Switched on Pop - Can’t Get You Out Of My Head

Episode Date: October 22, 2015

As much as we might have crazy love for pop music, pop music also loves to drive us crazy. Earworms that grab you and won’t let go; cookie-cutter compositions that bedevil in their unoriginality; strange new sounds that vex, rankle, confound. How does pop music possess the unique ability to get under our skin? We pull apart some of the stickiest songs to try and find out. And listen to our playlist of songs that drive you mad on Spotify. FEATURING The Fine Young Cannibals – She Drives Me Crazy The Backstreet Boys – I Want It That Way Katy Perry – California Girls Kesha – Tik Tok Mozart – Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, K.466 Grady Smith – Why Country Music Was Awful in 2013 Grady Smith – Country Stars Who Don’t Like Their Own Records Fletcher Hederson – The Stampede Skrillex – Bangarang Elvis Presley – Jailhouse Rock Kylie Minogue – Can’t Get You Out Of My Head  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Dude. Nate. Quit it. Nate, stop. What? Stop it. What? What's the matter? You're driving me mad. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you hate beautiful music. I mean, it's not that I hate beautiful music, but I'm trying to concentrate here on doing a show together. And I, it's just, it's really distracting. Wow, you are grumpy today. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, joined by musicologist Nate Sloan. And today, on Switched-on-pop, songs that drive us mad.

Music seems to have that ability. Music can rub you the wrong way. It can get your goat. It can turn you into an octogenarian curmudgeon decades before your time. That's my world. It can make you slightly insane. What is it about certain songs that drive us mad? We have divided up three ways in which music can drive us crazy.

the first earworms. Earworms, aka melodies that burrow deep into your brain and don't let go. Charlie, I'm sorry, can you stop playing that song? Dude. Okay, earworms.

Is each one unique in its methods of torturous catchiness or is there something that ties these diverse hooks together? Spoiler alert, it's the latter. I don't think that's the proper use of spoiler, I just have to say. I'll spoil my spoiler alert.

I'm sorry. I think that there are exactly three ways in which an earworm burrows itself into the insides of our brain. The first is it's got to have a really simple, catchy melody. Yes. The second thing is it has to repeat that thing

over and over and over and maybe provide a subtle variation to reset the loop that it starts. Okay. And I think that the third thing that we hear in a earworm is that it has some sort of unique tonal quality, something that defines it as its own work. All right. Simplicity, repetition, parentheses, and variation. Unique tonal quality. All right. I'm finding this persuasive so far. Let's see if we're going to apply these to a few legendary hooks. Okay. She drives me crazy by the fine young kids. cannibals. What, 1980 something? Okay, we can work with that. Let's test our theory against this

jam by the FYC's. So do you want to, do you want to sing it for us? Only if you'll do the high harmony. She drives me crazy. Okay, I think we got that. So let's apply the theory of simplicity to this song. Okay, so we have kind of a three note motive. Followed by a little vocalese, this ooh-oo. Then we get a repeat of this melody. It was some slightly different lyrics. Like no one else. Right.

And then... It sounds like we're going to get another exact repetition. Close. But they flip the script and end not with the now familiar U-U. but this other ending that resolves to the same note but an octave below. I can't help myself.

Oh, it's actually the same. Basically, the ooh-oo and the myself are the same notes, just one is an octave higher than the other. Just transposed down. So we're getting almost the exact same material in a slightly different variation. Just different enough that we find it

very satisfying, I think, when this does, when this melody doesn't do exactly what we expected it to. So already we've actually covered number one and number two. It is the simplest melody. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Very simple. And it just does that over and over and over. And then it resets its loop by giving us a subtle variation. Ah, so, okay, so we've already hit simplicity and our other category of repetition and variation. So lastly, unique tonal characteristic. For me, the unique tone of this comes in the singer's voice. His inflection on this phrase, she drives me crazy, is very specific. Okay.

It's not she drives me crazy. It's, she drives me crazy. He is crazy. Or something, some approximation of that. It's not the way you or I would say that or sing it normally. It's the way this particular person sings. It's, it's. It's a particular person sings it. Yeah, exactly. And that is just another thing that makes it lodge in our minds because it's not, it's slightly off. If you hear a cover of that song, maybe you don't react to it in the same way. When you hear the original and you hear that that slightly nasly tone, it's like this instant earworm attack. So she drives me crazy. It's almost self-referential, right? It's like, we're going to drive you nuts. This thing's going

it's stuck in your ear. I'm not sure that it's a person driving you crazy. It's actually the melody of the song designed to drive you crazy. Anthropomorphizing the hook itself. Yeah, definitely. That's deep. So one song does not prove our theory. Nay.

