Taylor Swift's 1989 will most certainly be crowned as the No. 1 album in America at some point this week; reports this weekend said that Swift's hard push out of country-crossover territory was on track to sell 1.3 million copies in its first seven days of availability, the biggest one-week tally of a single album's sales since 2002. Judging by the iTunes Store's charts, tracks from 1989 will also have a decent showing on the Hot 100, too—"Shake It Off" and "Blank Space" take up the iTunes Store's top two spots at this moment, and four other tracks are in the top 40 as well.
Swift's triumph puts a bow on what Billboard last month called "something going on culturally" when it comes to the pop charts. Pop music has always been seen as the province of women, at least from the perspective of who consumes it; the screaming teenage fans of the Beatles and One Direction lie at one demographic end, while the Delilah-listening adult-contemporary listeners who dedicate "Drops of Jupiter" to one another long-distance sit at the other. But does 2014 represent a sea change as far as women taking the reins on the other side?
That week, there were eight artists in the Hot 100's Top Five: Booty-shaking upstart Meghan Trainor ("All About That Bass"); Swift ("Shake It Off"); Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora (the dreary "Black Widow"); Tove Lo (the dreamy "Habits (Stay High)"); and the synergistic triptych of Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj ("Bang Bang", which recalls a mid-'00s British girlgroup song that lost its way). Since then, ladies' grip on the top has loosened slightly; Maroon 5's semi-stalkery "Animals" inched ahead of the Azalea/Ora duet, and the remaining four slots in the top 10 are taken up by male artists.
Perhaps going back to 1989, the totemic year of Swift's album, might help. That year capped a grand decade for pop that was artistically given life by the likes of Michael Jackson and Madonna and market-wise given a brand-new platform by MTV; 1989's biggest hits included Madonna's "Like a Prayer", the Bangles' "Eternal Flame", and Paula Abdul's "Straight Up". The top hit on the November 4, 1989 Hot 100 was Roxette's mournful "Listen to Your Heart", a synth-glazed track that could pass for a 1989 outtake.
Before comparing the charts of now and the charts of then, it's important to note that the Hot 100 is a very different beast today. In 1989 the chart's positions were determined by a combination of radio plays and singles sales, although exact sales figures weren't precisely measured on the chart until SoundScan was introduced in 1991; digital streaming services like Spotify and YouTube, which are so crucial to viral outliers today, were but a hiccup in a modem's connection screech. On the flip side, the post-Telecommunications Act consolidation of radio stations means that it, too, is a different place; radio stations are more likely to be programmed from the top down and with a nationwide audience in mind, meaning that the closest thing this decade will have to a regional hit is an online-first sensation like "Hot Boy", Bobby Shmurda's Vine-assisted current No. 8. (The influence of MTV, which served as America's national radio station 25 years ago, is important, but it wasn't, and isn't, measured by Billboard's bean-counters.)
Looking at the top 40 of the current Hot 100 (dated November 8, 2014) and its 25-years-ago analogue (dated November 4, 1989), one sees that while the tippy-top dominance alluded to in Billboard's trend piece is still mostly the case, there are a lot of dudes scattered in the rest of the chart's upper echelons; 13 songs with a woman vocalist are in the chart's present-day top 40, while the chart of 25 years ago has 16. Four women (Iggy Azalea, Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj) appear as performers more than once in that span; Swift's "Welcome to New York", which was released digitally a week in advance of 1989, is at No. 48.
Digging deeper into the Top 40's makeup, though, reveals a slightly more nuanced picture. That female voices remain a presence on pop radio is a given; the women of 2014, however, come from a much more monolithic place, with only Swift and Minaj having strong roots outside the pop world. Janet Jackson's muscular "Miss You Much" (No. 3, 1989), the lead single from her hit-spawning Rhythm Nation 1814, had its roots in R&B and added a militaristic pop; she was able to cross over to top-40 radio in a way that Beyoncé, who dressed up as 1814-era Janet for Halloween this weekend, hasn't with her last two albums, even though her starpower outshines that of pretty much anyone else making music right now; to say that the current pop landscape is hostile to women singing R&B is to be, perhaps, too kind. Meanwhile, the Miami trio Exposé, represented on the 1989 chart by a shimmery ballad ("When I Looked at Him", No. 23) came out of the Latin freestyle scene; and Soul II Soul had their roots in London's sound systems.
"All About That Bass", the current No. 1, has a couple of vague 1989 analogues in the consciously retro mold—"Love Shack", the crossover breakthrough by the B-52's, and Madonna's bubbly throwback "Cherish". Sybil's airy remake of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David standard "Don't Make Me Over" (No. 39, 1989) pairs well with Clean Bandit's effervescent "Rather Be" (No. 13, 2014), and Echosmith's brooding "Cool Kids" (No. 15, 2014) could make for a great split single with Belinda Carlisle's longing "Leave a Light On" (No. 30, 1989). But the dominance of not just certain artists, but the architects behind them, results in a sameness sonically; Max Martin, one of the chief songwriter-producers behind 1989, also had a hand in "Bang Bang" and Grande's "Break Free"; Shellback, who also worked on Swift's new album, co-wrote and produced the Maroon 5 track that bumped "Black Widow" to No. 6.
Meanwhile, Swift, whose first album came out in 2006, is a relative veteran compared to her compatriots on the pop charts; she's also not yet 25. Nicki Minaj and Sia ("Chandelier", No. 12) are the only artists over 30 in this week's top 40, while much-ballyhooed comeback singles by pre-Taylor-emergence starts like Gwen Stefani ("Baby Don't Lie", No. 46) and Fergie ("L.A. Love (La La)") have stalled outside that bubble. Compare that to the top 40 of 1989, which had relative oldsters like Tina Turner ("The Best", No. 15), Linda Ronstadt (the Aaron Neville-assisted "Don't Know Much", No. 27), and Cher ("If I Could Turn Back Time", No. 37). This age disparity could be the result of new technologies emboldening younger listeners to live out their fandom by hitting "play" over and over again; it could also simply be the result of more accurate measurement favoring youth movements, instead of known quantities.
While Swift's dominance of the pop world since 1989's release has been a sight to behold—a real, bona fide Event Album that satisfied fans and sold enough copies to bring back memories of the Diamond Era—the argument that 2014 is more of a peak moment for women in pop than 1989 doesn't quite hold water, thanks to the dominance of a few styles and artists at the expense of many.