Death of the male popstar: an analysis of Benson Boone

Is Benson Boone just a poser in a jumpsuit, or can we only accept vacuous pop music when it's fronted by female faces?

Something disturbing has happened in my neighbourhood. A large poster has gone up advertising the forthcoming London tour dates for an event called ‘Benson Boone’.

Yes, the all-singing, all-backflipping, all-American pop phenomenon is playing not one but three nights at the famous O2 Arena this November. I laughed when I saw that multiple shows were listed on the poster, imagining that was far too many, but was quickly humbled when I checked online and found that almost all of the tickets have been sold. Some standing tickets are available, as well as the shit seats right at the very back in the sections overlooking the corners of the stage for the low price of £76.10. This means that across the three dates there are around 60,000 people in the Greater London area who have paid this, and in most cases even more, to attend a Benson Boone concert.

What is happening here? I got the impression that Mr Boone was universally reviled as a bad artist with bad songs, famous largely for his startling ability to backflip off anything and everything, onstage or off. In an unforgettably scathing review of his performance at this year’s Coachella festival, Pitchfork derided him as ‘horrible, just godawful, the kind of act that makes you wonder if this whole medium [music] has been worth it.’

For my money, Boone’s singing voice is actually fairly good, but unfortunately he puts it in service of laughably terrible hits such as last year’s ‘Beautiful Things’, and the meme of summer 2025, ‘Mystical Magical’. His album American Heart came out on Friday and was immediately torn apart by critics, who no doubt had a field day coming up with mean, gymnastics-themed titles for their reviews (‘a front flip to the middle of the road’ - NME; ‘Benson Boone’s American Heart Doesn’t Land the Backflip’ - Consequence).

Boone for his part is trying to brush off the criticism by leaning into the joke. He released a new music video last week that made fun of the industry plant allegations, and aped the ‘moonbeam ice cream taking off your blue jeans’ lyric from ‘Mystical Magical’ that has been remixed to death on social media. Despite this show of bravado, you can’t help but feel a little sorry for the barrage of hate he’s faced simply for producing rubbish songs and flipping off Jimmy Fallon’s desk.

Is that strange man bothering you, Jimmy?

Where are all the male popstars?

Nevertheless, the question remains: is the pop landscape really so dry at the moment that this is the best male popstar we have? This??? With his floppy hair, self-conscious jumpsuits, and squeaky pop tunes, Benson Boone is trying (and failing) to fill a significant Harry Styles-shaped gap in the market. The tour poster above draws on greater iconography still, Boone’s Americana theme alluding to the aesthetic owned by Bruce Springsteen, the pose and moustache vaguely reminiscent of Freddy Mercury. Boone even performed a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ live on stage at Coachella, accompanied at the first weekend by legendary Queen guitarist Brian May. Clearly, he aspires to a pop greatness that is in no way reflected in his musical output.

Where are all the male popstars, seriously? Boone’s tour billboard once again gives away that he is all talk and no trousers (only jumpsuits #joke) when it comes to cultural impact. Harry Styles is the only thoroughbred male pop star of his kind these days. He has a huge fanbase and a solid list of acceptable hits, but he’s not released new music in three years.

In 2025, all the top male artists come from genres other than pop. Looking at the Billboard Artist 100 for the week of 21st June, men in the top 20 include Morgan Wallen (Country), Kendrick Lamar (Hip Hop), and The Weeknd (R&B). The highest-charting male pop singer is indeed Benson Boone, at number 10.

Spot the difference???

As for the women in the top 20, they are almost all pop singers of the highest calibre, with Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, and Billie Eilish competing alongside rising stars such as Tate McRae and Addison Rae. The only other male singer who comes close to the women in global pop appeal is Ed Sheeran, who ranks a little outside the top 20. And even then you could argue that Ed Sheeran technically isn’t a popstar, since he got his start in folk music.

Is this really who we want to lead the charge for male pop? Ed Sheeran and Benson Boone, two men so pale and bland they could fill a bread basket? Benson Boone’s tour poster apes the greats while having no artistic merit to back it up. Back in the day, we had bangers from George Michael and Justin Timberlake jostling in the Top 10 alongside Madonna and Lady Gaga. Do we simply live in an age where good pop music is a female-only genre?

