Meghan Trainor

Though it feels like she made her grand entrance into the mainstream music space nearly a decade ago, Meghan Trainor first graced – or cursed, depending on your stance – us with her presence a mere five years ago with the original EP version of her breakout record Title, charging into the mainstream consciousness with an unrelenting charm that hit all the right spots as far as listeners were concerned – As if part of some super-secret underground marketing campaign that’d be planned for months, she seemingly gained her overwhelming notoriety in a matter of days upon the record’s release, playing on a loop alongside Sia’s fantastic “Chandelier” & Nicki Minaj’s bombastic “Bang Bang” as if she were the second coming of Christ, giving her one of the most outstanding freshman entries anyone had seen in years from a relative newcomer to the scene; Of course, this ultra-refined persona would soon be outed as a studio-exec’s pet project designed specifically to appeal to the masses, seeing as she literally deleted her entire library of previous albums from music distributors like iTunes & Spotify to give her new image an air of authority by distancing herself from the happy-go-lucky ukulele teen she was before, selling out to the nth degree & removing any sense of artistic integrity whatsoever – It goes without saying that this marketing treachery should’ve warned us from the get-go how problematic the young artist would become in the subsequent years, but the wool had already been pulled over our eyes, convincing everyone – even a typically-judgmental prick like myself – that Title was the bee’s knees, an album worth blasting when you wanted a moment of levity in a music industry besieged by an endless assault of Reggae Fusion vibes. Oh, how wrong we were…

When it comes to Meghan Trainor’s so-called ‘follow-up’ record Thank You, it’s nearly impossible to describe it as anything but derivative garbage in comparison to what her contemporaries were producing around the same time in 2016, not only delivering what is arguably her most problematic album yet but one of the industry’s largest steps backward in terms of integrity, a half-hearted cash-in on industry trends that made previous Caucasian Pop appropriators like Taylor Swift look like absolute angels in hindsight; There’s no need to fake it, this is simply a bad album from tip to toe – As someone who has a soft spot for truly-inspired Pop music & whose classical training in music theory can acknowledge melodic skill when it’s present, I’ve no qualms with dragging this record through the mud as it represents everything wrong with mainstream media, going to great lengths to shamelessly adopt current trends without putting in the effort to deliver a cohesive musical journey you can actually get behind, essentially giving those still stuck in the eighties-era mindset of ‘what’s Black is mine’ a reason to continue feigning ignorance for little more than a quick buck. Thank You was initially presented as somewhat of a transformative career move for Trainor, pushing her sound even harder into the whole ‘I’m an infallible goddess’ aesthetic with a blatant display of fake-feminism only the most uneducated listener could possibly stomach, putting a heavy strain on the progress other more-effective female artists had made towards gender-equality & doing so in the name of self-centered stardom, making everyone within earshot a party to the downfall of Pop music’s integrity.