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Ed Sheeran might be the worst monster in the history of pop music. In the video for his recent single “Bad Habits,” the British singer plays a benevolent vampire. Prowling the streets in a hot pink suit, he stalks the night but maims no one. His bloodthirst is quenched, instead, by ketchup. Colorful and clogged with bad CGI, the Dave Meyers-directed clip constantly suggests the potential for violence and gore but never commits. Sheeran and his fanged cohorts pursue a frightened mob of would-be victims for apparently no reason at all (it is certainly not for their necks), sending the throng into fits of panic with a flash of their teeth. At one point, a man spews on the sidewalk, the slippery substance causing a 10-person pileup amid the stampede of bodies. When dawn reclaims the London high street, the vamps scurry to shelter as the sunlight peels off their skin like old paint. Sheeran, however, returns to his fangless human form, perched on a rooftop with his trusty six-string.
In the past, Sheeran’s visuals have leaned on PG-13-humor, fairytale romance, and the triumph of the everyman. But “Bad Habits” finds him reaching for something more… something edgy, god forbid. Timid as it may be, the video represents pop’s nice guy getting in on the grotesque, one of the most severe aesthetic trends of the past decade.
Sheeran’s Fisher-Price approach to the trend—which typically relies on bloody gore, disfigured flesh, and general putrescence—arrived almost six months after the Weeknd terminated his After Hours era, perhaps the apex of grotesque imagery within the pop sphere. The singer released a string of music videos between 2019 and early 2021, each one progressively more brutal than the last. Throughout the series, the Weeknd’s physical state deteriorates to the point of wicked farce. First he is bruised and bandaged. Then he is decapitated, his severed head brandished by his executioner on a nightclub dancefloor. You’d be wrong to think that’s the worst thing you can do with a detached head; in last year’s video for “Too Late,” the Weeknd’s cranium is discovered rolling down the road by two post-op plastic surgery addicts. Faced with the irresistible allure of the disembodied noggin, the women shuttle it back to their mansion. They hire a male escort, behead him, and sew the Weeknd’s head onto his greased-up, muscular corpse. Once their specimen is intact, they fuck it.
This stylized imagery, heinous and perversely hilarious, was once foreign to the purview of chart-topping pop stars. For years it was weaponized by hard rock and experimental artists who sought similar extremes in their music. Dating back to the late ’60s, metal and its spawn of heavier subgenres have long been the cradle of horrific stimuli—all on some Satanic mission to corrupt the American teen, as the Christian right often argued. But in the past 13 years, the gruesome and gory has been liberated from that stronghold and embraced by the status quo, a generation raised on nu metal, Hot Topic, and limitless access to shocking imagery. In 2019’s “Raising Hell,” Kesha murders her husband and drags his bloody, sheet-wrapped body down a flight of stairs; A$AP Rocky gives Tyler, the Creator a grisly face transplant halfway through 2017’s “Who Dat Boy”; Troye Sivan’s bleeding heart gets broken—and literally squeezed—by his love interest in 2019’s “Lucky Strike.” Twenty-five years ago, MTV refused to air the uncensored version of Nine Inch Nails’ iconic “Closer” visual, with its suspended beef carcasses and throbbing, anatomical heart. Now those images could easily pair with a Top 40 hit.
The best indication that a trend is underway, and ultimately on its way out, is its dissemination into the mainstream. The ubiquity of the grotesque is its death knell, especially now that it has been attempted by Sheeran, the tamest pop star this side of Michael Bublé. By the time Sheeran filed his fangs and gelled his hair for “Bad Habits,” the Weeknd had shed his red blazer and moved beyond his After Hours bloodlust. In August, he dropped a slick, strobe-heavy visual for his new single “Take My Breath.” The clip is consistent with a great deal of the Weeknd’s recent work; it is moody, sexual, violent even. But when a leather-clad woman wraps her long braid around the singer’s neck and drags him through a concrete hallway, something strange happens: His head stays on the whole time.
Historically, the word “grotesque” has referred to pieces of art that distort or cross-breed human and animal forms—“perversions” of natural beauty that sometimes include elements of plantlife. The works could be humorous, but were often absurd or ugly, marked by exaggerated, indelicate features. In its contemporary, colloquial application, “grotesque” seems to signal anything that inspires repulsion. But it does not simply suggest the violent or sexual—it confronts us with their most lurid effects on the body.
Big pop’s flirtation with the grotesque can be traced back to 1983, when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” changed the music video landscape forever. Director John Landis’ campy short, complete with visual effects by legendary makeup artist Rick Baker, is hardly as explicit as the grisly, hi-def visuals of the past decade, but it is the logical origin point for the aesthetic. Jackson’s sunken, cadaverous face, his tortured transformation into a werewolf, and the army of decomposing zombies clashed with the sheer elation of that perfect pop song.
