Why is pop music so sad?
December 21, 2013 4:56 AM   Subscribe

Why is pop music so sad? A study (PDF) published in the Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts tracked the mood of pop songs over five decades of Billboard charts, and it confirms that pop has changed in substantial ways. Over the years, popular recordings became longer in duration and the proportion of female artists increased. There was also an increase in the use of minor mode and a decrease in average tempo, confirming that popular music became more sad-sounding over time. (MP3 podcast)

Researchers Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve point to the rise of consumerism and individualism, which produces a demand for more choice; increasing cultural and societal ambiguity (such as the erosion of traditional gender roles); as well as the desire among pop consumers to demonstrate distinctiveness and sophistication in their taste.
Lady Gaga is highlighted as rare in her ability to produce up-tempo major-mode recordings, such as 'Born This Way' and 'Edge of Glory' that sound fresh while recalling or quoting popular music from an earlier time.

The findings complement an analysis of pop lyrics (PDF) from 1980-2007
posted by Lanark (60 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Oh, I can't imagine why pop music has gotten sadder over the decades. Or maybe I can.
  • 1950's: We won Big II, yay! A machinist can support a SAH wife, buy a tract house and a Chevrolet, send two kids to college, and retire in comfort.
  • 1960's: Sure the Boss is corrupt but we are so gonna make the world a better place.
  • 1970's: People walking around on the frickin' Moon, yay! We are so gonna conquer space and end poverty and hunger and everyone's gonna have an awesome computer in their kitchen and 200 commercial-free channels on cable TV and we're gonna get this peace thing fixed up finally.
  • 1980's: We just elected an actor President of the ... WTF? And it turns out they show commercials on cable TV too.
  • 1990's: How's that trickle-down thing working out for ya? Also your awesome computer keeps crashing and it's getting hard to make the rent without the wife getting a job. And don't even talk about that easy extra money for joining the Guard.
  • 2000's: Keep your nose to the grindstone, do what you're told, and you'll graduate with only a hundred K in student loans and able to make almost what that machinist did in real purchasing power in 1950. And your awesome computer just got hosed by a virus and you lost all your porn.
  • 2010's: ___________________________________
posted by localroger at 6:07 AM on December 21, 2013 [34 favorites]


Researchers Glenn Schellenberg and Christian von Scheve point to completely bogus speculation they pulled out of their asses.


Assuming that slower and minor key = sadder than faster and major key is kind of a leap. I mean, I know those are the basic associations, but emotion and music are both more complex than happy/sad.

Pop music has also gotten louder and brighter (in terms of frequency spectrum).
posted by Foosnark at 6:16 AM on December 21, 2013 [9 favorites]


Pop musicians take themselves (and are taken) more seriously.
posted by pracowity at 6:26 AM on December 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


V-I got boring so people are working hard at making V-vi equally boring now.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:34 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


Cynicism, we're a bunch of jaded cynics now.
posted by Mick at 7:04 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


I hate how music psych researchers naturalize and reify absurdly ethnocentric and ahistorical mappings of sonic properties to affect.
posted by spitbull at 7:05 AM on December 21, 2013 [14 favorites]


What about being happy in a minor key? After all, "[To the modern ear] if you have something that sounds unambiguously happy, it kinda sounds childish."
posted by illovich at 7:07 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]




I think it's because more relationships are disappointing than awesome for women. If you could just see the jokers in the dating pool, you'd be sad too.
posted by discopolo at 7:18 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


In those same decades pop became global in both market and musical language. The mapping of "minor keys" to "sad affects" is a recent artifact of Western European musical culture (which of course influenced vernacular American musical styles, which in turn enjoyed global hegemony thanks to US military imperialism and commercial cultural imperialism).

