Let's take on the pressing mystery of a type
of so-called “hit music,” such as the kind often played on Virgin Radio. A few
days a week I leave work at lunch to get a sandwich at Mr Sub, and they always
play that radio station. I’m treated then to certain recurring songs,
interspersed by the banter of Ryan Seacrest and the blather of ads.
What these songs have in common is minimalism. There’s
hardly anything going on in them. I’ll give you some examples: “One Dance,” by
Drake, “Love Yourself,” by
Justin Bieber, and “Hands to Myself,” by Selena Gomez. Not all the hit songs on
that radio station are minimally musical like those examples. Most, in fact,
are dance, rap, or soul songs. In the case of rap or soul music, the
instruments might be low-key because those songs feature the lyrics or the
soaring voice. But then there are these minimalist songs where the instruments,
the voice, and the lyrics are hardly even there. Those are the ones that especially cry
out for some explanation. Why do they exist? What do these ghostly, gutted
songs reveal indicate about the current state of Western art?
Now, in my opinion, 98% of all Virgin Radio’s hit music is
abominable: balless, brainless, vapid, happy-talking, and/or annoyingly
repetitive. But if I were to vent that opinion for the next little while, that
would be a mere cliché. Hit music is made mainly by young people for young
people—younger than me, at least. And we all know that older people lose touch
with young people’s culture. Besides, we’d be talking about taste in music, and that’s subjective.
So instead of committing the old guy’s fallacy of mistaking his aesthetic taste
for knowledge of some objective fact, I’m going to leave aside the value
judgment and point straight at the objective features of those minimalistic
songs. On YouTube, you can listen to the ones I listed and then you’ll know
what I mean, if you’re not already familiar with them.
For some background, I recommend this video interview of John Seabrook, author of The Song
Machine: Inside the Hit Factory, and this article that discusses
the recent history of hit-song writing. The upshot is that hit music today is
manufactured by teams of song engineers who fill in the blanks of the
track-and-hook template, following rote procedures made possible by the
computers on which almost all of this music is made. The beats are separated
from the melodies, and teams of producers are swapped by studios to work on dozens
of songs for each headlining “artist,” like Rihanna, Britney Spears, or Justin
Bieber, which are then pared down to form the CD. This method of engineered,
assembly-line music-writing is very different from the romantic one of the
1960s and 70s, in which individual artists expressed their vision on account of
their personal talent. Think of The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, or Led Zeppelin. Hit
music now is like fast food or the Marvel comic book movies that have taken
over Hollywood. The food is manufactured to exploit weaknesses in the human
brain, such as its love of sugar and fat, just as the movies are made by armies
of computer graphics engineers who serve up action and teenager fantasies.
Apparently, the brain also has an infantile love of repetition. The brain
releases dopamine if we can predict when the song’s hook will reappear, so a
hit song must be simple and catchy.
This, though, is the formula for hit music in general.
Again, the result is commercial music that has no existential impact and poses
no artistic challenge to dubious conventions. But
where does the absurd minimalism of a subset of hit songs enter the picture?
Here are a few possible explanations. First, the musically-minimal songs push
the boundaries of computer-driven hit music, by catering to no one, with
virtually no attractive features. As machines and computers dominate the
landscape, we must dehumanize ourselves to adapt to that inhuman environment. Hit music isn’t aimed at whole persons,
with our everyday concerns and existential questions. Instead, the music
targets the brain’s pleasure center: the song is formed by mechanisms of mass
production that trigger the listener’s complementary neural mechanisms, to
complete a capitalistic exchange of money for the fleeting pleasure taken in
the bare-bones sounds inserted into the track-and-hook template.
