Sounds made up: Hollywood’s fascination with fake pop songs

It was 2am on Pride weekend in New York, and at the queer pop party Gorgeous Gorgeous, the churchy organs of Jocelyn’s comeback single World Class Sinner / I’m A Freak swelled through the air. “You can pull my hair / Touch me anywhere / Whip and chains,” she sang, amid bass that lingered in the air like her beloved Virginia Slims. And, as some partygoers took a break to sway, mop sweat or to yell “who is this?”, at least a quarter of clubbers lost their mind.

Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is the fictional pop star at the center of HBO’s beleaguered trauma buffet The Idol. World Class Sinner, with its sticky touch me touch me touch me hook and deliciously dead-eyed autotune, has slinked its way into being a sleeper hit, with over 10m streams and a shoutout by Lorde, who sung along to it on Instagram. “Is the Idol’s World Class Sinner the song of the summer?” asked GQ. In the show, World Class Sinner is supposed to be bad, as a cynical play to get Jocelyn back on the radio. (“Every time I listen to it I’m fucking embarrassed,” Jocelyn says.) But the song is a cannily constructed earworm, with a Timbaland stutter soaked in the hazy, R&B–inflected pop sounds of the mid-2010s. As one TikTok user put it: “Makes me wanna drink tequila and get a tattoo.” It might be the only thing the show has stumbled into doing right.

Look hard enough, and you’ll find enough fictional music stars through the years to form an alternate canon of their own, running the gamut from wholesome family bands (The Partridge Family) to slick retro-soul (Sister & the Sisters) and proto-riot grrrl punk (The Fabulous Stains). In the 90s and 00s, made-up bands went with big-budget comedy like butter on popcorn; you’ll hear Freaky Friday’s Pink Slip in karaoke bars to this day, and faux 60s pop band The Wonders’ theme for That Thing You Do! was spot-on enough to be nominated for an Oscar. The soundtrack for 2001’s punk rock prom queen satire Josie And the Pussycats, created by members of The Go-Go’s and Letters to Cleo and with production by Babyface, went gold and helped to inspire a generation of indie-rock artists. “I studied the way they performed,” Mitski has said. “I’d be like, Oh that’s how you do it! That’s how you rock out!”

But no matter how hard it tries, Hollywood has a hard time matching its fictional pop artists with music worthy of a superstar. Pixar signed up Billie Eilish and Finneas to write the music for a Y2K-inspired boyband named 4*TOWN in 2022’s Turning Red. But their involvement felt like the musical equivalent of stunt casting, with hopelessly generic songs that had little of the wit or technicality of Backstreet Boys et al. Amazon’s 2023 music stan satire Swarm centered on a Beyoncé-inspired superstar named Ni’Jah, but her scattershot music – despite contributions from the show’s co-creator Donald Glover – wouldn’t pass muster with Michelle. For 2018’s mind-bending pop parable Vox Lux, director Brady Corbet worked with Sia to “create a catalogue of 20 years of [pop star] Celeste’s music” for Natalie Portman, yet the soundtrack’s one-note EDM is unconcerned with tracing the artistic risks and reinventions that a veteran star like Celeste would have needed to stay in the game. At least Hologram bangs.

By contrast, you could actually imagine hearing Ally’s – okay, Lady Gaga’s – dance-pop songs from 2018’s A Star Is Born on the radio. But the film holds them in quite low esteem. Gaga seemed to confirm that in an interview with Good Morning America. “In the [Shallow] chorus she says, ‘I’m off the deep end,’” Gaga said. “And then later in the film, we hear music from her that is the opposite of deep. We hear the shallow.” Surface deep, maybe, but Why Did You Do That? and Hair Body Face were a cut above most Top 40 fare, muddling the film’s (admittedly dated) narrative of an artist who abandons her gifts for lowest common denominator pop. They became cult favorites too, out-streaming most of the songs of her then current album Joanne, and hit a sweet spot with fans nostalgic for when Gaga made magic with little more than a disco stick and a dream.

As the writer Hazel Cills points out in an essay on The Idol, Jocelyn’s “extreme, over-sexed” type of artifice has taken a back seat in popularity to the unsanitized, personal writing of artists like Lana Del Rey and SZA. In its fourth episode, The Idol shows Jocelyn trying to go deeper with her music. “You got me having good times with a bad boy,” she sings, over a doomy trap beat by Mike Dean. It’s supposed to be bad, I think, but any attempt at commentary is undone by the show’s incoherent directing style. More promising is A24’s upcoming Mother Mary, a David Lowery-directed pop melodrama starring Anne Hathaway. Original songs will come from Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, who between them have seen the music industry from every angle. If anyone can get a fictional star to actually sound like a 2023 main pop girl, it’s them.

Happily, Hollywood doesn’t get to have the last word. Even if they don’t make logical sense in the context of their movies or TV shows, there can be real satisfaction in fake pop songs. Part of the sly pleasure in World Class Sinner is that it is proudly inauthentic, a bolt from the blue performed by an artist who doesn’t exist. Like Ashley O’s On A Roll before it, it has found a cult audience in the kind of pop fan whose Thriller is Britney Spears’s dark, mechanized Blackout, and who know that, while realness might be current pop’s coin of the realm, fool’s gold can shine just as bright.