64 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
Clairo’s first video took a half hour to make and has thirty-seven million views.
POP MUSIC
BED HEADS
Clairo and the fuzzy, D.I.Y. sounds of bedroom pop.BY CARRIE B AT TA N
ILLUSTRATION BY KELSEY WROTEN
A
t some point in the past decade,
the bedroom replaced the garage
as the primary spiritual escape hatch
for suburban teen-agers who wanted
to express themselves through music.
Oversized amps and hand-me-down
drum sets were usurped by Wi-Fi, lap-
tops, and home-recording software. The
angst and the noise of garage rock gave
way to more subdued sounds, as young
musicians began making the kind of
hushed, Internet-facing electronic pop
that could be kept secret from adults,
rather than weaponized against them.
This insular form of music eventually
crystallized into a scene called “bed-
room pop”—a digitally connected co-
hort of musicians with its own stars,
styles, and dedicated playlists. (It also
shifted the meaning of the word “bed-
room” in music away from the sensual
and toward the cerebral.) Like many
terms used to characterize micro-genres,
bedroom pop is a misnomer—not all
of it is recorded in bedrooms, and most
of it is not popular—but it is an apt de-
scription of a woozy lo-fi style gener-
ated from self-imposed isolation.
Claire Cottrill, a twenty-year-old
singer, songwriter, producer, and college
dropout from Massachusetts who goes
by Clairo, resists the bedroom-pop des-
ignation, but she has nonetheless be-
come one of its avatars. In 2017, afterseveral years of noodling around on a
guitar and a laptop, Cottrill recorded a
Webcam video for a song called “Pretty
Girl.” In it, the prepubescent-looking
Cottrill lip-synchs her lyrics while candy-
pink closed captioning flashes across the
bottom of the screen. “I could be a pretty
girl, I’ll wear a skirt for you,” she mouths,
even though she wears slouchy sweat-
shirts throughout. “I could be a pretty
girl, I’ll lose myself in you.” The track is
gauzy, made up of rudimentary synths,
and Cottrill’s singing is disaffected. The
video looks like promotional content
for “Eighth Grade,” Bo Burnham’s film,
from 2018, about an awkward teen-age
girl lost in the scrum of her peers’ social-
media accounts.
There was something powerful about
the posture of “Pretty Girl,” which was
part teen fantasy and part meta-com-
mentary on teen fantasies; it conveyed
youthful longing in a way that was both
naïve and winking. The video brings to
mind the content on TikTok, the hugely
popular social-media platform, where
users make slapdash, absurdist remixes
of songs and videos, adding digital filters
and ornaments. (TikTok was the spring-
board for the bizarro-country anthem
“Old Town Road,” which recently broke
the record for the longest standing No. 1
single in history. Major labels have begun
to mine the chaotic TikTok streams for
their next big stars.) “Pretty Girl,” which
Cottrill says took her just thirty minutes
to make, went viral, and now has some
thirty-seven million views.
Virality in music is more often a
fluke—a blip in the Zeitgeist—than an
indicator of an artist’s potential. But Cot-
trill, after her breakout video, released an
EP called “diary 001,” which included
“Pretty Girl” and five other songs that
employed saccharine synths and plain-
spoken lyrics about puppy love. On one
song, called “Flaming Hot Cheetos,”
Cottrill casually pattered a few nonsense
syllables in place of a chorus. At times,
“diary 001” sounded of a piece with work
made by the collective PC Music or the
singer SOPHIE, who have dominated
the experimental-pop scene for the past
five years. More recently, meta-pop has
been taken up by Kim Petras, a German
artist who first became famous for un-
dergoing gender-reassignment surgery
at sixteen, and now makes highly pol-
ished, concept-forward music that com-