Music Psychology as a scientific discipline has been ignoring culture and history since Helmholtz.
posted by spitbull at 8:02 AM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


addison: First thing I thought of, too.
posted by entropicamericana at 8:18 AM on December 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


The most irritating Mylie song "We can't stop" is a good example of this. The lyric is happy, and purely about having fun, but the tune is a weird sad lurching thing that doesn't match at all.That "we can't stop" line itself would make more sense if the lyric was "my dog died".
posted by w0mbat at 8:42 AM on December 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


This is pretty silly since most pop since the decline of the Tin Pan Alley songsmiths era has been mixture-based, i.e. uses chords not strictly built on scale degrees from the 'key' of the song anyway.

In a major key, the chords built on the flatted third and flatted seventh scale degrees have assumed central importance in rock (those are the chords you hear in 'All Day and All of the Night' by the the Kinks), even though the scale degrees those chords are built on do not appear in the major scale. So they're imported freely from the minor scale, and that's the sound of rock/pop. 99 percent of the people who've ever written a great rock tune will have no idea whether it's in a minor or major key. You hear John Lennon sing 'I want you-oo-oo-oo-oo' and that's a flatted fifth sung over an A minor, in a song that is anything but cheery, but the classical-style transcription has the overall song in F major.

Plus, melodies in blues-derived rock are also intentionally neither minor nor major at their moments of greatest tension - how does this study deal with the 'false relations' such as the minor third sung over a chord featuring a major third? Or again the flatted seventh and the raised *or* lowered fifth? In classical notation you end up with chords described as E7 with an added sharp ninth, but it wasn't conceived that way by the performer (e.g. when Lennon yells 'I TOLD YOU BEFORE' at the climax of 'You can't do that', he's singing the minor third over an emphatically major chord. The song's in G major but it's not 'happy').

The minor third is definitely 'sad' in isolation but this doesn't really extend to 'songs in minor keys are sad' at all. 'Eleanor Rigby' is in G major and that's practically suicidal.

Having rambled all this, you could I think make a case for pop/rock sounding 'darker' since the 60s due to the ascendancy of the flatted seventh as a commonly preferred cadential gesture (flat-VII - I, rather than the traditional V-I or IV-I cadence), and this cadence does indeed occur in the natural minor scale. But it's used regardless of the overall key of the song.
posted by colie at 8:49 AM on December 21, 2013 [23 favorites]


w0mbat: this is the song with the lyric "everybody's in line for the bathroom, trying to get a line in the bathroom"

Cant' stop, indeed.

Most of the world's music has been modal, and the interpretation of minor keys as sad is a historically specific thing. The ironic thing about "Common Practice" music is that most of the worlds history of music has nothing to do with it. Not only is it not universal, it is an aberration when you look at the big picture.
posted by idiopath at 8:55 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Musicians are sad because they wanted to be artists, but found out they were spending their careers doing self-promotion instead.
posted by sneebler at 9:00 AM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


(Sorry, had a look and Eleanor Rigby is totally E minor but the strange melody is modal (Dorian) and I want you is some kind of D minor/A minor and A major contraption. I'll shut up now).
posted by colie at 9:06 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


Any questions about these findings should be directed to the Fountains of Wayne hotline.
posted by aaronetc at 9:16 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


One of the top ten coolest things I ever learned from reading metafilter was Doors' Riders on the Storm worked in a major key.
posted by bukvich at 9:33 AM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


I blame Elton John
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:42 AM on December 21, 2013


not sad. maudlin.
posted by philip-random at 9:48 AM on December 21, 2013


Over the years, popular recordings became longer in duration and the proportion of female artists increased. There was also an increase in the use of minor mode and a decrease in average tempo, confirming that popular music became more sad-sounding over time.

Old people have been telling young people that the world is getting worse and worse for as long as there have been old people and young people.

