Hayley Kiyoko
Recommended
These days, we don’t get the pop star we want, we get the pop star we deserve. Mainstream pop music is currently past its peak of genre fusion, rapidly becoming just a milquetoast shelf from which EDM shillers can sell festival tickets. Because of this, social issues in pop music, possibly better tackled by other genres, take form as trending lyric topics. Hayley Kiyoko, a young singer riding just that trend, has reached her current popularity thanks to her hit “Girls Like Girls,” an effigy to burn of summertime boyfriends that simmers with the (obvious, yet still handy in example) declaration that that boyfriend wasn’t necessary in the first place. Because girls will always like girls, and it turns out we always have. From a Disney Channel seedling, it’s a positive start. If anything, Kiyoko puts a simple face—monosyllabic terms against a warm suburban backdrop—to a complex name: dissecting and declaring one’s sexual identity, which is sometimes all pop music is capable of.
by Kim Selling