Meghan Trainor

I have done a lot of odd jobs, and can confidently call myself a Renaissance man. I always wanted to be a Renaissance man, even though it is looked down upon in certain circles (‘why don’t you specialize?’). I dislike Meghan Trainor and everything she stands for. But let me set the scene: the problem was, when I was a Production Assistant on a stupid little fucking independent film (I mean stupid), this thick red head girl who looked like Meghan Trainor was all up in my grill. I had to reciprocate – and we hung out and had a whole lot of fun. But it was funny that the only reason why we were hanging out is because I somehow felt like I was getting back on her type. The drama student with tons of drama. My weakness.

One of Boston’s own, Meghan Trainor, is completely out of her depths here on her latest pop foray, Thank You, and being a Boston girl, I must admit, I was swept up in the supportive euphoria of her previous album Title, sort of going along with the ‘line’ that this was in fact girl-forward music, showing body positive imagery with respects to curvy women, and generally a female first attitude that was really needed at that time in 2015. But I have since come to change my mind about this album, and was actually hoping for the new, more artistically mature Meghan Trainor to grace my ears on Thank You, yet to my shock, not only did this album have no clear hits, but it was even more of a shift in the wrong direction. I like to think I’m a feminist but I also want to work with men along clear cut lines of communication, yet the ‘feminist’ Trainor would have it all about her without really having anything appealing going on for herself. Not to mention, some of these songs are so cringy, it make me reassess everything I believed about her. Listen to “Dance Like Yo Daddy” and feel your soul slipping away.

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…

Listen, y’all: I’ve been going in hard on Meghan Trainor’s declining relevancy as a Pop icon in my last few critical Narratives for her most recent records, doing everything in my power to convince the masses she’s been on a one-way trip to the bottom of the barrel ever since releasing her ‘first’ mainstream record Title, but I might’ve spoken too soon as her latest surprise EP drop THE LOVE TRAIN seems to have taken everything I said & turned it on its head to make me look like an absolute idiot – Coming just in time for everyone’s most-feared corporate holiday Valentine’s Day, Trainor’s newest entry improves upon every criticism I had with room to spare, dropping the more problematic melodic elements of her studio-perfected persona to produce what is easily the most original record she’s produced to date; Gone are the vast majority of her culturally-appropriating personality traits that made her feel like an American equivalent of the UK’s most culturally-insensitive Pop star Anne-Marie & much of the boring, formulaic, faux-Alternative R&B aesthetics which plagued her previous albums have likewise found their way into the trash bin, instead delivering a fairly-compelling collection of soothing Pop crooners & groovy Dance Funk jams that show off who she is as a musician for the very first time. It’s not the long-awaited second-half of her upcoming TREAT MYSELF record as many fans had been expecting, but it’s almost better that way as we don’t have to sit through her less-entertaining compositions just to get to the good stuff, replenishing what little faith I had that Trainor possessed any artistic integrity at all – I wouldn’t have believed it myself a mere two weeks ago, but THE LOVE TRAIN might actually be a good record, leaving me flabbergasted in disbelief after such a long string of literal trash informed her career hitherto.

It’s not always easy to pick yourself back up after a devastating loss, especially when it comes to being a Popstar in today’s industry, but sometimes all it takes is a quick dye-job & a drastic stylistic shift to regain the trust of all those fans you’d disappointed in the last round, knowing audiences are fickle & are eager to consume whatever noise you can put out to help them disassociate from the relative darkness we call life. This was Meghan Trainor’s basic path when she created TREAT MYSELF, pulling a Bruno Mars & moving a step ahead of industry trends by overshooting the whole eighties-inspired New Wave Synth Pop revival entirely for more of an early-nineties Freestyle & Dance Funk aesthetic that felt totally unique at its time of release, announcing to the world that she’d learned from her past mistakes & was ready to become the radiantly-shining Pop idol she was destined to be all those years ago had she not squandered the faith her followers had supplied – With such heightened expectations, one would assume TREAT MYSELF was a massive improvement over the artist’s prior works, which it certainly shows signs of being at times, but it’d come with its own range of missteps & poor performance choices that’d only serve to prove why no one should support Trainor as an artist in the first place, the first issues arriving even before the album was even live when she moved the original August 2018 release date to January 2019 which itself has yet to be met. Time & time again Trainor has shown she has no interest in growing a backbone throughout her career & I for one am getting tired of feigning interest in what she has to offer, as I’m always let down by the promise of each new song’s instrumentation the moment she opens her mouth & begins singing.

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.