Maybe they're onto something.
posted by flabdablet at 10:01 AM on December 21, 2013


I'll shut up now

Colie, I'd love to read several more paragraphs about how pop music actually works and how stupid it is to just say a song is "major" or "minor." Lots more paragraphs. Thanks.
posted by straight at 10:19 AM on December 21, 2013 [6 favorites]


Minor keys can sound badass/menacing, too. Maybe the influence of musical forms based on menacing badassery (metal, hardcore hip-hop, etc.) accounts for some of it?
posted by escape from the potato planet at 10:23 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


The Beatles' "Yesterday" is a "sad" song in a major key.
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:24 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


A theory I recently pulled out of my ass is that the quality of pop songs has declined because widespread use of antidepressants, Ritalin, Aderall, and MDMA among adolescents has not only made potential songwriters and musicians less depressed, but also narrowed the range of emotions "kids today" are able to experience. Pop songwriters need to be crying into their beers to write good songs, See also: the flat performances in mumblecore.
posted by vibrotronica at 10:27 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]




A theory I recently pulled out of my ass is that the quality of pop songs has declined because widespread use of antidepressants, Ritalin, Aderall, and MDMA among adolescents has not only made potential songwriters and musicians less depressed, but also narrowed the range of emotions "kids today" are able to experience. Pop songwriters need to be crying into their beers to write good songs,

I agree, in a friendly way, that you've pulled that theory out of your butt, but I will say that my musical taste changes depending on whether or not I've taken Vyvanse.

That said, it is a gargantuan leap to say that all of those kinds of drugs cause flat emotional affect, or whatever.

See also: the flat performances in mumblecore.

I blame mumblecore on the lack of financing for independent movies in the US, plus also the rise of YouTube and reality TV. All one can afford to shoot is a bunch of people talking in an apartment, and fewer audiences will "buy" a movie set in a heightened reality, outside of horror films and films publicized at churches.
posted by Sticherbeast at 10:32 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


(Oh dear, that stupid joke is going to send me down an amazing klezmer rabbit hole all day. This stuff is so much fun.)
posted by straight at 10:38 AM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


"Minor keys can sound badass/menacing, too. Maybe the influence of musical forms based on menacing badassery (metal, hardcore hip-hop, etc.) accounts for some of it?"

I wouldn't call most metal or hiphop major or minor. They are modal styles, as is the vast supermajority of traditional, popular, and ancient music.
posted by idiopath at 10:52 AM on December 21, 2013


If the concept of a song being 'in a minor or a major key' essentially breaks down at the points of highest tension (i.e. often the 'hook' that makes the song) in pop/rock (See: Yesterday and Call me Maybe), then I think it would be more informative to look at the most commonly used chords, modal inflections, or even intervals in pop, and see how they have changed over the years. I agree that metal or hip hop are modal, not because of the harmonic or melodic content so much as because of their cadential gestures (or lack of them often).

Certainly the chord built on the flatted seventh scale degree used in a major setting was hardly used before its appearance in some early 60s pop ('Poison Ivy' is probably the first?) and now it's perhaps the defining sound of rock. And the minor third is a long way down the harmonic series I think - you get to a flatted seventh before you get a minor third when you twang a string and listen to all the partials (I think).

As time passes, the general 'ear' seems to want to find more ways to accommodate dissonance, and this is probably what the survey is getting at. Because successful pop music is often called upon to convey sexual desire and simultaneously the fear of loss (loss of the safe pre-sex world of childhood), then listeners since at least the 60s have wanted sounds that can contain both major-key dominant seventh power but also reflective and painful minor thirds within the same musical gestures.
posted by colie at 10:56 AM on December 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I often hear people complain that too much music is in minor keys instead of major. I believe this is purely due to the names of the keys. The American psyche is drawn to big, strong "major" over its weak little brother "minor". But these word associations do not reflect reality.

The vast majority of music uses a minor key, and other keys like the blues scale and diminished scales are more closely related to minor than they are to major. The minor scale is the epicenter of music with connections to everything, whereas major is an odd-sounding scale on the fringe.

