It’s one of the hoariest cliches in popular culture: that every fading generation must, in flailing anger at its own imminent irrelevance, turn on the next generation and say, ‘your music is dire’. From the crusty judge contemptuously asking ‘who are these Beatles’, to the middle-aged outrage surrounding the spitting and pogoing Sex Pistols, to the Tory MP who expressed his horror at the Beastie Boys and Run DMC for ‘mocking disabled children in Montreux’, it is an established human tradition. And of course, it is always nonsense. It turns out the next generation has music of equal brilliance, passion, vivacity, excitement.
Pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy, freedom, and happy sexuality
Except, perhaps, this time. If you are a Spectator reader of a certain age, or indeed any human of any age, and you’ve found yourself listening with bewilderment to the repetitive, loud, inert, droning, crunching, and infantile vulgarity of modern music while thinking, ‘er, this is seriously poor.’ I am here to bring you the good/bad news that, this time, you are correct. This time, it really is rubbish, and it’s probably getting worse.
And this isn’t me talking. This isn’t an old man shouting about Taylor Swift (by the metrics I am discussing, she is actually that rare thing: a good modern pop star), this is the science talking. Musicologists have spent the last decade or more carefully analysing, parsing, and deconstructing the rhythms, lyrics, harmonies, and orchestration of modern popular music, and their conclusion is: WTF is that racket, turn it down.
An article in the Times earlier this month was just the most recent example of this musicological trend. Titled ‘The Ever Shrinking Song, How TikTok is Transforming Music’, the article goes into some depth about the demands of TikTok algorithms, feeding a hunger for ever speedier stimulation, which in turn is making songs notably shorter and simpler, edging them closer to jingles and ad melodies, or the simplistic tunes emitted by annoying toys. Here’s one paragraph:
The result of all this analysis is the changing shape and structure of songs themselves. Popular music is increasingly tailored to short social media attention spans. Many of the most popular songs on apps such as TikTok start with choruses or short introductions, while devices such as the middle eight and bridge – such as when the Beatles sing ‘Life is very short …’ in ‘We Can Work it Out’ – are waning.
The ‘loss of the middle eight’ might not sound like much, and the lack of a bridge (that’s the bridge in ‘take it to the bridge’ – from the lyrics of ‘Get Up’, by James Brown) sounds more like an architectural choice than a musical flaw, but the middle eight and the bridge are – or were – the classic moments in a classic song when a new theme, melody, context or mood is cleverly introduced to the song, enriching it and surprising the listener, showing off the artists’ musical and lyrical skill, especially the difficult skill of seamlessly returning from the middle eight to the original melody.
Without the bridge or the middle eight, a song is just: chorus verse chorus verse end. Simpler, and considerably more boring, but also less demanding. Something for the dippy kids on The Tok. However, this is not just a TikTok thing. The sad fact is, the simplification and infantilisation of popular music has been going on for a long time, since about the year 2000.
In 2012 Scientific American reported on several studies noting the phenomenon, especially one conducted by the Spanish National Research Council, which analysed 500,000 recordings from 1955 to 2010. Here is one choice quote: ‘songs are becoming more and more homogeneous. In other words, all pop music sounds the same now.’ Does that quote remind you of you? Well, you’re spot on. The article goes on to note: ‘pitch content has decreased – which means that the number of chords and different melodies has gone down. Musicians today seem to be less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another, instead following the paths well-trodden by their predecessors and contemporaries.’
Not only that, if you’ve noted that modern music seems to be depressingly loud, as if to compensate for its lack of imagination by deafening you with drill or rap or Ariana Grande played at a sound loud enough to shrivel the ovaries of the distant narwhal, then again, you are tragically correct: ‘Loudness comes at the expense of dynamic range – in very broad terms, when the whole song is loud, nothing within it stands out as being exclamatory or punchy. Indeed, Serrà and his colleagues [of Barcelona University] found that the loudness of recorded music is increasing by about one decibel every eight years.’ As one commenter pithily responded: ‘How did this happen? How did we go from Bob Dylan to Britney Spears, from Led Zeppelin to Lady Gaga, and from the Kinks to Katy Perry?’
Speaking of Bob Dylan – a lyricist so gifted he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – let us look at the decay of lyrics, as this has also been carefully studied. One such analysis (in 2018) concluded that ‘the complexity of lyrics is declining,’ it also compared words used in 220 chart-topping songs to expected reading levels in US schoolchildren, and decided that most modern songs seem, lyrically, ‘aimed at kids aged 8 or 9’.
What’s more, these lyrics are getting evermore negative, several studies – e.g. Quantitative Sentiment Analysis of Lyrics in Popular Music (from the Journal of Popular Music Studies) – have shown that whereas pop music once commonly expressed joy, love, energy, freedom, and happy sexuality, now themes of anger, violence, hatred, greed and despair are much more prevalent.
This will chime with anyone who has had to listen to someone else’s car-music blasting out, with bleak relentlessness, the desire of the singer to ‘kill his mofo bitches’ and celebrate his expensive car, hat and Rolex watch, rather than, as Bob Dylan put it in ‘Tambourine Man;, the singer’s desire to watch a beautiful woman:
dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
But let us not an end on a depressing note. Look on the bright side: this decline may be terminal. What I mean is, art forms come and go, they rise and fall. Poetry used to dominate literature, now it is invisible. Opera was once the music of the masses, not a dwindling elite. But opera was replaced by great pop music, and if pop music goes, then something else, perhaps even better, will replace it. We just have to endure a few more years of thud-drone-screech, and close the rattling windows.
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