Now that I'm done blogging about movies for a while, it's time to make like Monty Python and do something completely different. That completely different thing: pop songs. Like, top 40 radio pop songs. More specifically, Ariana Grande and Iggy Azalea.
Excited? Good. Now let's back up for a second.
My question (which you probably already guessed if you read the title of this post) is, what exactly is it that makes a pop song great?
Now, that's a ridiculously broad question that I have no hope of ever answering, and even if I did answer it, the music industry would send its men in black to harvest the idea from my mind faster than you can say "Whatever happened to Taylor Hicks, anyway?" So no, sorry, I don't have any nifty formula that will instantly turn youngsters into Lennon/McCartneys. But I do have a theory of what at least part of the answer must be.
Here it is: a great pop song must be able to maintain the good will of its audience after hundreds upon hundreds of replays. To put it a different way, the greatness of a pop song must have something to do with why I get sick of every Maroon 5 song after a few listens but still get excited about "Since U Been Gone" or "Call Me Maybe" whenever they come on the radio, despite liking all of the above about equally on the first listen.
A more recent example: I like Ariana Grande's "Problem." It's well-produced, catchy, Ariana makes good (read: fun) use of her vocal range, and man, that saxophone. But is it a great pop song? If you had asked me at the beginning of the summer, I would have most definitely said yes. In fact, after hearing it a few times, I'd probably have told you that it was going to be one of my favorite radio hits of the year. In May, "Problem" felt fresh and vibrant to me, and I'd always pause my dial-searching on a radio station playing the song. Three months of near continuous radio play later, though, I'm beginning to find myself changing that dial more and more often when "Problem" comes on. Saxophone notwithstanding, its charm is wearing thin. I'm sure there are all sorts of technical and psychological analyses that could be done regarding the song's relationship with my brain, but I think the easiest explanation of my tepidizing opinion is that I have now heard the song a million billion times.
Becoming sick of a musical piece is a weird phenomenon; I mean, it's not like the song itself changes when you replay it, but almost invariably, listening to a song a lot will significantly affect one's feelings toward it. My theory for why this is the case, at least for me, is that listening to a song many, many times makes us, by sheer mental bludgeoning, pay more attention to the minutiae of the piece and, consequently, magnifies the strengths and weaknesses of that piece. Take "Problem": the more I listened to it, the more I became aware of things that had probably always bothered me but I hadn't paid much thought to previously, like the airy tone of Ariana Grande's voice and the forced hipness of Iggy Azalea's rap verse—in fact, okay, can I just say that I really don't like the Iggy verse at all? The rhymes are weak, her flow is erratic, and the whole "99 problems" thing was barely even clever when Ice-T came up with it[1]. All of this would have gone unrealized had I not had to listened to "Problem" so much. I still like the song, but all the replay has made me start to reevaluate just how much I do like it. We'll see if it makes my year-end list.
When I say I don't like something (a movie, TV show, book, music, whatever), depending on what it is, people sometimes tell me that I don't like that piece of entertainment "just because it's popular," the implication being that I'm trying to be a contrarian instead of giving a sincere opinion. I usually respond by pointing out that I do like some popular things (Star Wars, pizza, Harry Potter, "Since U Been Gone"), but, if I'm being completely honest, I should probably also admit that yes, it's true, there are things I now dislike because they became popular. Don't get me wrong; I'm not opposed to popularity. But once something starts gaining cultural clout, you can bet I'm going to have to experience that cultural artifact quite a few times, and the more I experience it, the more aware I'm going to become of the things about it that I dislike. Often that increased awareness leads to me ending up disliking the whole thing. It's a matter of scrutiny, not contrarianism[2].
This is all very subjective, of course. What songs one person can hear a thousand times before becoming sick of them are going to be much different from what songs another person will still put up with after a thousand listens. The magnified dislikes that make someone sick of a song are going to differ from individual to individual, too. But I'd still argue that no matter what it is that makes somebody dislike a song, those dislikes became even more defined after the radio played the song every day of their lives.
Maybe this is all really obvious to you folks out there. I'll admit that it's not the most sophisticated idea, even for one of these blog posts. I'd still love to hear what you think, though.
Until next time!
1] Given Iggy's part in "Problem" and that Charli XCX pretty much makes "Fancy" work in spite of her, I'm beginning to think that Iggy Azalea's real talent is positioning herself alongside more appealing artists. I dunno, y'all, maybe that's mean, so I'll take that back. But know this, readers: I really don't care for her musicianship.
2] This is exactly what happened to me with Mumford and Sons, by the way. I bought their first album on a friend's recommendation just a couple months before "Little Lion Man" blew up on pop radio and turned them into superstars, and in those pre-stardom months, I enjoyed the CD. I mean, it wasn't life-changing or anything, but it was pleasant enough. Hearing them on the radio in much greater frequency than in my own personal listening, however, forced me to pay more attention to their songs, magnifying the quibbles I already had with the band (the lyrics, the way that their pop-as-folk approach diluted both the pop and folk elements of their music) into full-blown irritations.