We knew this hundreds of years ago, when we named the notes. "A B C D E F G A" is a minor scale. And in the 19th century we used A to standardize pitches around 440Hz. But over the last century, music theory has latched onto major as the default scale instead, and these days we think of the major "C D E F G B A B C" as the canonical scale. Every piano student learns to start with "middle C". Major is given an importance which it does not deserve.
posted by foobaz at 11:09 AM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


colie: yes, I think it is about the greater and greater accommodation of dissonance. I also think that many of the assumptions of Common Practice derived music theory become more and more tenuous in their application as the role of dissonance evolves.

For example, compare the role the riff in "Everybody", and the emotional message of the song, with the meaning a 19th century composer would ascribe to that melodic fragment. And even predating the Common Practice period we have happy music full of "dissonant" and "unresolved" lines (see the above referenced klezmer for a newer example of this).
posted by idiopath at 11:11 AM on December 21, 2013


major is an odd-sounding scale on the fringe.

Not in terms of cadence though surely? That V7 - I resolution is not about to pack its bags and give up any time soon. But I do agree about minor pentatonic materials and natural minor and blues scales being at the heart of melody in pop.

A part of what listeners have cherished in pop for 50 years or so is fleeting dissonance treatment that arises when these minor gestures get mixed into major mode songs in new ways. The reason people like to listen to 'I Feel Fine' is because Lennon sings the F sharp leading note (major) on the word 'world' in the phrase 'She's telling all the world' in a low register, but then immediately leaps up to sing the flatted 7th (F natural) on the second syllable of the word 'baby' in the phrase 'that her ba-BY buys her things...'. Totally free mixture I think based on importing blues minor notes into a major context and giving you a chromatic hit of brain review.

No doubt similar stuff going on with the Backstreet Boys track but I haven't fully investigated their oeuvre... :-)
posted by colie at 11:33 AM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


It's because sad songs, they say so much.
posted by happyroach at 12:18 PM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


A theory I recently pulled out of my ass is that the quality of pop songs has declined because widespread use of antidepressants, Ritalin, Aderall, and MDMA among adolescents has not only made potential songwriters and musicians less depressed, but also narrowed the range of emotions "kids today" are able to experience. Pop songwriters need to be crying into their beers to write good songs, See also: the flat performances in mumblecore.

Taking the right kind of antidepressants/antianxiety pills could knock out the ability to do higher math in developing teens, according to a family member's mention of a neighbor's kid who lost the ability to do algebra. I think what atrophied was the part of the brain that fussily obsesses on problems.

Or something.

[Citation needed]
posted by sebastienbailard at 12:31 PM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


A friend of mine, a musician from Russia, said that most western or American music is in major key, and Russian pop, a mixture of Spanish tempos and other things I can't remember, is mostly in minor keys. When I listen to world music a lot of it is in minor key. It is not that we are happier, just more brassy. The trend that pop music is going more minor is probably a globalization trend creating more of a world sound in American Pop. I theorize American music in general was mostly hymns to start out with, and so we stayed in that major format until the secularization of the most popular music has offered more variation to discuss the full range of emotion, rather than formal sounds of worship.
posted by Oyéah at 1:04 PM on December 21, 2013


a brief historical survey of metal music

1970s - guys in black leather jackets screaming about how they worship satan, screw plenty of women and take every substance they can

1980s - guys in black leather jackets, spandex pants and fluffy permanents screaming about how they worship satan, screw plenty of women, and take every substance they can

1990s - guys in black leather jackets wondering if they should get t shirts and jeans and go alternative while screaming that the man won't let them worship satan, screw plenty of women and take every substance they can

2000s - guys in black leather jackets and tattoos whining about how they're too depressed to worship satan, how women want nothing to do with them, and how taking every substance they could put them into rehab or in close proximity to a gun or a high bridge to jump off of
posted by pyramid termite at 1:38 PM on December 21, 2013 [4 favorites]


