@Фарух Байоглиев

Justin Bieber is one of the few pop stars of his generation to have truly grown up in public. The Canada-born singer arrived in 2009 at age 15, lending his baby-faced image and voice alike to collabs with rap and R&B royalty like Ludacris (“Baby”) and USHER (“Somebody to Love”). More than just catnip for pre-teens, he proved himself as a chart-topping balladeer with 2012’s “Boyfriend,” while still playing well with rappers on the same year’s Nicki Minaj-assisted “Beauty and a Beat.” But Bieber’s biggest smashes were still ahead of him, thanks to a post-teen career reset in 2015 that began with the ubiquitous Skrillex and Diplo teamup “Where Are Ü Now” and hit properly with his fourth album. <i>Purpose</i> yielded multiple diamond-certified singles, including the clubby mea culpa “Sorry” and the weepy farewell “Love Yourself.” Bieber didn’t slow down from there, reteaming with “Love Yourself” co-writer Ed Sheeran for the jaunty dancehall flirtations of 2019’s “I Don’t Care” and enlisting Migos leader Quavo for the feathery R&B of 2020’s “Intentions.” After cementing his adult identity as a sensitive singer who can make a meal of either comforting arrangements or edgy electronics, Bieber sounds equally at home on “STAY”—passing the torch of young talent to The Kid LAROI—and the beachy future soul of “Peaches,” both from 2021. He’s still maturing in real time in front of the whole world, and we’re still hanging on his every word.

Whip-smart lyricism, endlessly catchy hooks, endorsements from some of pop’s biggest names, and a support slot for Taylor Swift on the biggest tour in history: Sabrina Carpenter had it all when she unleashed “Espresso,” the moreish hit that would dominate summer 2024 and propel her to pop’s top table. Then came the just as witty, Jack Antonoff-produced “Please, Please, Please,” which turned out to be that summer’s <i>second biggest</i> hit. It was Carpenter’s breakout moment, but it hardly came out of nowhere. Balancing her on-screen career as a Disney star with her slow-burn journey to pop stardom, the Pennsylvania singer-songwriter and actor explored dance-pop styles on 2015’s <i>Eyes Wide Open</i> and 2016’s <i>EVOLution</i>, trap and house on 2018 singles “Almost Love” the cheeky kiss off “Sue Me,” and a more reflective style on 2022 album <i>emails I can’t send</i>. It housed tracks including “Nonsense,” “Feather,” and the headline-grabbing “because I liked a boy.” The record also featured a prophetic claim: “Woke up this morning, thought I’d write a pop hit.” Needless to say she did, with hits including “Taste” and “Bad Chem” following “Espresso”’s moment in the sun. Listen to all the songs—and every line of witty lyricism—that have made Carpenter a superstar here.

Latin music can often feel like a boys’ club, yet Colombian superstar KAROL G built a massive movement that regularly outshines her male contemporaries. By the mid-2010s, her glow-up proved undeniable on collaborative tracks like the tropical-tinged perreo “Hello” with Ozuna and the trap duet “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny. Both tracks appeared on 2017’s <i>Unstoppable</i>, her proper album debut that heralded the arrival of a formidable star. Hits like “Mi Cama” and the explosive dancehall rework “China” made her ubiquitous in the reggaetón world, but the Nicki Minaj team-up “Tusa” pushed her to new stratospheric heights. No longer exclusively tethered to any one scene or sound, genre is no obstacle for the self-described bichota, a femme-positive term also adopted by KAROL’s massive fandom. Through albums like <i>MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO</i> as well as stand-alone singles and features, her artistic range now covers everything from maximalist pop and arena-ready EDM to emotionally intimate balladry, often with producer Ovy On the Drums close at hand. Whether raucously celebrating Colombian pride on “+57,” reveling in the tropical thump of “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido,” or reflecting on endurance through empowerment on “Milagros,” KAROL G continues to make history.

