Tinashe Wants You To Get Off The Computer And Dance

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently.

In many ways, Tinashe’s career thus far has been a road map for navigating the changing landscapes of music and the music business. As the product of the post-2000 melding of pop artists and hip-hop production—think Britney with The Neptunes, or Nelly Furtado with Timbaland—Tinashe first broke out in 2014, when she made a very classical style of club-first major label R&B. She had good singles, but the style of mainstream music she was making was falling out of fashion, replaced by a more alternative and insular style of pop R&B music, in the vein of Frank Ocean, SZA, Solange, and Brent Faiyaz. How we get from “2 On” to Tinashe’s latest album feels legible but also completely unexpected. On Popstar, she defines what pop music for an internet age should be: club music that is postmodern and self-aware about living in an era of phones and people sitting on computers all day, while imploring them to get back outside.