Okay, so I've gone back to my middle school dance days. I've talked about that before. It's a really low period of my life. With the Backstreet Boys. And I want it that way. And I think if we could take one of the biggest mega hits, the Backstreet Boys, I want it that way and apply it to our theory, then surely

it must hold. All right. Let's see. Let's put, let's put I want it that way under the earworm test. I want it that way. Tell me why it ain't nothing but a morning. Tell me why

it ain't nothing. I want to argue that this song absolutely meets these criteria. Tell me why. I will tell you why. Criterion number one Simple melody What you got right there

Tell me why Ain't nothing but a A three note melody This time rising up instead of down But very simple Yeah Easy to sing memorable

And similar to the fine young cannibals We actually have a little bit of a melody counter melody thing going on here Where before we had Ooh ooh ooh We now have Ain't nothing but a heart ache

Heart Breaks Cool yeah Something like that. All right. So tell me why ain't nothing but a heart egg. Okay. So you have this melody, counter melody. So we've checked the simplicity box.

Number two. Repetition and variation. Right. So he's done one line. Okay. Next line is exactly the same. Yes, it is. A little bit of that.

Tell me why it ain't nothing but a mistake. Ain't nothing but a mistake. Ah, okay. Third time. Tell me why I never want it. So after the third, tell me why. After the third, tell me why, there's a subtle variation.

Right. The third tell me why is going down instead of up. Yeah. And then we get this new melody, this sort of new material. I never want to hear you say. And then we get the epic line, which just hammers the whole thing. And right, we've had like repeat, repeat, subtle variation. And then there's hammer it home.

I want it that way. Thank you, Nate. Yeah. So number three, unique tonal quality. For me, this comes in the word why. Okay. Because, again, the way you say the word why, you don't say it, whye. Tell me why.

You don't make it three syllables and end it on the phoneme E. But in this song you do, and I think that's this trick that, again, makes it instantly memorable. That thing scratching on your brain. Yeah. If they just said, tell me why, maybe it wouldn't attack our cerebrums with such ferocity. But because of this YE, it just lodges itself in your brain because, again, it's kind of off. It's kind of weird. It is unforgettable.

Backstreet boys, I want it that way. Totally unforgettable. Always stuck in our heads. And it's simple. It repeats itself a subtle variation. It's got a unique tonal quality. I think it meets the mark. So two songs down, there are many millions more out there.

And let's put them all under the microscope. As you're listening to pop hits, think about is this song corresponding to the golden rules of earworminess, simplicity, repetition, unique tonal quality. And if we're wrong, then we might have to introduce another theory about hooks. Well, I suppose the other theory would be that there's no universal rule for what makes a song catchy. In fact, the only thing that makes a song catchy is just hearing it over and over and over and over again, being exposed to that song so much. So not just the repetition of the melody within its own form, but by the just mass production of radio being blasted in our ears and we can't turn it off.

So you're asking here, is it about exposure or about the construction? of the song itself. Yes. And we might come up with a way to test this out as well. How would you test this? What would you do? Well, I guess what you would do is to see if there's nothing special about these melodies in terms of their catchiness and only that we've just heard them.

Right. Then theoretically, any melody could become catchy if you heard it enough. Okay. So our goal then would be to create the least earwormy melody possible. and see if we could get it stuck in our heads. So this is the least likely case? Yes. And if just continued exposure to this unhookable melody makes it get stuck in our head,

then perhaps it, like you said, it's not about construction, but just about exposure. Okay. So then I'm going to have to give you a little challenge. Okay. Can you write for us a melody, which is neither simple nor repetitive? and it is completely unlistenable such that it doesn't have any unique tonal quality. Rather than come up with this ourselves, perhaps we dip into the repertoire of avant-garde classical music,

full of complex, dissonant, completely unmemorable melodic motives. Perfect. This is actually exactly when I decided to drop my music major in college. It was when we got to this stage, because I could not stand it. Yeah. So let's take, who do you want to do, Charlie? Do you want to do Karlheinz? Do you want to do Pierre Boulez, or do you want to use Georgi Leggety?

You got to give me some of that Stuckhausen. Stachhausen. Okay, let's take a piece like Clavier Stukten. Okay, okay. Famous piece. And let's see if we can take this melody. we'll give it, well, at least give it some lyrics that we know are catchy. That makes sense.