“Thriller” had a massive impact on the pop universe, but its interest in the grotesque wasn’t fully adopted by the genre until decades later. Between 2008 and 2011, a few key events redefined the pop star image—many executed by Lady Gaga and her creative team. Gaga’s contributions to pop’s gory makeover are considerable: The meat dress. The blood-slicked, disembodied organ in “Alejandro.” That freaky, flesh-scaled mermaid in “Yoü And I.” But it started with Jonas Åkerlund’s “Paparazzi” video, an early (and fairly mild) excursion into the macabre. Gaga falls to her death, splitting her head open on the pavement. Cameramen snap away as fresh blood oozes from her skull. A number of shots depict women who have just died: from saran wrap suffocation, hanging, and a bullet between the eyes. At the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Gaga performed the song as fake blood streamed down her abdomen. Rather than an artfully-placed trickle, the red spilled onto her legs in a rush. She smeared the rest across her face.
It was also in 2009 that Gaga’s admiration for fashion designer Alexander McQueen, a provocateur and champion of the grotesque, became public knowledge. In October of that year, McQueen staged his collection Plato’s Atlantis by transforming models into reptilian creatures teetering on hoof-like platforms. Arriving weeks later, Gaga’s freaky visual for “Bad Romance” saw her sporting subdermal implants down her spine and posing in the finale piece from Plato’s Atlantis: an iridescent, scaled minidress fashioned from domed paillettes. The singer wore it like a second skin, stalking through the video like a bipedal lizard woman. That collection was the last to premiere during McQueen’s life. Four months later, the designer hanged himself in his London home.
McQueen’s death had a profound impact on Gaga; she penned “Born This Way” shortly thereafter, claiming in one interview that his spirit wrote it through her. In the song’s video and accompanying images, she accented her face with angular prosthetics identical to the makeup in Plato’s Atlantis. Her 2011 Born This Way album dropped the same month the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, a career retrospective and eulogy for the designer. It was one of the most popular exhibitions in the museum’s history, attracting over half a million visitors in its three-month run. The show repulsed and intrigued viewers, but more importantly it exposed thousands to McQueen’s morbid fixations, and his unparalleled ability to make them exquisite. “I find beauty in the grotesque,” he once said. “I have to force people to look at things.”
Pop has always been a medium where the subversive meets a mass audience. The alchemy of mere exposure has the ability to normalize taboos, and popular music’s acceptance of the visceral mirrors its embrace of non-normative sexuality throughout the last century. The emergence of music videos in the 1980s only encouraged our increasing comfort with sexual liberation. Pop’s fairly recent interest in the grotesque does not replace its fascination with sexuality (as if anything ever could). Rather, it is beyond sexuality—where pop stars have ventured now that mere sex is no longer shocking. You can only be so naked, after all. The grotesque digs under the skin, or builds upon it, making dysmorphic sculptures from the flesh.
In many cases, the sexual is combined with the monstrous, a messy marriage that figures like Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson put forth for years. But while their interpretations were often steely-eyed and sadomasochistic, contemporary pop stars are free to inject a bit of camp and levity into their simulated violence. This might be the very reason pop stars have embraced the macabre so effortlessly: the upbeat nature of their music lets us approach death and decay with a sense of humor. In her delightfully ferocious visual for “Bitch Better Have My Money,” Rihanna kidnaps a rich trophy wife, strips, torments, and eventually kills her (her husband, played by Mads Mikkelsen, meets a similar fate). The 2015 video culminates with the singer naked and caked in the blood of her victims. Miley Cyrus and Dua Lipa simulated the look in last year’s “Prisoner,” as they smeared themselves with a viscous red liquid.
Strange fluids and ooze could comprise their very own subgenre within the grotesque. Shot in extreme closeup, Miley’s 2015 clip for “Dooo It!” finds the singer expectorating a number of innocuous liquids that become disgusting within the context of the video. She spits out ribbons of thick, glittery goop, sprinkle-studded caramel, and milk, none of which are innately gorey or sexual. Yet the mouth’s rejection of each substance, captured at point blank range, inspires repulsion.
Billie Eilish’s debut album rollout was abundant in slime, too. In the visual for “when the party’s over,” black liquid oozes from her eye sockets; in 2019’s “all the good girls go to hell,” Eilish drags herself out of a dark, slimy lake after a set of cumbersome wings burst through her scapulae. (Examine the album covers and press shots of last century’s pop stars; you will not find them swimming in vile ectoplasm.) What’s particularly unique about Eilish’s relationship with the grotesque is how mundane she makes it seem. Whereas Gaga circled each startling aesthetic choice with a fat red marker, Eilish meets her gruesome reality with no more than an eye roll. Coming into fame a decade apart, Gaga and Eilish represent two extremes of the grotesque pop phenomenon. One clanged the bell to announce its arrival, the other shrugs at its prevalence. Eilish’s position mirrors our own as an audience: We can’t be shocked by the same old carnage.
With the release of her latest album Happier Than Ever, Eilish joined the Weeknd in abandoning the grotesque. She ditched her black contact lenses and slime-green hair. There is no ooze coursing through her new music videos, which are also void of levitating bodies, hospital scenes, and hypodermic needles. Gaga is still flying her freak flag, but these days she’s more interested in distant planets ruled by dancing aliens than she is with perverting the human form. Glorious as the reign of grotesque pop has been, it seems to be gasping its final breaths—and it will take more than Ed Sheeran to reanimate its corpse.
