Does Madison Beer need to get "ugly"?
Pop culture demands imperfection from female singers to buy into the global pop stardom. Madison Beer is just another victim to the game.
Over the years, Madison Beer has been the topic of discourse in regards to her future in the music industry. She’s a pop girl, but hasn’t reached pop stardom like her peers Sabrina Carpenter or Tate McRae. Her aesthetic is cutesy, pretty, and hyper-feminine, which some how makes the average person on the internet angry. So after all these years of album releases, rebrands and artistic directions, how should Beer appease the world? Better yet, should she?
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Recently, I came across a video from the Swiftologist, a TikTok music-critic known for his really up-close portrait videos where he spends a little over six minutes criticizing your favourite flops and cultural phenomenons. In this video, he talks about Madison Beer, claiming that she needs to get ‘ugly’ to reach that stardom target she apparently keeps missing. As someone who has understood the history of scrutiny Beer faces about her beauty, it rubbed me the wrong way. However, he hints that ‘ugly’ is a term to describe the grittiness and imperfections of the human experience, which he speculates isn’t reflected in Beer’s music.
Seeing the comments, I was amazed at how many people praised and agreed his take. But it only confirmed this idea in my head; the reason why Beer gets so much hate is because they want her to be just like everyone else so they can feel better about themselves.
No matter what anyone says, her looks will always be a contributing factor and root cause in this conversation of Beer’s success. It’s unapologetically baked into her aesthetic, which she has embraced, and should continue to. Yet, people convince themselves that it’s only a facade towards a more imperfect version of Beer. A version she’s fronting with the unavoidable, perceived shallowness that comes embracing the pretty aesthetic.
The ‘true’ Madison…
If this is sounding a little stupid, well, it’s because it is. Despite the non-existence of the ‘true’, more ‘uglier’ Madison, the people still want it to see it to accomplish the ‘a-ha’ feeling they’ve been eagerly waiting on since her Life Support era. And that’s the true problem that’s hindering Beer’s perception within the public eye. Under all this talk about her artistry, has anyone stopped to wonder if this, her aesthetic, is who she truly is and wants to embody?
I like to compare the discourse with Madison Beer to Sabrina Carpenter. They’re both pop girlies, make completely different pop music, but share the same love for the polished, feminine aesthetic. The one distinction, however, is that while Carpenter’s music plays into the man-lover aesthetic, she does so in a sarcastic way. We hear and see that in her songs like Manchild, or Please, Please, Please, which has that tongue-in-cheek banter between her lover to balance out that what she sings about is just as surface level. And again, does it have to be that deep?
It does caters to those who want that girlie, aesthetic music, but hints that Carpenter isn’t ‘too girlie’ because she’s not afraid to ‘get ugly’ with some swearing, yelling or occasional killing-men trope in her music videos. It tells the audience, “I know I look and sound like a doll, but I’m in on the joke as well, guys!”. Madison Beer truly embraces the girlie aesthetic, and doesn’t leave much room to play lyrically and creatively like Carpenter, which doesn’t put the listeners at ease because it’s almost too polished for them.
IFFY
The mood of the day is ‘iffy’. Evidently, the public believes they are owed a de-glamourized version of Madison Beer to convince themselves that Beer is real. It feels iffy because it’s a disruptive tarnishing of Beer’s artistic brand, as it works to completely destroy her current aesthetic in order to be digestible for the average pop-culture enthusiast. Maybe they are entitled to it, because they’re the consumers after all. All I’m providing is the perspective that maybe Madison Beer has showed her ‘ugly’ side all these years, and yet it’s still not ugly enough for the public. I implore you to listen to songs like Ryder, Default, Selfish, and Emotional Default, and then determine if she has yet to give an ounce of her true self in her music. And if it’s still not enough, oh well. She has over 21M monthly listeners.