Pop goes my heart
Becoming a believer, and inviting you to come along
It was a Friday in late 2005. I went over to my best friend’s house, we had an after school snack, and then she hurried me into her bedroom and closed the door behind us. She had something to show me.
She pulled a CD case out of her desk drawer and held it like it was contraband. It featured a redheaded woman in a pink bodysuit over a black background. I’d never seen it before. Her mom had just bought it, she said while carefully taking the disc out of the case and putting it in the CD player. She pressed play, and my jaw hit the floor.
Describing what I heard that day seems hollow. I have words for it now, but at the time, I had none. I didn’t have the language, yet the songs blasting through the speakers gave me something that felt electric, expansive, and maybe even a little forbidden. I was eight years old and had just discovered Madonna.
Where were you when you first heard Madonna? Perhaps your pop awakening wasn’t Madonna but Britney. Or Cher. Or Prince, or Kate Bush, or Queen, or Lady Gaga. Maybe your first pop memory is blurry, a song playing on the radio in the car, or a music video glimpsed at a sleepover. Maybe you didn’t even realize it was a moment until years later, when that same song came on and pulled something up from the depths.
Or maybe you do remember it and you dismiss it. Because you don’t listen to pop music anymore. Because you’re too “cool” for that.
Pop is the opposite of what many music devotees admire. It’s commercial and accessible. It literally stands for “popular”. It’s for the masses. It’s mainstream. The negative connotations attached to all these descriptors arise from our desire to be different, special, unique. Everything pop dares not to be.
I’ve watched people flinch with embarrassment as they admit they like a pop song. I’ve listened to people try to convince me that certain songs aren’t pop to justify listening to them. For decades I’ve seen pop stars carry the burden of taste wars: real music vs guilty pleasures.
In an era when everything is niche and irony is currency, loving the mainstream earnestly can be radical. Especially if it's girly.
This series isn’t about convincing anybody to listen to pop. My desire to write about divas stems from the belief that pop is intrinsically woven into the fabric of our culture, and that it should be talked about like it matters.
Pop in languages other than English is often treated like a subgenre—something exotic, a curiosity, or a trend. But for those of us from non-English-speaking countries, it’s not a detour. It’s the main road. These songs are just as rich, complex, and culturally significant as anything topping the Billboard Hot 100. In this series, I want to write about the Spanish-speaking too. Not as footnotes to the English-speaking pop machine, but as essential voices in the global story of pop. Some posts will be in English, others in Spanish, depending on the artist at hand.
This isn’t a history of divas or a ranked list of “best” albums. There are plenty of those online. It’s a collection of personal essays, part memory, part critique, part cultural commentary, through the lens of the pop stars whose music and visuals have shaped me. It’s about my personal journey through the genre, what I’ve learned from their personas, and what they reveal about the world we live in.
I’ll hope you’ll come along.
Bring your diva. I’ll bring mine.