This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
Selena Gomez is not a singer. I mean, she sings. She sings a lot. Gomez’s singing career stretches back 17 years — more than half of her life. By some metrics, she’s among the most successful singers of her generation. She’s got a generous handful of top-10 hits, and she’s got her name on a few serious bangers. She gets some criticism for her breathy, whispery vocal tone, but she knows how to communicate an emotion and deliver a hook, which is really all that a pop star has to do. If you look at Gomez’s Wikipedia page, “singer” is the second of her five listed careers, right after “actress.” When I say that Selena Gomez is not a singer, I don’t really mean that as criticism. As a singer, Gomez is completely fine. Singing just isn’t the main thing that she does.
There is no main thing that Selena Gomez does. She is a celebrity, which is not the kind of career path that Wikipedia really recognizes. She’s a professionally charming human being. In the realm of professionally charming human beings, you don’t get much bigger than Gomez. She has found ways to spread her charm across tons of different media and to make a vast fortune off of it. On Instagram, Gomez is the most-followed woman in the world; only Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Instagram itself have more followers. People across the planet are deeply invested in Gomez’s personal narrative — her health struggles, her relationship issues, her successes, her failures. She is a gigantic global brand unto herself, and music is somewhat incidental to that brand.
By the time she scored her only #1 hit in the waning days of 2019, Selena Gomez was 27 years old, and she’d been massively famous for more than a decade — first in the world of Disney-kid culture and then in larger cross-generational realms. She had her devoted core of scary, intense fans, like every other massively famous person of her generation, and then she had a much larger group of people who had generally positive feelings about her. I was one of those people, and I still am. Selena Gomez seems cool. She does good work. I can’t say that she’s a big part of my life, but I like having her around.
“Lose You To Love Me,” Gomez’s one Hot 100 chart-topper, depends heavily on her personal narrative. It’s a therapy-speak power ballad, a nebulously empowering number about suffering through a breakup and coming out stronger and more fulfilled on the other side. Lots of pop songs work like that, but the really good ones escape the boundaries of their context. You might know that a song is a commentary on the singer’s life, but the song hopefully transcends its backstory and becomes the sort of thing that you can use for your own purposes. I’m sure that many people have found something bigger in “Lose You To Love Me,” but I never have. It’s not one of the really good pop songs. It’s just there.
When I say that Selena Gomez is not a singer, one of the things I mean is that she has no real signature style, no sound. You wouldn’t hear someone else’s single and think, “Hmm, that person seems to be going for a Selena Gomez sort of thing.” There is no Selena Gomez sort of thing. (Earlier this year, Benny Blanco said that Gomez “kind of created this whole whisper-pop melancholy type of thing.” I get why he made that claim, and I think it’s nice that he said it, but I disagree.) Gomez is a being of the song machine, and her sound moves to fit the mold her her collaborators and the style of the moment in which she’s working. Sometimes, that leads to very cool things. She’s got good taste and presence. I don’t think she’s got any classic songs, but she’s got plenty that I’d be happy to hear at any given moment. “Lose You To Love Me” happened to come out at a time when the pop audience wanted big, soul-baring ballads about personal growth. That’s not my favorite mode, and it doesn’t suit Gomez’s skill set especially well, but it’s what finally pushed her over the top. As someone who has vaguely positive feelings toward Selena Gomez, I’m happy for her. Too bad the song is nothing special.
