell someone to pack up their stuff in a poetic way than we are to call them a thousand times on our flip phones. After all, Bieber's live comeback was met with tears – his own. The Weeknd's The Hills was about the sanctimony and preciousness of his post-5 p.m. phone call. Selena Gomez's latest album, Revival, was about life in the wake of a major (and very public) breakup. And Zayn Malik took to Fader a few weeks back to admit he wouldn't freely listen to One Direction's music.
Which is something, considering the band's latest album, Made In The A.M., was their most emotionally vulnerable, too. Jams such as Perfect outlined the realities of dating a young twentysomething in the midst of world fame (see: here for a good time, not a long time), while Long Way Down acknowledged the efforts and failures of various relationships. (This coming from a band whose first singles were about makeup-free girls and dancing all night.) Not even a Simon Cowell-manufactured boy band was willing to fake it any more. If you weren't willing to parade your humanness, you weren't much.
Of course, to paint emotional honesty as a blanket trend (regardless of it being a type of currency) is to devalue what it actually means in the big picture. It's easy to assume that artists have tapped into their inner sads in hopes of earning that No. 1 spot, but the fact that an artist like Drake is willing to sing about his ridiculous post-relationship expectations is less about hipness than it is about allowing us to see behind the curtain. For years, we've been trying to convince ourselves that stars are just like us, and in 2015, pop music has confirmed that they actually are.
What this year gave us was the ultimate turning point. While feelings in music did reap certain rewards and have been consistently present in some capacity, they also demolished the existing landscape and replaced it with a culture rich in vulnerability. Thanks to 2015, it's fine not to pack up and go immediately after heartbreak. It's acceptable to whine after a relationship changes. You can cry in public or insist on calling and calling in a text-heavy culture.
Just maybe throw on a turtleneck when you do it.