Sarah Ditum on Pop

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY 14-year-old daughter about music mostly take place as a series of incredulous demands. She’ll find me in the kitchen listening to Megan Thee Stallion as I stir a pot of macaroni, and unleash an outraged cry: “How do you know this? This is a TikTok song!” — meaning, a song that’s popular on the video-clip social network.

Or I’ll swish past as her phone throws out something I first heard in some filthy nightclub before she was even imagined: “ did you hear the Yeah Yeah Yeahs?” (The answer, usually, is that it’s been stripped of context and turned into a TikTok song.)