I’ll regularly check in with TheNeedleDrop’s YouTube channel to see what’s on his weekly list of new releases. It’s a decent slice of tracks that are fresh off the shelf, new music from artists of some significance or bearing on the pop landscape, and I appreciate that it’s not limited exclusively to tracks he likes. We get the chaff as well as the wheat.

YouTube / @theneedledrop

Last week there was a mention of a song by London-based rapper and singer J Hus. The song itself was fine; a nice bouncy Afrobeat rhythm, some synthetic marimba flourishes here and there and charismatic delivery typical of J Hus. Enter a Drake feature, or rather the over-processed husk of what used to be Drake’s soul. Timbre? Nope. Melody? In a way, but it could’ve been phoned in from any other Drake track from the last five years. Emotion? No chance.

He sounded like he’d been run through a filter that was designed to disrobe his voice box of any signs of humanity. Heavily processed, lifeless vocals are nothing new in modern pop, but personal opinions on Drake’s career trajectory aside, this felt extraordinary to me. New heights of banality. And it’s reflective of a larger picture in the context of modern pop.

We’ve been flying very close to an ever-growing musical black hole for a long time now, and it’s possible that we’ve actually passed the event horizon and pop music is now post-supernova. Some time in the mid-2010’s, radio EDM, trap, pop, and more recently reggaeton began to fuse into an anonymous amalgamation of all of those genres. Unfortunately, this morass took the worst and most obvious parts of each and discarded considered songwriting or lyrical depth, replacing them with a sort of hyper-concentrated sugar rush of musical nothingness.

Still from Interstellar movie of the black hole

At first it seemed reasonable to assume the blueprint would fade away, but as time has passed the hit machine continues to churn. Pop, it seems, has hit a creative low point. Of course, there’s still hundreds of thousands of wonderful artists out there producing music that’s exciting, daring and new, but we’re zeroing in on what occupies most of the charts, presently.

We want to examine the common tropes and complaints when it comes to modern pop, and many lament the dwindling lyrical originality. The last few decades have indeed been characterised by a notable shift towards simpler, repetitive lyrics that are designed for mass consumption rather than cerebral reflection. This is valid, but the spectrum of lyrical themes in pop have never been broad (love, loss, money, etc) and whilst this departure from meaningful storytelling is often attributed to the growing importance of streaming success and easily digestible jingles, you might be shocked at the lack of lyrical depth in any chosen Billboard chart from a given year.

Lionel Ritchie performing live in the 80s

Walt Disney Television via Getty

For illustrative purposes, December 1982’s Billboard top 5 contained five songs about love or relationships or the sexual nature of human beings and little else. And good luck convincing me that AI couldn’t have written the words to ‘Truly’ by Lionel Ritchie, the number four song for that month. Artists and producers today are under increasing pressure to produce tracks that will top charts and yield instant virality, a feat often achieved with catchy, simplistic hooks rather than profound lyrical substance.

Yes the demand for songcraft may have declined, but the narrow scope of themes is a tale as old as recorded music. Putting lyrics to one side, the decline in the dynamic range of modern pop justifies some pearl-clutching. The days of stirring vocal crescendos, sweeping key changes and enveloping songcraft are gone, bucko. Instead, we’ve got songs that maintain a constant ‘flatness’ of volume and scarcely reach for anything resembling the stars.

The 'loudness war', a term coined to describe the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, is seen by many as symptomatic of the diminishing subtlety and complexity in pop music, but we’d posit that it’s probably the other way around. Either way, this development does a bang up job of sucking the emotion from a song, and it’s ubiquitous on the charts. There’s a very limited degree of how much you can convey with synths that are the same volume as the drums with are the same volume as the vocals which are the same volume as the rest of the song, and that volume is loud.

Fueling the tendency toward flat and loud tunes is the increasingly synthetic nature of the modern pop palette. In a recent interview, producer and DJ A-Trak mentioned the way that requests from the crowd at live shows are moving away from specific songs and towards broader desires like artists or musical flavours. We’re not even chasing a specific song, we’re chasing a vibe.

In isolation these proclivities and musical traits aren’t problematic, but it could be perceived as a preference for music-as-window-dressing rather than the desire to engage emotionally with music. Examining the root cause, the ease of access to music production tools has undeniably democratised artistic output, but it's also led to a homogenisation of sonic textures, with pop tracks often feeling overly polished, lacking the raw emotion that analogue production once captured.

There’s other contributing factors to this musical flattening that we’re living through; TikTok’s demand for trend-friendly musical microclips, the age of streaming and on-demand convenience, shorter attention spans, but these arguments are overcooked at this point.

Despite all of that, let’s not pessimistically dismiss modern pop music as a lost cause. The very criticisms levelled against it—its repetitiveness, simplicity, digitisation—might also be its saving graces. These traits have made music more accessible to both creators and consumers, expanding the realm of musical possibilities.

Just outside the confines of the mainstream, artists are pushing boundaries, experimenting with sounds, lyrics, and structures, and blending genres in ways that were unimaginable in the past. Acts like 100 Gecs are pushing the concept of what pop is and can be to its extremes, but these sorts of artists still dwell on the fringes in relative terms.

The Guardian

The current state of radio pop may appear stark in comparison to the cherished halcyon days of the middle and late 20th century. However, a society standing on the precipice of a golden age doesn’t know it’s there until after it’s happened. Music is a living, breathing entity, forever in flux, echoing the times we live in.

And if what’s popular at a given time is simply a reflection of the current existential landscape, then maybe pop’s malaise is just a mirror for our times, and simplicity for the masses is where we’re collectively at. If this admission feels a bit defeatist, take a second to remember that trends are cyclical, and we’ll eventually come out the other side. In the meantime, there’s plenty else to discover outside the popular realm.

Music and culture

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