Hooked on a Feeling

The changing structures of pop music

Apr 26, 2021

Welcome back! Last week, we talked about intent and control and how frequently the intended use and meaning of any given innovation doesn’t typically point us to its eventual meaning in our culture. That discussion came out of our thinking more about what modern-day High Times might be in our culture from the previous week, and today I want to pick back up on that thread.

One of my favorite Podcasts is Switched on Pop. In each episode, the two hosts talk about the music theory and background of songs, trends, artists, and other happenings in pop music. In an episode from earlier this year, they talk with a modern songwriter and examine the phenomenon of the decline of the “verse-chorus” structure that has dominated pop music for the last 50 years or so.

From the episode’s description:

The chorus—the emotional apotheosis of a pop song, its dizzying high, its cathartic sing-along center—is disappearing. In its place, artists from Bad Bunny to Taylor Swift are toying with new, chorus-lite song forms that introduce a new musical grammar to the sound of contemporary pop. We may not think much about pop structure when listening to our favorite songs, but this is a big deal—the last time pop experienced such a seismic shift was when the chorus first came into fashion, back in the 1960s.1

In the episode, the hosts start by examining the current state of the chorus; then, they walk through the history of the rise and current decline of the verse-chorus structure. Their discussion of this is vibrant, and I don’t want to do it an injustice by trying to summarize it here, so you can listen to it if you want to hear about their reasoning to support their point that the chorus is indeed changing (if not declining).

At about the 24-minute mark (after they come back from their break), they begin discussing what the new structure of music might look like. They highlight a few changes that have happened that are influencing how pop music is made, which they categorize into changes in technology and changes in culture. For Technology, they highlight:

The rise of streaming platforms and how streaming songs need to grab your attention and hold it for long enough for the play to count and them to make money. See How Streaming Changed the Sound of Pop.
Our move to a digital culture with social media, and how our more pseudo-intimate access to celebrities through these media and the feeling of “knowing them” causes us not to want such formulaic music but more “authentic” storytelling. The hosts theorize that we may want a more “stream of consciousness” aesthetic to our music.

They also discuss happenings in culture and what’s happening in the “world of music” and move through a fast series of ideas from the broader world of music, contributing to the decline of the importance of the chorus in our songs.

So, where does this leave us? The hosts suggest that while music formats are always being experimented with, we have hit an inflection point where the dominant Hot 100 charts are now starting to accept music that doesn’t “fit the mold.” The hosts, at around the 37-minute mark, get into a discussion of what to call this new “form;” Nate Sloan, one of the co-hosts, says this:

It’s almost like in 2021, we’re going back to the deepest roots of American popular music. And we’re recreating this like folk-form; this strophic form, where you just use this sample loop to like tell a story that just vibes and keeps you hooked to your seat and it’s an intimate story drawn from your own life experience and it relates to people and it holds your attention for two minutes and you move on to the next, so “future folk.”2

So again, we find ourselves talking about vibes and feelings that keep us hooked. Whereas the verse-chorus structure is highly narrative and focused on taking us somewhere, these post-chorus structures are more interested in letting us pause in a feeling and letting it wash over us. A couple of weeks ago, talking about binge-watching TV shows, I said:

We get sucked into their meta-narratives, the stories about the stories. These meta-narratives are not so concerned with the individual plot points but are very interested in the bigger story being told. The binge-watching format of streaming media makes experiencing those meta-narratives much more intuitive. We can almost feel them as the mood of the story.

I think the same is broadly true about these musical trends we are discussing here.

Our electric media creation and consumption tools favor these vibe-focused forms rather than the strong narratives from our previous eras. It’s not that narratives are completely leaving us, as our current media state is by definition a mixture of all of the previous media states that came before it, but there is a sense where they are being transformed.

So the next time you’re "vibing” to a song, take note of its structure and how its narrative (or lack thereof) “sits” with you now in contrast to the music you may have been listening to 10 or 20 years ago.

Thanks for joining me, and see you again next week as we continue our explorations.

I highly recommend giving this full episode a listen:

You can view the episode on their website.

You can find the episode on Spotify.

You can also check it out on Apple Podcasts.

Notes and Further Listening

Today, instead of further reading, I thought I would give you my top 10 episodes of Switched on Pop (outside of the episode we are discussing in this newsletter). We are at peak podcast (and getting more peak by the moment), but if you are interested in these subjects, this particular podcast has some great thinking. This isn’t a super “high context” podcast, so you can pop in to listen to most single episodes without issue.

D.O.C. (Death of the Chorus) with Emily Warren

Playback of D.O.C. (Death of the Chorus) with Emily Warren at 37:38, Nate Sloan, Co-host, speaking.

Context and Content

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