Pop Music- Thank You, Next
“If music is the food of art, then play on.”
A quote from Shakespeare. It’s so simple, yet it successfully explains the beauty and importance of music in our lives. Music has evolved, changed, and morphed throughout our existence, varying in beats, chords and vocals… but the one consistent thing about music is its ability to change our mood to our liking. Whether it’s the happiness of jazz and waltz, the sober feeling you get from listening to emotional songs, or watching an anime character doing his endless homework on “lo-fi beats for studying” on YouTube, music always gives us exactly what we want.
In the spirit of World Music Day, we’ll be exploring pop music. What is pop? It’s an abbreviation for “popular”, which basically means that pop music is music that is… well, popular. The next question that comes to mind is, “what makes pop music popular?” Is it the “beats”, the melodic tune, or the lyrics which catch the attention of the listener? We can answer this question with a generic “it depends from person to person”, but that’s a boring answer, and analyzing pop music can help us understand a lot about the way people think. Who knows, you might even learn how to make your own hit piece.
We’ll start off with the beats. Beat signatures, or the number of beats which play before repeating themselves, are usually found in a 4/4 signature. This means there are 4 beats per bar, i.e. a line of a song. There are some songs which are slightly different, with a ¾ key signature, or even rarer, 7/4 or 9/4 signatures, like the main theme of Wonder Woman. In conventional pop, however, things tend to stay simple with simple 4 beat signatures.
Acoustics vary from song to song, but a muffled synthetic drum beat is usually very popular, especially after the die-down of natural loud drum-kits, which were prevalent in the age of rock. The main reason muffled bass drums are popular could be the huge importance given to the chords in modern-day songs. These muffled beats also do an excellent job in enhancing auto-tune voices and instruments, while also covering up some of their obvious issues, like unwanted resonance that occurs when one uses software.
A famous example of this can be Shape of You, where there is a treble Marimba which gives the base background tune (the most identifiable part of the song), whereas the bass beats are quite muffled, yet perfectly go well with Ed Sheeran’s vocals and the other instruments used in the song.
Next come the lyrics, which also have an interesting trend. In the “good old days” of lyrical music, lyrics were known to be complex, full of depth with layers of meaning. They could be about the inner thoughts of a person like “Baby it’s cold outside”, or could narrate an entire story, like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”. Comparing and contrasting that to various songs of this generation, we can observe that the lyrics in songs today tend to lack that level of depth. This, however, doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. There’s a level of beauty in simplicity, and having simple lyrics can often enhance the melody and tune of the song itself.
Speaking of melody, let’s address the elephant in the room, chords. One thing modern pop songs do in unison is basically reusing and recycling chord progressions from other songs until only 2 or 3 are dominant in the current musical sphere. Do you know what Despacito, Faded, Numb, All of Me and Spectre have in common? These songs follow the same chord progressions, which is essentially playing 4 chords, occasionally mixing up the order.
A lot of Alan Walker’s songs fall into this trap. If we listen to Spectre, reduce the base pitch, and slow down the song, you essentially get Faded. Yes, there are some differences based on the types of synths used, and of course, the lyrics, but they usually matter very little when the level of similarity is enormous.
This level of similarity in chord progressions can also be seen as something “catchy”. This feeling of listening to something familiar transcends the pacing of the songs and the instruments used, which can also explain why songs like Despacito become as popular as we know it today.
The right combination of colours could make a painting that wows the world, but an odd mismatch could create a complete eyesore. Instruments are exactly the same. The set of instruments you use could make or break a song. Imagine if “Old Town Road” was played on a piano or a violin. A song which was supposed to embody being a rider in the Wild Wild West just becomes a generic melancholic piece of music. In the same way, if you had replaced the piano build up in the main track of “The Imitation Game” or “The Light of Seven”, it wouldn’t have been as memorable as we all know it.
In the end, we can reasonably conclude that pop music doesn’t need complicated lyrics, all it takes is something that the general public can resonate to. A recycled version of previous chord progressions tends to pull in audiences with a vague, yet welcoming feeling of familiarity. Sticking to common beats helps in keeping the song simple and familiar and having a muffled base to give tempo can boost the popularity of your next hit. Now all you have to do is work on your vocals… Oh wait, Auto tune has got you covered.
This article was written in collaboration with Shashvat Jayakrishnan, Antony Terence and Abhishek Ramachandran.
