Switched on Pop - Demi Lovato Searches for "Substance" In Pop-Punk Perfection

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Demi Lovato has found herself in many avenues over the past few years – from releasing a tell-all documentary to uncovering extraterrestrials – but 2022 finds them traveling back in time to the sound of the late 90’s and early 2000’s: pop-punk. On this episode of Switched On Pop, we check out her two latest singles, “Skin of My Teeth” and “Substance,” and through focusing on the latter, pull out what, exactly, pop-punk is, and how Demi embodies the genre’s ever-evolving sound in their new track. Songs Discussed: Demi Lovato - Substance Demi Lovato - Skin of My Teeth Demi Lovato - Sorry Not Sorry Demi Lovato - La La Land Demi Lovato - Heart Attack Turnstile - MYSTERY Bring Me The Horizon - Chelsea Smile Blink-182 - Dysentery Gary Misfits - Astro Zombies My Chemical Romance - Astro Zombies Blink-182 - What’s My Age Again WILLOW, Travis Barker - t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l Yellowcard - Ocean Avenue Machine Gun Kelly - bloody valentine Citizen - Stain La Dispute - Such Small Hands Mom Jeans - Edward 40hands Rise Against - Savior NOFX - Whoa on the Whoas Jarrod Alonge, Sunrise Skater Kids - Pop Punk Pizza Party Paramore - For A Pessimist, I’m Pretty Optimistic Fall Out Boy - Of All The Gin Joints In The World Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun The Police - Message in a Bottle Modern Baseball - Tears Over Beers Jimmy Eat World - Sweetness Good Charlotte - The Anthem The Offspring - The Kids Aren’t Alright Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm producer Rihanna Cruz. So what's up, Rihanna? Well, Charlie, I got a lovely episode for you about none other than Demi Lovato. You know, I don't know a lot about Demi Lovato, except that I love Sorry Not Sorry, and I think it's a perfect pop song. So I'm going to have to ask you to educate me. Of course. So in 2022, Demi Lovato is going through a rebrand.

Demi leaves rehab again. When is this shit gonna end? A rebrand that gives us an opportunity to understand some of the hallmark sounds of pop punk and adjacent genres. This is Skin of My Teeth, the first single off of Lado's forthcoming album, Holy FVCK, which is out on August 19th. It's very 90s, like, whole kind of sound. Exactly. There's a lot to unpack in that. song, but namely a direct interpolation of the song Celebrity Skin by Whole.

Oh, okay. That wasn't far off. Oh, make me over. Demi leaves rehab again. When is this shit got it? Pretty cool, right? I love it. Yeah.

So this single was the first hint. Demi was going to be looking to the past in her new work, completing a heel turn, so to speak, from the historically pop bangers that Demi has become known for over the the past decade, like you mentioned, sorry not sorry. And we see her moving to a more rock-oriented territory on her second single from this record, substance. Fun, pop punk, good energy. I dig it. I can take it you're a closeted levotic, Charlie. I had no idea I was a lovotic. Definitely sounds like some kind of medication. Totally. I mean, this rebrand, though, doesn't necessarily come as a surprise, right? So if you've been following Demi and their social media, they've named Baltimore

Hardcore Act Turnstile as their favorite band. They're also my favorite band, which I think is really, really cool. I haven't listened to hardcore music since I was a teenager going to really bad shows and basements. That's where all the fun is. They have also publicly posted on social media about listening to post-hardcore bands, bringing the horizon and Devil Wears Prada, which are also middle school staples of one Rietta Cruz. So that's Chelsea Smile by Bring Me the Horizon. Charlie, have you ever heard that before? Rihanna, you have such a cheery demeanor.

Where does this dark, heavy music come from? It comes from my middle school years in suburban New Jersey. I've not heard this music. This is new to me. Yeah, I mean, Demi loves it. And, you know, true Levitics will know, they even flirted with a rock sound on the 2008 album, don't forget. Here's a fan classic, La La Land.

This is less a rebrand than a return to form. I feel like the new music really fits in with this 2008 vibe. So when I was first listening to Substance, judging by these inclinations towards hardcore music, and Demi's previous track record of incorporating more rock sounds into their music, I immediately was interested. And on first listen, I thought, oh, this is a pop punk song. Yeah, that's definitely what I'd call it.

Yeah. Right, but the more I listen to it, I realize it's not that simple. Oh, man, I'm wrong. Okay. Definitely getting a lot of pop punk here. We've got the relentless drums that remind me of Travis Barker from Blink 182, who is still making a lot of pop punk today. It's even got those stuttery, high hat things that he borrows from Trap. It's got chugging guitars.

It's got a slightly annoying and a good way whiny vocal, and it has that little breakdown moment of the like a don't. All feels very pop punk to me. Exactly. And I am so happy that you mentioned Travis Barker because I feel like the band that encapsulates pop punk the most is Blink 182. Now you're going back to my childhood. Exactly. Got some late 90s, San Diego, skating down the boardwalk kind of vibes. Absolutely.