I can't think of a lot of metal from the 70s with guys screaming about worshipping Satan. Welcome to Hell didn't come out 'til 81.
posted by Wolfdog at 2:10 PM on December 21, 2013


PT the only thing I'd add is the guys in black jackets running through sewers and abandoned buildings meme which seemed to fade out in the late 80's.
posted by localroger at 2:48 PM on December 21, 2013 [2 favorites]


I can't think of a lot of metal from the 70s with guys screaming about worshipping Satan.
How about Black Sabbath?
posted by foobaz at 4:07 PM on December 21, 2013


Andean music, even joyous Andean music tends to get expressed in a minor key. Leading to a most haunting effect.
posted by telstar at 4:17 PM on December 21, 2013 [1 favorite]


One of the things I've enjoyed about Irish music is the almost complete disregard for the concept of major/minor. Major (Ionian) can be sad and haunting, and Minor (Aeolian) can be cheerful and devilish. Plus you get to play around with Dorian and Mixolydian. It feels like there's a broader palette of moods that can be accessed, although how much of that is just familiarity I don't know.
posted by sneebler at 4:57 PM on December 21, 2013


I don't know much, but I can tell you this: D minor is the saddest of all keys.
posted by nowhere man at 5:32 PM on December 21, 2013 [3 favorites]


A theory I recently pulled out of my ass is that the quality of pop songs has declined because widespread use of antidepressants, Ritalin, Aderall, and MDMA among adolescents has not only made potential songwriters and musicians less depressed, but also narrowed the range of emotions "kids today" are able to experience. Pop songwriters need to be crying into their beers to write good songs, See also: the flat performances in mumblecore.


No, don't do this. That theory belongs where you found it.
posted by sweetkid at 5:34 PM on December 21, 2013 [7 favorites]


colie: "This is pretty silly since most pop since the decline of the Tin Pan Alley songsmiths era has been mixture-based, i.e. uses chords not strictly built on scale degrees from the 'key' of the song anyway."

I don't think mixture is really the right way to frame this, since it both implies that the foundational major/minor duality that modal music by definition discards still holds, and that certain idiomatic usages from the Common Practice period prevail (mostly centering around the flat-6 scale degree and the minor subdominant). I'd be much more inclined to describe the use of the flat-3 and flat-7 degrees in pop music as, in order of likelihood:
  1. A consequence of the reification of blue notes as fully-featured scale degrees in and of themselves, capable of serving as chord roots,
  2. Side effects of parallel voice leading, potentially deriving from guitar idioms where an entire chord slides up a half-step in an appoggiatura figure,
  3. Chromatic mediants, maybe as a trickle down from jazz or from film scores in the Romantic idiom, where they're used heavily.
I'm also super-confused at the notion expressed upthread that the preeminence of the major scale is a phenomenon of the last century, since a foundational harmony text published in 1722 treats it that way and since, although the importance of the overtone series as the fundamental well-spring from which all harmonic practice derives is thoroughly overstated in Common Practice dogma, its influence on our notions of consonance and dissonance is non-trivial. I don't think Boethius' note names serve as proof for anything, since one could just as easily point to Guido d'Arezzo's name scheme, now the basis of solfege, as evidence of the contrary position.
posted by invitapriore at 6:08 PM on December 21, 2013 [6 favorites]


invitapriore: I'll agree that the overtone series is formative of our notions (or even experience) of consonance and dissonance if we can agree on what consonance and dissonance mean.

If by consonance and dissonance you mean our standards of whether a set of notes sound right together, there are multiple well known historical counterexamples. In fact I don't know how a case that tastes in sonic texture don't vary or evolve would even begin to be made.

