: In general, I'd avoid naming a specific musician in a causal reference like, "When Sally got home, she sat on her bed and listened to X". (a) Popular musicians come and go pretty quickly,

@Annie587

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In general, I'd avoid naming a specific musician in a causal reference like, "When Sally got home, she sat on her bed and listened to X".

(a) Popular musicians come and go pretty quickly, and naming one is likely to make your story sound dated very rapidly. Singers who were top of the charts just 10 or 15 years ago are often unknown to modern teenagers. Just recently I looked up on YouTube some singers who were popular when I was a young man in the 1980s, and my college-aged son had never heard of any of them. If someone reads your story 10 or 20 years ago, they may well think, "What? A teenager was listening to this grandpa music? Is this kid some kind of extreme traditionalist? A student of music history?"

(b) Musicians are often unknown to people not interested in their genre. Country music fans tend to be unfamiliar with rappers and vice versa, etc. An unfamiliar name is likely to just be distracting, as the reader wonders who it is.

(c) Similarly, people who are not particularly interested in music may not know a name even if the musician is fairly popular.

If the nature of the music doesn't matter, I'd just say, "listening to her favorite singer" or something generic. If the type of music is important in establishing the character, you can describe the music. "She was listening to raucous heavy metal" or "listening to mellow, sentimental love songs" or whatever.

If there's some reason why the particular singer is important -- like, I don't know, an important plot element is how she sees parallels between her life and the lyrics of his songs or something, where you have to go into detail for the story to make sense and be interesting -- that would be different.

BTW In general I agree with SaberWriter that details are important. No one wants to read a story that says, "Some guy did stuff and then other things happened. The end." But pop culture references are tricky for reasons I outlined above. I'd be more inclined to describe the kind of music then to name a contemporary singer.

Oh, I should say that if it's a musician who is very widely known and has been for many years, that's a different category. A reference to Beethoven or Elvis (whew, that's an odd pairing) would likely be recognized by almost any American anyway, and I think it's a fair bet that they'll be remembered for many years to come.

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