In hindsight, Destiny’s Child was only the beginning of our long love affair with Beyoncé Knowles. After the top-tier girl group pushed themes of female empowerment and sisterhood with hits like 1999’s “Say My Name” and 2001’s “Survivor,” Knowles quickly became a household name when the trio finished up. Her 2003 collab with future husband JAŸ-Z, “Crazy in Love,” was a pop smash of the highest order, going multi-platinum in multiple countries and announcing her as a solo star. From there she has been more or less unstoppable, gifting us with earworm R&B ballads (2006’s “Irreplaceable”), sassy clapbacks (2008’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”), groovy 1970s flashbacks (2011’s “Love on Top”), and swaggering feminist anthems (2014’s “Flawless”) that continually reinforce not just her powerhouse vocals but also her uncanny versatility. Then came her 2016 concept album <i>Lemonade</i>, an era-defining work that tackled infidelity (“Hold Up”), civil rights (“Formation”), and political frustration (“Freedom”) while exploring the most adventurous music of her career. It features on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list and emboldened Knowles to devote herself to genres outside her usual comfort zone. She plunged into the history and culture of house music on 2022’s <i>RENAISSANCE</i>, saluting the genre’s queer and Black roots on “BREAK MY SOUL” and strutting disco forebears on “CUFF IT.” Even more surprisingly, she went full country on 2024’s <i>COWBOY CARTER</i>, topping charts around the world with lead single “TEXAS HOLD ’EM” and finally earning a long-overdue Grammy for Album of the Year. Knowles’ work positions her as a first-rate musician and cultural archivist who knows the responsibility of uplifting the past while sowing seeds for the future. It’s entertainment, yes, but also a kind of ambassadorship.

The country world feigned surprise when, after three albums of Music Row-indebted songcraft, Taylor Swift formally embraced pop on 2012’s <i>Red</i>. But no one should have been shocked: Any 14-year-old capable of persuading her parents to move from suburban Pennsylvania to Nashville for her career clearly has ambition to burn. And the thrill of following Swift’s rise has been watching her execute it flawlessly, largely because her melodic intelligence is equal to that ambition. Her early, youthful love songs heralded 2010's newly self-possessed <i>Speak Now</i>—which showed off her scathing wit—and evolved into knowing, ironclad pop fare that held its own against boisterous Max Martin production on <i>1989</i>, her fifth album, titled after her birth year. Throughout, her songwriting has blurred the lines between the public and private, burying enough real-life clues (about, say, scarves and Starbucks) to make clear that only Swift can own her narrative, thank you very much, while still retaining a lyrical elegance. Though 2017’s <i>reputation</i> might have been perceived as a gorgeously constructed piece of dramatic theater—its attendant heroes and villains all real-life characters from Swift's public feuds—all that spectacle proved an attention-grabbing cover for her most romantic album yet. She turned up the romance even more on 2019’s <i>Lover</i>, but it was 2020’s <i>folklore</i> and its companion, <i>evermore</i>—ruminative, relatively lo-fi albums written and recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic—that earned her the Apple Music Award for Songwriter of the Year. She followed those up in 2022 with <i>Midnights</i>, which she wrote and produced with Jack Antonoff, and described as "the stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life." In 2023, Swift undertook one of the most ambitious road shows of all time: the multi-year Eras Tour, which saw her presenting new and classic material across more than 100 locales worldwide. It was just one of many reasons she was named Apple Music's Artist of the Year for 2023. Swift returned to the soft, comfortable, bed-like sonics of <i>Midnights</i> for her 11th album, 2024’s <I>THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT</I>. A study in extremes and heightened emotions, the record—which features guest turns from Post Malone and Florence + the Machine—is her most specific, candid, and unsparing work to date.

Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar’s dense wordplay and community-minded vision has earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 (a first for a rapper) and the headline slot at the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show in 2025. Most people heard K-Dot for the first time on 2012’s <i>good kid, m.A.A.d city</i>, a coming-of-age concept album that nonetheless yielded multi-platinum hits like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” seven Grammy nominations and the no. 7 slot on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list. That resounding success emboldened the generational MC to explore live-band hybrids of jazz and funk on 2015’s <i>To Pimp a Butterfly</i>, all while still producing a single as accessible yet self-possessed as “King Kunta.” As for 2017’s <i>DAMN.</i>, it’s no accident that the song titles are in all caps with a full stop, from the all-time clapback “HUMBLE.” to the slow-burn Rihanna collab “LOYALTY.” With Lamar now firmly established in the culture, he was tapped to curate the soundtrack album for 2018’s <i>Black Panther</i>, giving him one of his signature tracks in “All the Stars,” a swooning pop crossover featuring his repeated creative partner SZA. He has remained dominant since then, flexing hard across multiple vocal modes on 2022’s scathing “N95” as if in training for his chart-topping 2024 diss track “Not Like Us,” powered by his ultra-public feud with one-time collaborator Drake. The same year’s “squabble up” and “tv off” reinforced both his fiery focus and talent for polyphonic delivery, slipping between voices as often as needed to hammer home his commentary on hip-hop and wider popular culture alike.