If you mean the subjective experience of intense auditory "roughness", then the mechanism is the basilar membrane of the ear, and the fact that aligning pitches between harmonics cause less roughness is a side effect of that organic structure and only coincidentially related to the physical properties of the sounds themselves. There are sensitive regions where the roughness sensations are more vs. less likely (for biologically structured reasons), and they perfectly predict our tolerance of roughness in those frequency ranges (see for example the banjo, accordion, or bowed string being much more likely to offend those with "golden ears" than for example a plucked gut string or flute playing identical pitches).
posted by idiopath at 7:40 PM on December 21, 2013


It's a bit of both -- I'm totally with you on the fact that what constitutes a consonant harmony is culturally determined, but that all other things being equal, if we were to send a group of babies on a spaceship to another planet and then checked up on what their harmonic practices sounded like a few hundred years down the line, I think the deck is stacked slightly in favor of the resulting sounds being explainable in terms of the earlier intervals in the harmonic series for exactly the biological reasons you describe.
posted by invitapriore at 9:24 PM on December 21, 2013


And, I mean, it's not just the ear, since the prominent partials in the human voice are harmonic too.
posted by invitapriore at 9:35 PM on December 21, 2013


There is a difference between having a harmonic series (of course it has this, the largest part of the structure is a tube), and being a sum of pitched sounds (that is to say sounds having a harmonic series) such that one fundamental is a harmonic of the other..
posted by idiopath at 10:53 PM on December 21, 2013


For example no combination of sine waves of arbitrary ratios, no matter how complex, that are not close enough to hit the critical band in the basilar membrane will produce a dissonance. This is easy enough to verify with a tone generator and a good sound system.

The reason harmonizing pitched sounds avoid the critical band overlap is because the harmonics are either far enough apart to not hit a critical band, or close enough to overlap and not produce a roughness reaction. The regular series is a common structure that makes consonance easier to achieve with multiple sound sources. But when you only have one sound source, and thus one series, harmonic or inharmonic, it suffices that the partials are not close enough to create a roughness.
posted by idiopath at 10:59 PM on December 21, 2013


invitapriore: I agree with everything you write but I think I've heard the term 'mixture-based' used in order to try and cover off the different ways you list that blue notes have begun a dialogue with diatonic material in pop, but also to describe an evolutionary process in which they have been gradually brought into common practice voice leading in novel ways, while retaining their power to shock and create false relations where required as well.

The flat-VII chord in particular goes through a process, which starts with it being used as an isolated shock effect, then it does the Kinks 'All day...' thing that you describe in your 1 and 2 definition, but then eventually becomes a full member of the harmonic palette, able to support voice leading lines and create cadences.

Beatles examples as per usual: flat-VII as 'shock effect' in PS I Love You (end of the chorus on the second 'you') in 1962; used as a dominant preparation within a chromatic line in All My Loving in 1963; verse-ending cadence in I Don't Want to Spoil the Party in 1964. Getting these blue notes structurally 'tamed' was perhaps an ongoing 60s pop project rather than something that just happened.
posted by colie at 1:09 AM on December 22, 2013


"it's part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy that I'm doing in D... minor, which I always find is really the saddest of all keys, really, I don't know why. It makes people weep instantly" ~ Nigel Tufnel
posted by Lanark at 3:08 AM on December 22, 2013 [2 favorites]


"D Minor is the saddest of all keys":

A dude called Christian Schubart wrote a book called Ideen zu einer Aesthetik der Tonkunst where he tried to characterise the moods of keys in 1806, and came up with superb stuff like "F Minor: Deep depression, funereal lament, groans of misery and longing for the grave."

The full list is here.
posted by colie at 4:05 AM on December 22, 2013 [4 favorites]


Well, pop music has certainly been pretty bloody sad since about 2000.
posted by Decani at 5:42 AM on December 22, 2013


My wife recently made the comment that "girls singing shitty lies about empowerment is the new socialist realism." And songs like Katy Perry's Roar or Sara Bareilles' Brave seem positive, they reflect a creeping desperation that belies their apparent optimism.

