Meditation for April 4th
You Can Sing Along
Pop music has helped people have a good time for a hundred years now. We still sing songs from decades past, and it doesn’t take long to learn the words to a new pop song. Popular music brings us comfort when life is hard and accents an already great day. We can sing along, dance, or have it in the background, without critiques, and wax poetic with pop songs. Some older people will ask whether the music today will have the same lasting power as the pop music of the past.
Pop music sucks. In fact, you have been just listening to the same song over and over again with different words. Louie Louie by the Kingsmen is the same song as “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift. There are only three changes in the song so that the Kingsmen couldn’t sue Swift for copyright infringement. You’d be surprised how many thousands of songs use that same chord progression.
Why does music suck now? It’s because of a few things. One is that you want safe music that you and all your friends can sing along to, and that also says, “Remember this song?” This is a weird thing to say, considering you have heard Love Shack by the B-52s 54,894 times – not counting partial hearings of the song, and it’s still so “fun” to hear it again. The second problem is that music education has been drastically cut since the 80s, so younger people have no real educated ear when it comes to music, so they’ll listen to any of this splatter shits on them. The third problem is that algorithms curate most music.
The timbre in songs has been slowly being reduced, creating a more homogenized variety of music. This basically means that the eighteen-songwriter team working on one single Beyoncé song is using the same instruments to make the same tone from song to song. To deviate from that will kill Beyoncé’s career because you don’t like unsafe, comfortable songs. Don’t worry, a critic sounds like something interesting is happening. Now we have AI very easily creating pop songs because it is a very easy recipe to copy.
Newer musicians have less pitch in their songs than in the pop music factories of the late 50s. This means pop music uses the same chords in the same octave, keeping the song from varying in complexity; it is almost written as monotone. In fact, most pop songs use the same three” chords: the ones from Louie Louie.
Now music is just loud. When it is played live, it is just as loud as it possibly can go without making blood come bleeding out of your ears. This is to cover all the mediocrity of the songs being played. No one changes the volume they play to convey by meaning or feeling anymore. Just play it loud and turn up that BASS! Metal isn’t the only music trying to sound like fashion; most pop culture has a soundtrack, and the music is meant to sound like that culture’s uniform.
During the Cold War, American schools taught kids basic musical theory, how to play s recorder – the ‘urban flute’, and study the history of music by attending the symphony. That has been cut because homeowners didn’t want to pay more in property taxes, and who cares if kids are musically educated as long as the football program is still competitive? We are cutting the arts and humanities from grade school through high school, and reading comprehension is on a downward slide, leaving people unable to appreciate anything that isn’t full of sugar critically.
That means kids don’t know a good song if they’ve heard one; it’s based on the algorithm, nostalgia, and a lack of critical thinking. So symphonies are losing funding, art and music are dead, and we have musicians playing stripped-down, dumber versions of previously popular songs. No one is going to really take a chance and make anything new because no one wants to be uncomfortable or challenged.
Prayer
Apollo,
As you fly across the sky on your chariot,
Let me hear something new,
Actually new.
All of this sounds the same.
I actually can’t tell the difference between Drake and Chris Stapleton.
They sound the same.
Same drums,
And the same monotone.
I want to hear something new!
I can’t get excited for the Cars and the Police anymore.
I can’t get pumped for Judas Priest and Black Sabbath anymore.
I just can’t cut my wrists to New Order and Interpol anymore.
I can’t even tell the difference between Radiohead and Coldplay anymore.
Does it have to have guitars?
Bass?
Drums,
Or even worse, a drum machine?
Does it really have to be leather pants again?
Does the sax really have to be novel and ironic?
Please, Sun God.
I want to hear something that will actually blow my mind.
Instead of saying this sounds like that,
Or saying this is ska-metal-polka-surf rock . . . just like the Cramps,
Or that this isn’t just metal,
But a specific kind of metal that only a kid dressed as a leather daddy meets Sylvester Stallone’s character in Cobra would know.
I want a new sound.
Not an ode to the Clash album,
Not a concept album, and the rapper is now going by a different name, but he returns to his old self again after the third. time they had retired,
Not a David Bowie stage,
Not a throwing hundreds out the window of a private jet video,
Not a slightly psychedelic version of the previous songs, but really, just the same old Rolling Stone riff.
Just something actually fresh.
Amen.
Craft
How to write a perfect pop song:
First off, you should transpose happy music to bittersweet lyrics. Make sure the music is danceable, bobbing a lot, bouncing to it, but make sure your lyrics touch the heartstrings.
Don’t bore us with witty lyrics. You don’t even have verses anymore, choruses. Make it sweet and sing-alongable.
If ear-to-ear, bouncing ear to ear-bouncing head up and down, and maybe some fist pumps into the air, use the chords CFGC.
If you want the same bounce as the previous song, but with a little hip-hop, mix-tape-y, sell-worthy quality, use the chords CGFC.
If you want the staring out a window on a rainy day, your lover is far away, and there is a fire in the fireplace and a cat on your lap, and you want to die because you long for your lover’s touch, use chords CGAminorF.
If you want a more witty, ironic twist to a ballad, then you must use the chords A minor FACG, but you have to have the sick, wicked, smart lyrics.
If you want to pretend to be an art house band, like Radiohead or MUSE, you’ll want to sound different-sounding, use the chords A minor, GFG. Be careful, it’s a coin toss on what, as you can pull it off as Coldplay and Jack Johnson can.
Goal
Broaden your horizons. Delve into a different kind of music. Don’t just allow the algorithm to be what you settle for.
It’s okay if you actually like simple music; it’s not your fault, and you don’t know any better.