Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I'm in the studio with Rob Sheffield and

Brittany Spanos. We thought it was a good time to talk about 2018 in pop.

Last week we did 2018 in hip-hop. It's been kind of a weird year in pop you know defining pop gets

kind of hard but it's definitely you know it when you see it kind of thing and Bernie we were

talking yesterday and you said it's been kind of like a weird year off year in Palm. Yeah there hasn't been as many big

albums from like legacy pop artists this year I mean legacy in the sense of like

have kind of dominated pop over the last like decade or so even and also just like not a really big pop event year

There's been a lot of great albums I think in a lot of career-making albums from

Newer artists, younger artists artists that are kind of just now seeing their career sort of evolving in a way where an album can be called their best.

But yeah, not a lot of big pop events. I feel like all the big music events have been happening in rap.

Yeah, and we were saying that in some ways the year in pop

is, you know, in part the year in Ariana Grande, for sure.

And if you, you know, Camille Cabello had an amazing amazing year and that was a big one.

Casey Musgraves made a beautiful album that won Best Country album but you know it's pretty

much a pop album. Rob how do you see this year how would you define this year

broadly speaking in pop? A lot of hits sort of a transitional period in terms of a lot of like

Brittany said a lot of the legacy artists were kind of sitting it out and a lot of the new

contenders for the throne kind of really stepped up and so it was a

just a fantastic year for pop hits really from from everywhere.

What were some of your favorites if you want to throw that out and maybe we can play some of them?

Well, honestly, since you brought up Ariana already, like, Thank you Next is such a,

understand that for expectations for Thank you Next, I would have been happy with a lot less. I was kind of expecting it was going to be funny little trivial shade released overnight and we'd all like snicker about it the next day and then forget about it. It turned out to be this amazing statement.

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