There have always been pop songs about being wronged by an ex-lover and getting over it, but this heroic anthem thing seems new. (Kelly Clarkson's Stronger probably also qualifies if only because who the fuck quotes Nietzsche in a pop song.) I suspect popular culture has invented this because we are feeling a need for heroism these days.
posted by localroger at 7:18 AM on December 22, 2013 [3 favorites]


There have always been pop songs about being wronged by an ex-lover and getting over it, but this heroic anthem thing seems new.

What about "I Will Survive"?
posted by Sticherbeast at 8:20 AM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


girls singing shitty lies about empowerment is the new socialist realism

I think this is a bit harsh, because the point about Katy Perry or Taylor Swift or Jessie J etc is that they are female voices singing for the consumption of females - there's virtually no male interruption or gaze going on. So there's an honesty going on about their feelings towards 'empowerment'. It doesn't really matter what they actually say. They are the heirs of the 60s 'girl groups' who used to enact little scenarios in their songs which on the face of it presented females as very passive in dealings with males, but in doing so gave these feelings a visibility and a vocabulary.

This could all be nonsense, but certainly to be a female singer is a very complicated cultural performance. Male singers tend to position themselves as boasting-lamenting about desire/love for the benefit of other males, and tend to frame the whole thing as a form of 'work.'
posted by colie at 9:24 AM on December 22, 2013 [2 favorites]


they reflect a creeping desperation that belies their apparent optimism

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of these songs, but I don't understand this criticism.
posted by sweetkid at 10:31 AM on December 22, 2013


Stitcherbeast, Gloria Gaynor spends half of I Will Survive kicking herself for not changing the locks and trying to kick her ex out of her own apartment, which does not quite equate with I'm gonnna roar or you can turn a phrase into a weapon or a drug.

Perhaps my wife's observation would make more sense if, instead of looking at it from the music end, you look at from the Socialist Realism end. The people who invented that style were underdogs facing what most thought insurmountable odds to build a type of society that had never been seen in the face of powerful, unified opposition. They portrayed themselves heroically because they knew they would need heroism to have a chance.

Popular culture reflects the popular mood. You can trace an arc from Donna Summer through Madonna to Alanis Morisette to Pink to Taylor Swift. It's the same arc you can trace through the bullet points in my first comment on this thread.

P.S. Pop music tends to also be half formed in amusing ways, and from the first time I heard Brave I've wondered exactly who the hell Sara Bareilles thinks she's singing it to. I'm sure she thinks she is encouraging some modern Voltaire or Jefferson, but really the first historic personage to pop into my mind as having taken her advice was the Marquis de Sade.
posted by localroger at 12:14 PM on December 22, 2013 [1 favorite]


There is a difference between having a harmonic series (of course it has this, the largest part of the structure is a tube), and being a sum of pitched sounds (that is to say sounds having a harmonic series) such that one fundamental is a harmonic of the other..

For example no combination of sine waves of arbitrary ratios, no matter how complex, that are not close enough to hit the critical band in the basilar membrane will produce a dissonance. This is easy enough to verify with a tone generator and a good sound system.


Sure, and the piano is a great example of this, since any single note sounded has a wealth of inharmonic partials. I don't think we're disagreeing about anything fundamental here -- all I'm voicing is a suspicion that, if we think about consonance and dissonance between two fundamentals as a three-dimensional space with two pitch axes (call them x and y) and a consonance/dissonance axis, we would see, in the case of a completely untrained mind, "consonance wells" in the parts of the landscape where x / y corresponds to an earlier ratio in the harmonic series.* If that's the case it's also apparent that the slope around those wells isn't too steep to be surmounted by other factors, since the wide variety of human musical practice suggests that it has been many times over.

* This of course assumes that the two pitches in question have mostly harmonic overtones themselves, but I think that since the human voice is the first pitched instrument anyone hears in the vast majority of cases that it's a reasonable assumption. If things were otherwise then I suspect that music in general would sound quite different.
posted by invitapriore at 1:34 PM on December 22, 2013


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