Why is modern pop music so morose?
I blame Deep Purple. Back in 1967 they decided to cover “Help” and upbeat tune by the Beatles and turn it into a slow dirge. A good one, but slow and morose nonetheless. Fifty something years later, every time I turn on the radio or television there is a modern band “covering” and old classic at such a slow and miserable tempo that the drummer could fall asleep between beats. “New arrangement” seems to be taking a perfectly good tune, designed to get folks up and dancing, and adjust the pace that they will lie down in a slumber.
Perhaps it is the fact that the world has been locked down for an interminable periods due to Covid 19, but it seems that the ban on public dancing has translated into pedestrian paced blandness. The cover mount CD in each months’ Uncut magazine could well be the cure for insomnia. Honestly, one could pogo dance to a Nick Cave album after listening to most modern artists (and boy is the newish Nick Cave/Warren Ellis album “Carnage” slow).
I watched the Hyundai Mercury awards a a month or two ago (when I actually wrote this article!) – won deservedly by Arlo Parks (who actually sings in her own lovely voice)– and it was one slow assed song after another – capped by Mogwai performing a five minute tune that felt like twenty minute drone. Wolf Alice, who I love, were practically a dance band in this company.
Many critics blame the relaxed tempo of rap and hip-hop tunes for the moroseness of modern popular music. I think that they are wrong. We know that pop music slowed down by about 25% in the 2010s (from about 115 beats per minute to 90) – Adele and Ed Sheeran and other “smooth” musicians have also been blamed. Music is at such a walking place now that sing/talking seems to be all the rage. For example, David Balfe’s “For those I love” should be re-titled “for those I drugged.” Black Country New Road (“For the first time”) sounds like Slint with extended guitar noodling and wordy talk lyrics. I rather like it – but the album will have very limited shelf life. I actually fell asleep listening to Steven Wilson’s newish album yesterday.
I’m afraid to listen to modern albums while driving across the country, in case I find myself waking up upside down in a field. Everything seem interminably slow. But why? I believe that the real fault (if that is the correct term – perhaps it is a good thing) lies with Lana Del Rey, and the hegemony of female pop stars. And it started with “Video Games.”
Scroll back 65 years and you have the blue-print for the pop music that followed. A three minute song: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus. Four to the floor (4/4) beat, that just screamed “try not to dance to this.” The best songs contained “hooks” that became “ear worms” that you couldn’t get out of your head. Songs were about love and sex, or, on occasion, both. Ok, occasionally they sang about cars, but that was a prelude to sex. Sometimes downtempo tunes or ballads were released and became pop hits, but that was for slow dancing and snogging. Sometimes tunes sped up – punk, new wave and disco, or slowed down with a pulsing beat (reggae). On occasion, as singer songwriter such as Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen or even Crosby, Stills and Nash (& Neil Young), came along – providing music for groups of teens to sit around and drink and take drugs and then have sex. The 1970s brought us funk and disco and ABBA – morphing into synth pop in the 1980s and everyone kept dancing. If they couldn’t dance, they did the pogo or just jumped around. In the late 1980s Stock, Aitken and Waterman industrialized dance-pop music, a process that Swedish producers have globalized since. And everyone kept dancing, or nodding their heads or tapping their feet. Slower songs with rousing choruses became football ground love-in chants (“You’ll never walk alone,” “Sailing,” and myriad others). So, popular music could be summed up with songs that you could dance to and songs that you could sing in the shower, or, in-advisably, do both. Nobody ever questioned what “Brown girl in the ring” (or “brown log in the bog”) meant, or what Sally would be waiting for, or why anyone would want to be spun “right round (round, round, round) like a record baby.” It was, and always has been, irrelevant.
When popular singers/musicians developed delusions of artistry the decided that they were “rock” and before (they were signed) and after (they were dropped from) major labels, they became “indie.” When nobody knew or understood what rockers were actually doing, it was called “Prog” (progressive rock) which is characterized by 1. Indecipherable lyrics that nobody can sing, 2. No reference ever to sex. Most progressive rock was consumed while drunk or stoned or both. It still is. But Prog is not pop music and no self respecting prog rocker would ever have the bad manners to try and sell their wares on the pop market. Rather, like Yes (“Owner of a Lonely Heart”) and Genesis (after 1980) they became pop-rock bands, upped the tempo, added choruses and bridges and sang about sex.
Following a period of a few glorious years when various grass roots threads came together in the early 1990s to give us grunge, brit pop, indie rock, hip hop, electronica etc., the pop industrial complex reasserted itself to give us N’Sync, Take That, Brittney Spears and myriad other manufactured pop acts that brought back four to the floor songs containing hook after hook about sex.
And then along came Lana Del Rey. Slow songs. Limited range. Complex subject matter. Superstar. She did not and does not fit the formula. In a parallel universe, Lana is slugging it out with Ron Sexsmith, Matthew E. White, Bon Iver and Everything Everything rather than mixing it up with Ariana Grande and Beyonce. But there she is: pop royalty. I love her records but wonder if she has, single handedly, killed off traditional pop music. Normally I would congratulate anyone who undermines the “hit factory” but what has happened is the emergence of self indulgent, whiny and, at times, boring acts whose lyrics (delivered principally by female singers) cover a universe of indignation, resentments, and “whatabouts?” Take, for example, the hubris of Lorde, who released an empty CD box, priced €18 with an upskirt photo on the cover, that, if taken by a random guy, would lead to banishment from all social platforms, resulting in a bum covering sticker on the album. The album is plod along boring (her song “Royals” was one of the best pop tunes of the past decade).
I was perusing a bunch of new recordings in a record shop in September when Olivia Rodrigo’s album started playing – very good I though, beautiful enunciation, lovely arrangements – interesting subject matter. Strangely, after each song played, the album seemed to have a visceral impact on me – my mood darkened and I started to fantasize about shooting myself up with heroin, sniffing glue or having electro convulsive therapy. Christ was it depressing. I begged the sales clerk to take it off and put on something – anything else. There should be a sticker on the cover stating “Prolonged listening to this recording may result in the need for psychotherapy referral.” Janis Ian and Carole King this is not.
I don’t want to be over critical of the current generation of pop stars – Laura Mvula’s 1980s retromania album Pink Noise is very entertaining and the Weeknd is a genius. Taylor Swift continues to dazzle, by combining her new indie music with F**CK you music industry re-recordings of her successful albums. Many independent artists releases seem to be set in some weird time distortion field in which clocks don’t actually advance. At least none of them has resorted to the ignorant anti-vax cognitive dissonance of Van Morisson and Eric Clapton that is currently hugely undermining their reputations and back catalogue value (if I have to hear one more gobshite telling me that “I have done my own research” (i.e. on Facebook) for their stupid selfish reasons for not getting vaccinated prior to infecting their grandmothers with COVID – who subsequently died….but that rant is for another time).
Lana – two albums in one year: seriously?
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