103 Bad Songs in a Row

Spotify is an amazing tool for discovering music, and I don't use "amazing" the way that people talk about a normal food that has bacon added to it - I mean I feel legitimate amazement at its usefulness. I'm learning more about music with Spotify in the background at my cubicle job, than when I was a doctoral candidate in music at the top-ranked music school in the world.

I've been listening exclusively to rock and metal for over a year, so I thought it might be nice to dive back into modern pop. For a while I was totally up to date, I made an effort to listen to the entire Billboard Hot 100 a couple times a month just to stay current. Using Spotify, I took the most direct route possible to get caught up: click Browse, then Pop, then Today's Top Hits, which at the time was a 103 song playlist of pop from 2016.

I always complain about sound quality in modern music, and there's tons of scientific research to explain and support that stance, which I'll get into some other time. Nutshell: recordings have become loud and dynamically unvaried, a consistent level of noise for every instrument in every moment of every song of every album. Our brains treat it as noise, and we're wired to ignore repetitive sounds for our own survival. We have no processing power for important things unless we can shut out a dripping faucet, traffic, the A/C humming, the fridge buzzing. Thus badly produced music gets ignored so we can function. We can only pay attention to modern pop is if it's ingenious enough to overcome that survival mechanism (it usually isn't) or if the lyrics are thought-provoking enough to hold our attention (they aren't).

Revisiting pop for a 103 track binge was an exercise in frustration that made me wonder whether

• All of it sounded like trash due to bad production only, and there was some good music hiding in there that my brain was biologically unable to appreciate, or
• The music itself was bad and the loud production was sadly its only attention-grabbing feature.

I'm inclined to think the latter. I tried something on the opposite end of the spectrum to test whether I accidentally made myself hate music: the second track from Aerosmith's "Get Your Wings", a song from the early 1970s that I had never heard before. The production was much clearer, with frequent, varied, and complex melodies, way more textural variety, the lyrics seemed to tell one continuous story from beginning to end, and the rhythmic content was way more advanced than anything from the 103.

An aside about rhythm. People seem to think that rhythm is a big feature of current music because the percussion is really loud and easy to follow. Rhythm doesn't get any less important than in modern pop, I understand that it's easy to confuse a really busy percussion section with rhythmic complexity but they're not the same. Percussion is locked into a quantized grid in a digital audio workstation and cannot swing, improvise, or subtly vary in tempo, and it never changes meter, it just counts to four over and over. 103 songs of machines counting to four in the same tempo. That isn't rhythmic.

The irony of the 103 is that modern technology allows musicians more variety in sound choices than ever before possible, but the loudness of the production tells our brains that it's white noise. How does more variety sound more monotonous? That's insane! There are more sounds but less texture, explicit lyrics sung to childish melodies, more percussion but less rhythm, complete musical freedom but zero improvisation.

I've since become more familiar with "Get Your Wings". I tried listening to it while writing this but it was too distracting, so I put on Today's Top Hits for some background noise.