And I'll sing these lyrics with Stockhausen's melody. Okay. And see if we can't get this into our heads. Okay. So what's the lyric? She drives me crazy. Ooh. I think the test that is, can it be repeated?

Can that get stuck in your head? If you play that over and over, will we remember? remember it. All right. Well, can you even sing it twice? She drives me crazy. Ooh,

ooh, she drives me crazy. Ooh. She drives me crazy. Oh, I kind of feel like they weren't the same, first of all. Second,

it is effective in driving me crazy, but I could absolutely not sing that melody back to you. Fair enough. But let's step away. Okay. We're going to step away from our microphones. And then at the end of the show, I'm going to ask you if you can remember it. How about that? Beautiful. All right. It's a good test. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay.

Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No. No. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube. or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday.

We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down.

That's this week on America. America actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Okay, so I feel like, I feel confident that the original drive me crazy and I want it that way are thoroughly stuck in our heads. Not so certain about the stockhousin. We'll get back to that. I think it's time to move on to reason number two that music drives us mad. I feel like one of the great tricks to writing a good pop song is to have a full understanding of cliche, to know how to master the things that we all know and want to hear, and then twist them. just right so that we hear them in a slightly new context. For me, that is sort of the magic of great pop songwriting. Yeah. Pop music by definition is formulaic. Of course. But perhaps when we hear a formula that isn't inventive enough, isn't, original isn't tweaked in some way. It makes us a little

upset. Yeah. So this is reason number two, when the formula goes sour. Yeah. One way that I hear the formula going sour is when the same producer produces different songs for different artists, but they sound the same. Ah, okay. So this is what makes you mad. This drives me absolutely mad. Yeah. I think one of the best examples, and a fairly well-known one, is Dr. Luke, great producer, who wrote both Katie Perry's California Girls and Keshe's TikTok.

TikTok, California Girls, it's the same thing. This is frustrating to you. This gets in your head because when you hear a new song, you want to hear. hear something new. I want something fresh. You want something that takes the formula and challenges it in some way. Right. In particular, that these two songs were on the radio at the same time, I'd get frustrated

when I heard one song and then the other. Yeah, you know, the formulaicness and the standardization of pop music were exactly what drove the philosopher Theodore Adorno crazy. Ooh, ooh. So he was known as a member of the Frankfurt School. school, writing about culture. But he's one of the great music critics of all time, though. He has a particularly grumpy cadence, which comes out when he talks about things like pop music. Yeah. Because he didn't just have an aesthetic issue with the formulaicness of pop. He actually

had some moral objections to this phenomenon. He wrote, quote, listening to popular music is manipulated not only by its promoters, but as it were, by the inherent nature of this music itself, wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free liberal society. Standardization of song hits keeps the customers in line by doing their listening for them, as it were. I don't agree with this. Good, because he's a jerk. I don't agree that pop songs are coming out on the same assembly line. So where I agree is that when things come too close to sounding like they're off the same assembly line,

and that assembly line maybe has a few defects on it, they don't have good quality control, that drives me mad. Right. When there's too much lead in your pop song. Yeah. And it needs to be recalled. Yeah, exactly. And I'm not going to take that metaphor any further.

No. Yes. I think the textbook example of this, what we might call the pulling back the curtain phenomenon, is one of the most universally reviled songs of the past few years, Rebecca Black's Friday. This song made by a 13-year-old girl and a music production for a higher company called Arc Music, churned out this little ditty about the magic of the weekend, probably intended just for a few of her friends, maybe. Yeah, of course. Instead, it dropped on YouTube and instantly went viral, racked up millions upon millions of views,

and was kind of an obsession where people couldn't get the song out of their head, I think, but also couldn't stand it. Like made people angry, full of ire. It so perfectly follows the formula that we set up earlier, but it does it to such a degree without any of that variation that we need to be successful, that it gets stuck in our head, and it does so in a way which kind of pushes all the wrong buttons. It's almost like the uncanny valley of popular music.

Because at once, it's entirely catchy and memorable for all the reasons we enumerated earlier. It's got the right chord progressions, the right synthesizers, all those things you expect from your pop song. Yeah, totally. And it has, you know, these like pump-up choruses. It has the requisite verse by a rapper in the third quarter of the song before a final chorus. I could just picture her thinking about, I've got to write a bridge. The song is about Friday. Where do I go from here? Let's go back a day to Thursday.