Bad Bunny has become a symbol of Latin culture’s migration into the global mainstream, reshaping the look, sound, and feel of modern pop just by following his own idiosyncratic muse. It’s like he says in the title of his 2020 album <i>YHLQMDLG</i>: “Yo hago lo que me da la gana”—“I do whatever I want.” As a kid growing up in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, in the mid-’90s, Bunny (born Benito Martínez Ocasio in 1994) fell in love with a broad spectrum of Latin music—reggaetón, merengue, salsa—before discovering hip-hop. His best tracks don’t just blend tradition and futurism, Latin and global, but stake out new thematic territory for male Latin artists, including personal vulnerability (“Vete”) and women’s empowerment (“Yo Perreo Sola”). His collaborations—the downcast “LA NOCHE DE ANOCHE” with ROSALÍA, the ultimate power pair-up “MÍA” with Drake, the airy and laidback “Lo Siento BB:/” with Julieta Venegas—only further highlight his range. After releasing 2022’s huge <i>Un Verano Sin Ti</i> (named one of Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums), he returned the year after with <i>nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana</i>, an album that added bits of Jersey club to his arsenal (“WHERE SHE GOES”) and reinforced his status as perhaps the world’s most dynamic hitmaker. When the NFL announced him as the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show headliner, they did it with a short clip of him sitting quietly between the goalposts on his childhood beach, Playa Puerto Nuevo. “That’s what I like about me, about my career, about my success,” he told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2025. “It’s always been me.”

At the height of his success, The Notorious B.I.G. dubbed himself the King of New York after the Christopher Walken-portrayed antihero from the film of the same name. The title was fitting and limiting: His swagger was unmistakably Brooklyn, but his talent and charisma made him a world-renowned superstar. Born Christopher Wallace in 1972, B.I.G. was raised by a Jamaican immigrant mother, writing raps and freestyling on street corners as a preteen. B.I.G.’s explosive 1994 debut album, <i>Ready to Die</i>, chronicled his survivalism (“Who Shot Ya?”) and sexploits (“Big Poppa”) with charm, menace, and urgency. His vivid tales featured unflinching details (“Gimme the Loot,” “I Got a Story to Tell”) made digestible by his distinctive flow and recognizable ’80s R&B samples courtesy of The Hitmen. The “ashy-to-classy” aspirations of Biggie’s hit “Juicy” became a reality: He elevated his Junior M.A.F.I.A. crew, godfathered an empire of hitmakers, and became one of the biggest rap stars in the world. Sadly, his meteoric rise came with a media-exacerbated beef with 2Pac that culminated in both stars’ murders six months apart, crippling the culture as it reeled from the luminaries’ absence.

BTS represents the power of catchy pop music as a force for social transformation. Since convening in South Korea in 2010, members RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook have touched on subjects that are taboo both at home and abroad, including mental health, LGBTQIA+ identity, and class inequality. And far beyond the umbrella of K-pop, their songs often dabble in just about every flavor of hip-hop, starting with the layered swagger of their 2013 debut single “No More Dream.” Despite singing and rapping primarily in Korean, BTS found success in Japan with their 2015 breakthrough “I NEED U” and farther afield from there, scoring a Top 10 hit in the US with 2018’s emotive “FAKE LOVE.” After their 2019 Halsey collab, “Boy with Luv,” confirmed them as proper crossover stars, their global status was assured with 2020’s American chart-toppers “Dynamite” and “Life Goes On,” the latter a rap ballad with very few English lyrics. More in the genre-jumping party mold of “Dynamite,” 2021’s electro-funk earworm “Butter” went multi-platinum in the US and elsewhere. After enlisting Snoop Dogg and benny blanco on 2022’s winking “Bad Decisions,” the group reinforced their vocal-stacked versatility on 2023’s “Take Two.” More than just developing a brand, BTS has crafted a rich alternate universe whose many references land well outside of bankable teen pop.

For Queen, rock was merely a jumping-off point. Formed in London in 1970, singer Freddie Mercury, guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor, and bassist John Deacon built high-octane pop songs out of parts boosted from classical music, dance music, doo-wop, New Wave, metal, and opera, forging one of the most distinctive and distinguished catalogs in modern music history. They wrote complex songs but always winked at their own penchant for excess, best captured on 1975’s audacious <i>A Night at the Opera</i>, which featured “Bohemian Rhapsody,” a six-minute mini-opera and an unlikely hit. As their career progressed and their popularity soared, they perfected less complex styles, scoring their biggest hit with the indelible groove of 1980’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” (“We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” from 1977, will be around as long as sporting arenas of any kind exist.) Their success continued through the ’80s, even as Mercury was quietly living with AIDS. After his death in 1991, Queen carried on in various forms, with Paul Rodgers and Adam Lambert taking turns in front for tours and new recordings.