Weekly Billboard Theory — Sign of the Times
At the beginning of the year, I had sent my sister a rough draft of an article I was writing. She’s one of the smartest people IN THE WORLD and asked me a pretty important question, “Who’s your audience?” I like to think the answer to this question for Weekly Billboard Theory would be people that are interested in music but don’t know any of the technical stuff behind it. Pretty easy right? With that being said, I have noooooo idea who the audience is for Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times.” Let’s go.
Harry Styles
Key: C major kinda (sorry about this, I’m living in a van right now while on tour and don’t have an instrument on hand to figure this out, will update when I can) The third chord makes things sort of ~modal~ but who cares
Tempo: 120 BPM
This is a weird one. I probably won’t go into pitches and written music stuff too much because the song repeats the same the chords over and over again and I don’t really think that’s the interesting part about this song. I find the most interesting part about this song to be how UNINTERESTING it is. But let’s go back to the first question, who is the audience for “Sign of the Times?”
When you think of Harry Styles, you think of One Direction, and when you think of One Direction you think of teenage girls. With this logic, one might assume that the target demographic for the former 1D star’s first single would be a pretty standard Top 40 pop song. But “Sign of the Times” isn’t that. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but a looooooot of pop songs will be around 3:30 in length. There are several reasons for this. Back in the day, engineers had a limited amount of time they could record, so this forced songs to be kind of short. Obviously, we don’t have these limitations anymore, so why would we still do this? Well, some boring people might insist that, “young people just don’t have the attention span.” However, similar to only using several chords, setting a time limitation like, oh I don’t know, 3:30, forces songwriters to trim the fat and present a streamlined product. The anti-capitalist in me has another explanation for why radio songs are relatively short: commercials. The radio station makes their money from companies paying them for airtime and shorter songs leave more time for commercials, which means more time for moolah. If you listen very closely to the radio you may notice that songs are often sped up to fit the same amount of songs into a smaller amount of time. Because of this, I would not be surprised to hear a version of “Sign of the Times” on the radio with the entire intro scrapped.
So yeah, let’s talk about the intro before the vocals come. It’s three chords played by the piano on every beat. Pretty boring, but it’s an intro so it’s just used to set up the entirety of the song. The song will probably get more interesting, right? Eh, not really. We get a contrived vocal melody that repeats twice. It’s not really a good melody and the last bit of it shines light on why it’s so subpar. The actual pitches repeat verbatim but the lyrics change. Par for the course, sure. But the “You look pretty good down here, but you ain’t really good” doesn’t really resolve sonically or temporally (meaning it feels abrupt). Following this, Harry sings a new melody over the same chords. This time he’s in his falsetto so it’s gotta be more interesting right? Nope! This melody is even more awkward. Why does he repeat “the bullets”? There is nothing to suggest any type of emphasis. It feels as if whoever wrote the song decided that there would have been too much space after the first “the bullets” and thought “Oh yeah, lets just repeat something that doesn’t serve to further the song.”
Did I mention that the whole time up until now the song consists of only piano and Harry Styles? Oh yeah, there’s a super corny wind-like sound that comes in when Harry sings the word “atmosphere.” Text painting, right? Ugh. It’s not until around 1:17 that we get any new sounds. Holy cow, trim the fat. I’m getting frustrated while listening to this song over and over again because these are minutes of my life that I will never get back. So yeah, we do eventually get a bigger accompaniment when some other instruments come in for what I guess is the chorus? The reason why I’m not sure is because the chords of the first melody are the same as the chords for the second melody (and the entirety of the song, come on guys) AND it repeats just as many times as the second melody. SO YEAH, bigger accompaniment chorus or whatever section plays once and then plays again with a slightly smaller accompaniment. And then, surprise, melody two comes back. This happens again and again pretty much for the rest of the song. There are slightly different melodies towards the end but the accompaniment is pretty much the same but I don’t feel like wasting more of my life to go back and listen to it.
Let’s go back to that first question, who is the target audience for “Sign of the Times”? It’s certainly a more mature sound than we were expecting from Harry Styles. Is he trying to appeal to the parents of former One Direction fans? Is he trying to appeal to the GRANDPARENTS of former One Direction fans? Let me give you a description of what this song reminded me of the first time I heard it. Have you ever listened to a live album from a classic rock band where they go into an extended, more orchestrated version of one of their hits? It’s like, yeah that’s cool that they did something different for the live version but honestly I’d rather hear the original. “Sign of the Times” is the live version of whatever that song would be without the original. “Sign of the Times” is a more boring version of the ending of “Hey Jude” that insists on repeating for an excruciating 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Maybe I do have an answer for who might be the audience of Harry Styles’ new song: People that don’t value their time.
Sorry that this weeks writeup didn’t have as many ~fun~ hyperlinks as usual. I’m currently on tour with some of my brothers so I have to go about writing these in a slightly different way and I don’t have the best access to internet.
So it might have seemed that I went a little hard on Harry this week but it looks like I’m not the only person that has. “Sign of the Times” dropped from #4 to #22. Probably because nobody has that kind of time to be spending it listening to the same garbage melodies all day. Let’s look at what I’m writing about next week. King Kendrick is #1 with HUMBLE. which is so dope. Ed Sheeran is finally not in the number one spot and is now a lowly number two. Bruno Mars is liking #3 with “That’s What I Like.” AND KENDRICK LAMAR IS ALSO AT #4 WITH DNA. BAYBEEEEEE. I’ll try to be a little better with my links and fun stuff for next week because it’ll deserve my attention. Mahalo!