I think if she were really doing this well, she would have modulated down a whole step, brought the whole song down a key to emphasize the going back in time, but she didn't make that creative choice. Again, we get something that we expect via the formula. Here's a little bridge, right? Right.

This is a moment in the song where we see another perspective, it like deepens our understanding. There's a musical change that makes the return of the chorus that much more powerful at the end. So it's doing everything right, but the actual material of it is so insipid. And just maddeningly phlegmatic, it upsets us. But not just because it's bad.

I think because it exposes the formula. Right. It reveals what we maybe implicitly understand, but try not to say out loud, that this stuff does come off assembly line in a lot of ways. And it really is only the, small, brilliant details of invention and creativity separating these songs from one another that make them objects of joy and something we treasure and not something that drives us

completely bonkers. So two ways in which the formula goes sour. One, a producer, reusing their material in slightly new context for different artists. Right. To completely exposing the formula, giving us the ingredients and seeing, you don't want to know how the soft sausage is made. I think third is even worse than a producer copying their own material is when people just copy each other's material over and over such that you get these lyrical tropes and the worst offender has got to be country music. There's an amazing mashup on YouTube by a columnist at The Guardian, Grady Smith, who writes about country music and popular music. And it shows how all country songs back in 2013

had the exact same lyric tropes. So we had Wait, let me guess. Blue jeans. Blue jeans Painted on time. Those things you paint it on. Love the way you're wearing those jeans so trucks.

That's my truck. Talking about trucks. Alcohol. Beer. Yeah. Okay, alcohol. Just cutting up and shooting Bacardi. We got 24 tall boys on a chill. So maybe country music drives certain people crazy, and I know people for whom this is true. Yeah.

Country music drives them crazy because it's kind of incestuous. The same person who put together that YouTube compilation recently wrote an article for The Guardian about country stars who don't actually like their own records, who admit that if they could, they would write more in the style of Hank Williams and old traditional style of country music because that's what they really love, but they don't feel there's actually an audience for it. And so they write songs like John Deere, John Cooke. John 316. Is that real? Yeah, that's Keith Urban, man.

We'll throw up a link on our site so that you can listen to the rest of that. What's the opposite of greatest hits? The low likes of country music to 2013. So we've established the pop music successful in taking a formula and playing with it ever so slightly to put it in a new context for us. And when we get too close to that formula, when people copy themselves, when people expose what it's made of and when people copy each other, that formula sours and we throw back and the music drives us mad. Unlike earworms where I'm kind of like going a little crazy, I actually just get

angry when I hear the formula going sour. That anger you feel may only be eclipsed by our third category of music that drives you mad. Let's call it the shock of the new. Music that you don't understand that is too foreign, too different to utre for you to even process. Often our reaction to that feeling of the shock of the new is rage. Musical rage. And this reaction can apply to music throughout history and of all different genres. Right. It's not maybe about the sounds themselves, but about their relation to the sounds that you know. Yeah, it's about the listener's exposure to whatever the music is of that moment. For the shock of the new, let's use the most divisive genre of music we have right now.

It has to be EDM, electronic dance music. That had to happen. Nice wobble, Chuck. Thank you. And I can't think of a more paradigmatic musician. in this field than Scrilex. Absolutely. It's in his name. You don't even have to hear his music to know what it's going to sound like.

You just have to hear his name. Yeah. Say the word Scrilex at a dinner table and watch someone sitting there just cringe. Just hearing and get your shudder. So what are you going to play for us? Let's take a song like Bangorang. Bangorang. All right. And let's focus.

Let's start from the beginning. Okay. So what are we hearing? I mean, so far, I don't think we have that shock of the new yet. Okay, but the tension is building. Uh-oh. What's going on? I don't know.

I'm scared, Charlie. Uh-oh. What's happening? It's new. No. It's in your face. What is that sound? No.

But I feel it in my bowels. Oh. Wow, that is insane. I'm in shock. Yeah, I've never heard anything like that before. If I put myself hearing this music for the first time, it's like, what is that? Right. It's not, I can't process it.

Yeah. So what are you hearing? This tone, this kind of pulsing tone, it's a sonority that it doesn't come from the natural world. Yeah, it's very inorganic. Yeah, it's not a violin or a piano. or a voice or even those instruments and then altered in some way. This is like something I can't put my finger on. It's something that's created in a petri dish in a lab.