Why do we reject male popstars?

Reflecting further on this, I had to consider whether we’ve ever had any mainstream solo male artists who’ve been 100% pop. Those who have mostly seem to be men starting careers outside of boybands (Harry Styles, Justin Timberlake, George Michael). Many artists of the past that we consider to be great popstars today only achieved success in the pop charts after beginning in alternative genres (David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran - it should be a criminal offence to list him here alongside those two but it’s true).

Male musicians who start their careers in pop from the off seem to struggle with acceptance from the public, or at least they have in recent decades, especially if they present as straight (Troye Sivan, who is openly gay, is an obvious exception to this rule). Take, for example, Charlie Puth, who was pretty ubiquitous in the charts ten years ago, a musical prodigy with perfect pitch. While his second album Voicenotes I actually think is decent, I hesitate to say so because most of what he’s released otherwise has been stale and unimaginative, the kind of music that gives pop a bad name. His debut album received a damning score of 2.5 from Pitchfork back in 2016.

Or, to take another critically derided artist from the 2010s, the band Imagine Dragons, labelled ‘an AI interpretation of creative expression’ by NME. With such vacuous hits as ‘Believer’ and ‘Thunder’, the group have racked up billions of streams and top 100 hits, but become enemy #1 in the war against overproduced radio singles

In case you’ve ever wondered, this is what Imagine Dragons look like.

Puth, Imagine Dragons, and Benson Boone have become easy targets for users online who want to rally against meaningless, genreless, and inexplicably ubiquitous pop music. Noticeably, these hate trains are all targeted at male musicians. And while top female artists are frequently and tediously scrutinised from all sides, there are many female pop singers lower down the pecking order who are the face of music as facile, if not more so, than Boone’s. To name a few, past and present from the sludge pile: Zara Larsson, Selena Gomez, Rita Ora, Jennifer Lopez, Mabel, and Bebe Rexha. And as far as I’m aware, none of them have ever attracted so active a hate campaign for their sound as that currently facing Benson Boone and his moonbeam ice creams.

There will always be pointless pop stars who exist only to fill hours on the radio or clog up Spotify playlists. But I wonder if there is a deeper reason that the men of this less-than-illustrious subgenre are so readily targeted. We as a society seem to find it acceptable that women can be the face of disposable pop, but not men. Again and again the idea emerges across social media that Benson Boone ought to be using his vocals for something ‘better’, or that Charlie Puth should put his perfect pitch in service of ‘good’ music. I’ve never seen anyone say the same about Rita Ora, that she should aspire for more.

Points to whoever knows the name of this artist, who has gone to Number 1 in the UK before????

Beneath all the Boone backlash is an instinctive reaction against a man representing a strain of pop culture that is inherently superficial and vacuous. We want our male pop stars to be pop stars by accident rather than by intent; like Prince or Bowie, they should have something more substantial to back them up. Male musicians should have taste and integrity, in the same way that gender stereotypes present men as drinking neat whisky and hard martinis while the girls giggle over fruity cocktails.

A prime example of these concepts in action can be seen in the early career of Justin Bieber, who became a cultural phenomenon in 2010 when he released his #1 song ‘Baby’. This round-faced teenage crooning repeatedly, ‘baby, baby, baby, ohhhh’ was so offensive to the general public that the music video remained the most-disliked upload on YouTube for eight years after release. The song was a bit annoying, but it wasn’t on the level of ‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black. When it came out, what I remember more than irritation with the music was a general distaste for ‘cringe’ Bieber and his ‘girly’ pop song.

You would think with time and the passing of ‘ironic’ early-2010s Cinema Sins-style criticism, the Internet would become less hostile to male purveyors of meaningless pop music. The reaction against Benson Boone disproves this theory and highlights how far we still have to go before we dismantle all the assumptions of the patriarchy. Boys should have the right to create shit, forgettable pop music without judgement just as much as the girls. But while we wait for that to happen, I’m going to practice my backflips.