Now that we are into the halfway point into 2026 (Well for Billboard we have way past that but I digress), Let's grade the ins and outs of what's happening with popular music. The consensus seems to be that this year has been lousy so far — that it's either the continuation of 2025 bad year or even worse. I can't say I won't really blamed them per say but there's a nuance to this year. Let's look at every genres and see if there's a consensus or not. Pop was slow at first but it really picked up a lot with Olivia Rodrigo. RnB is still good but I can see some cracks that are showing, Kpop is actually having a busy and better than average year. And we even got some crossover rock and country songs here to a mixed results. I think the genres that have actual bad year on the chart were Hip-hop, EDM, and Latin Pop. Hip-hop is having generational bad year that made 2023 look quaint. EDM is still on their AI bullshit. And Latin Pop basically just held up by Bad...
This is gonna be a big challenge for me. So far in my journey into going back to blogging, I've been talking about pop music from around 2000s to the 2020s which for the most part are my wheel house. I have also talked about how most of the songs I put on my best and worst lists didn't exactly align with the critical consesus and that's fine by me. But we are in a tricky territory because not only I'm going back to a time where my parents were in college or even working, but also facing a challenge talking about an infamous year. Let's face it, a lot of people have pointed out how 1980 was such a bad year for the pop chart. The reason was very obvious and could be summed up in three words "Disco demolition night". After the oversaturation of disco in 1979 (no joke a lot of artists were doing disco records even the whitebread one), there's a mass campaign of "Disco Sucks" by a radio DJ and it turned into riot and the burning of disco records...