It freaks me out. Or like a demon has unzipped the heavens and like crawl its way through and it has screamed in your face. Yes, or that. The sound of Scrillex is literally the sound of the new. It's something that only exists in the 2010s. We hear it and we hear it. change. We hear upheaval. We hear tectonic plates shifting and it's very unsettling because change is

scary. But just as much as Scrillix is the representation of the new, this is not a singular moment. This is part of an ongoing evolving process, right? The process of new sounds, bitter vitriol that rises to meet them. And then eventually those new sounds becoming mainstream and acceptable. And then being usurped by some new sound. And then the people who used to hate that sound, who now love the sound, react bitterly with vitriol, and then the cycle continues. This has happened always, all throughout history.

Totally. Every kind of music. And to back up that assertion, you just have to flip through the pages of one of my favorite books. The Encyclopedia of Musical Invective. by Nicholas J. Slonimski. Okay, so what's this about? And I just have to, as a quick sidebar,

I've always felt a kinship with Dr. Slinemski. Yeah. Because our family name, Sloan, used to be Slonimski. Oh. When my ancestors migrated here, and then they shortened it at Ellis Island to Sloan. So I've always wondered if we're related somehow. Okay, earlier you were accusing me of being a kermudgeon,

but now I think you're admitting that within your family roots, there is the most curmudgeony of critics in the musical world. This is the tables have turned. So in Slinimski's Encyclopedia of Musical Invective, he basically goes through every great classical composer. Okay. From Beethoven to Verez. Yeah.

And has collected all of their worst reviews. Okay. And every one of these composers had a terrible review. Don't think for a second that Mozart was spared by the 18th century Salzburg equivalent of pitchfork. They laid into him just as much as we lay into Scrillex. Of course. So do you have a favorite review? Well, one that stood out for sure was actually from the Russian author Maxim Gorky.

Okay. Let's just say he was not into jazz. 1928, this was his take on jazz. Listening to the screaming music for a minute or two, one conjures up an orchestra of madmen, sexual maniacs, led by a manned stallion, beating time with an enormous phallus. So that was his understanding of jazz.

This was clearly music that made him mad. I don't even know what to say to that. It is a unsophisticated, pretty, unveiled racist critique of jazz. In 1928, someone like Maxim Gorky just is driven mad. This is the newest music that anyone has ever heard and it scares the crap out of him. Yeah. But then fast forward 30 years later and you get to a movie like jailhouse rock starring Elvis Presley. Yeah. And jazz, this terrifying orchestra of maniacs beating time with an enormous palace has now. become the province of stuffy old middle-class people sitting around a fireplace and talking about

altered courts. This is what they have to say. I think stubby's gone overboard with those altered cords, don't you? I agree. I think Brubbeck and Desmond have gone just as far with dissonance as I care to go. Oh, nonsense. Have you heard Lenny Trestano's latest recording? He reached outer space. someday they'll make the cycle and get back to pure old Dixieland. I say a tonality is just a passing phase in jazz music. What do you think, Mr. Everett? Lady, I don't want to hear you talking about.

Now, rock music is the shock of the new. Elvis is sweeping jazz to the side and in the process, making a lot of people very angry. You were going to sing us a little? a song at the end. We listen to this song a number of times. She drives me crazy. Stockhausen number 10.

Right. Music, Carl Heinzschaghausen, lyrics, Fine Young Cannibals. Right. Can you remember it? Not a note. She drives me crazy. As close.

Well, jury's still out on that. All right. So we went out hunting for the songs that drive us most mad and asked our listeners on Twitter to send the best. candidates, and we've put together a playlist of the songs that drive crazy. The best on here has got to be Kylie Minogue's. I just can't get you out of my head. Kind of like the fine young cannibals, she drives me crazy. This is a self-referential, recursive song in which the melody gets drilled

into your mind over and over and over again, such that the song is clearly not about a relationship, it's just about the earworm itself. We'll have a link to that playlist on our website. www.Switchdownpop.com. Also, I'll be performing a live version of Switchdown Pop in Los Angeles on Sunday, November 1st at 8.30 p.m. at the Lyric Hyperion Theater as part of the You Get a Spoon event hosted by comedian Chris Duffy. Tickets are available on Eventbrite. Just search You Get a Spoon, L.A. And we'll, of course, post the link in our show notes for this episode on Switchdown Pop.com. Our show is written, edited and produced by the two of us, and our design is done by Luke Harris. Tune in in two weeks when we delve deep into the work of a pop star we've missed for too long. And until then, as always, I'm Nate Sloan. I'm Charlie Harding. Thanks for listening.

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