Contrary to punk music, right, which is more brash and sometimes formless, pop punk is just that in the name. It's punk music with pop songwriting sensibilities. And it's usually palatable, contrary to a lot of punk music, which comes off as abrasive sometimes, and often expresses frustration with society. In this case, hometowns, parents, the dude that stole your girl in college, things of that nature, right? So it's very adolescent targeted and is often immature. So not as much a takedown on like capitalism, patriarchy and systemic racism and the problems of the world? It's a takedown of the suburb that you grew up in. Yeah, pretty much.

Got it. So take Early Blink 182, for example, and their song Dysentary Gary off of their biggest record, Enema of the State, which is regarded as one of the hallmarks of pop punk music. It's fun. It's got the institutional dissatisfaction without the desire to throw away form and melodic hooks. I guess pop punk is very embracing of wanting to. to pull people in rather than to push people away? Yeah, like think of other pop punk acts from the same era. They kind of do the same thing in the late 90s or early 2000s.

And you think of bands like some 41, yellow card, and even like early Green Day. You know, like, Welcome to Paradise is a pop punk song. And similar to emo music, there's a lot of discourse over what is or isn't pop punk, whether it be on Twitter or blogs, even now in 2022. You can toss a band like Fall Out Boy in several boxes, right? Like you can call them emo, you can call them Mall Goth for a period of time. You're laughing. Partially laughing because like malls feel really irrelevant now at this moment. Oh, yeah.

I'm sure the various malls of America are very upset about me saying that. Charlie says down with malls. It feels like a very dated reference. It's like, does Hot Topics still exist? Maybe it does. I bought my first Fallout Boy t-shirt at Hot Topic. And they're still selling them. They're still chugging along. Now they sell like Billy Eilish and Lil Peep T-shirts, but I feel like that. Okay.

You know, same thing. Good for them. I clearly have not been to them all in a minute. So yeah, someone like Fall Out Boy, you know, they can fall in several boxes. But for a period of time, they were firmly pop punk, as was a band like Paramore or the offspring. And Charlie, you mentioned before the sort of hallmarks of pop punk. There's a few things about the genre that come up consistently in that type of music. And one of the things you mentioned is the drums.

Yeah. I always think of like very bright, hard-hitting, completely relentless drums. Like the person working the hardest in a pop-punk band is the drummer. They are constantly head-banging. All their limbs are flailing. It seems extremely exhausting. Well, I want to connect substance to these sort of hallmarks established by pop-punk ancestors, starting with the drums.

So let's check them out on a classic pop-punk emo title. For a pessimist, I'm pretty optimistic by the band Paramore. And then check out the drums on substance. In a pop punk group, you might be able to get away with some slightly out of tune guitars, some wobbly vocals. But the drums are just metronomic. They are on the beat and they hold the whole thing together. Yeah. And speaking of vocals, that's the next thing I was going to mention.

All the songs have a sort of similar soaring quality to the vocals. Soaring Southern Californian accent with as much nasal quality as possible. That's a perfect lead in to this example, Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card. Awesome. It's like you have to sing completely from way up here. And it's the accent that people not from America who've only seen Hollywood films imitate when they're trying to imitate a stereotypical American, which codes as like Southern California bro. Oh my God.

Totally. And Demi is no stranger to this type of vocal. Accent aside, the soaring quality of their voice is something that they're honestly known for. Spectacular. Definitely. Wow. Yeah. I guess you don't graduate from the world of Disney without being able to sing in those super high soaring registers.

That's got to be part of the grueling training. But I also love how they bring in that. mixture of full chest voice, but then movement up into this very sort of nasally pop punky quality and switches back and forth between them. Yeah, and you could hear it throughout substance, but particularly here on the bridge. Fun. And something else about pop punk music, Charlie, that you didn't mention is the classic, the eternal, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I was getting there. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And Demi uses this woe in substance. It's only 12 seconds in. And we're going to go deep on the woes for a little. Yeah, the wo-wows feel like to me the pop punk version of bubblegum pops la-lalas.

Exactly. And that's a great synthesis because the woes have always been present in this sort of genre. The first example that I could find was from 1986 in the Misfits song Astro Zombies. I mean, even when they say all I want, it sounds like they're saying all I, whoa. Right, exactly. It bleeds into the song. And I think it's really funny that my chemical romance, another pop punk, emo, rock band, whatever you want to call it, cover that song for one of the Holy Grails of the Tony Hawk American Wasteland soundtrack. But other songs that use the whoa-o fills, we got Savior by Rise Against.

I dig it. There's the anthem by Good Charlotte. Admittedly on the more emo side of things, we have Sweetness by Jimmy E. World. And they do it on 2005s of all the gin joints in the world by Fall Out Boy. And a personal favorite, the song I got in a skateboarding accident too because I was riled up at how much this song rocks. Oh no. The kids aren't all right by the offspring. It's all woe all the time.

All woe all the time. And it's something that became so maligned in the pop punk genre in the early 2000s that punk stalwarts, no FX. made a parody track called Woe on the Woes in 2002. But all of these similarities between Demi and Pop Punk are there, right? They're there. We've called them out. But there was something specific that was throwing me off about the connection between pop punk and substance. What's that?

The guitar. Oh, okay. 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, 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

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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 Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. There's a distinct guitar sound in substance.

So what do you hear, Charlie? It's almost clean guitar. Yeah, for me, I feel like clean is the perfect way to put it. The guitar tone on the track sounds a little bit too polished. for it to logically be pulled from what I know to be classic pop punk. Original pop punk guitar of what I've noticed tends to sound a little bit crunchy. You could hear it on Ocean Avenue by Yellow Card, Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous by Good Charlotte, and on a weird owl-esque parody song of the genre by Sunrise Skater Kids,

the track Pop Punk Pizza Party, this is the guitar tone that they use. Yeah, very bright, fuzzy, distorted. They're heavy guitars. Right. To me, the new guitar heart tone that we hear on substance is one that is distinctly focused on the pop punk revival. Willow. Transparent soul. It's like a 90s chorus guitar that feels like it's more out of sound garden or something than it does out of pop punk. That chorusy, woo-shy sound, it's a sound you would hear coming out of the 80s in bands like the police, but was heavily used by bands like Nirvana in the grunge.

world. Another person shepherding in the pop punk revival is former rapper, now musician, I guess, machine gun Kelly, and you could hear it on a song Bloody Valentine. Whatever. I feel like this tone of guitar borrows more from the tones of fourth wave emo and post-punk revival music. I'm going deep, Charlie. So you could hear this tone on songs from bands like Citizen. Edward 40 Hands by Mom Jeans You can also hear it on most songs by the band Modern Baseball When I was just a wheel call it 15 or so And you could hear it on the song

Such Small Hands by Lottis Few Which is often cited as one of the apexes Of Experimental Hardcore in Fourth Wave Emo I feel like I have to point out There were obviously clean guitars that have happened in pop-punk throughout the eras. I think of a song like What's My Age Again by Blink 182? But they always seem to get distorted at some

point in the song. Nonetheless, the tone that you're pointing out that we hear on substance is, if you'll allow me, substantively different, I feel like there is that feeling that the guitar amp is maybe, it's not even like far away in the room, it's like in a hallway down in the house somewhere else.

It adds this feeling of, I'm sorry to use the word. but like authenticity because it is a little lo-fi. It's not close-miked and like overproduced. It's just, oh yeah, we happen to have a guitar on. It's over in the hallway. And yeah, we're just, we're just playing it. No big deal. It just plugged it in. Cleans tone. Didn't even think about it. Right. And that's a benchmark of the emo music that we're talking about, right? It's supposed to be inherently authentic. I think that this guitar tone is used to add an air of transparency and sort of associated connection between Demi's influences and what they're trying to do on this track.

I feel like it softens a bit. Yeah, because the song is about asking for substance. Not substances, which have been a challenge for Demi, but substance, something real in life. And the way that they bring that to the fold here is using these tones, which feel not too produced, feel just in the right way, almost recorded at home. Yeah, and I think an interesting thing with regards. two substance here is that Demi isn't using any of the usual collaborators that cloud this sort of pop punk revival scene today. There's no Travis Barker on the track, even though it might be

inspired by Travis. There's no Travis on the track. There's no MGK on the track. Machine Gun Kelly. There's no Avrilavine on the track. The only people that are credited are the collaborators that Demi's been working with their whole career. There's producer and songwriter Oak, who has produced mostly pop and R&B music, as well as Demi's hit, Sorry Not Sorry. Also a friend of the show. We spoke with him a few years ago. And joined by him are his collaborators, Alex Nice and Keith 104 Sorrels, who also play instruments on the track. So I think that Demi's trying to look at this sort of foray into this genre as more authentic. It's not a facade. It's not them trying something new for the sake of trying something new. They're working with people that they've been doing this with for a very long time. They're incorporating genres that are near and dear to their heart, while also kind of subverting. the tonality of pop punk as we know it, which I think is really interesting.

It's rad. Substantive. Quite, quite substantive. Switched on Pop is produced by Rianna Cruz, engineered by Brandon Farlin, edited by Jolie Myers, Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, Community Management by Abby Barr, our executive producer of Meshacharwa and Hannah Rosen, were a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes anywhere you get podcasts and on our website, switchdownpop.com. And you can get us on social media at Switched on Pop on Twitter. Instagram. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, thanks for listening.

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