Switched on Pop - ICYMI: The End Of Pop Music As We Know It: Fall Out Boy & Charli XCX

Episode Date: January 5, 2021

Is it true that all pop music sounds the same today? For the past year the “pop-drop” has dominated the airwaves. This new form of EDM infused pop came out of DJ culture and has infused its sound with every mainstream act like Lady Gaga and Coldplay. Tiring of this sound, some artists are finding creative ways to parody this pop trope. The rock outfit Fall Out Boy’s “Young And Menace” demonstrates equal parts mastery and mockery of the pop-drop. And PC Music, a rising art-music label out of London, skewers the whole of pop cliché on their mixtape collaboration with Charli XCX. After this episode, we promise you’ll be ready to move on to new sounds. Luckily, listeners have collaborated to create a new favorites playlist to help you cleanse your palette. This episode was originally published May 2017. SONGS DISCUSSED The Chainsmokers – Closer Kygo & Selena Gomez – It Ain’t Me Lady Gaga – The Cure Fall Out Boy – Sugar We’re Going Down Fall Out Boy – Young And Menace Jay Z – D.O.A. (Death Of Auto-Tune) Ariana Grande – Into You Katy Perry feat. Skip Marley – Chained To The Rhythm Drake – Passionfruit Postmodern Jukebox – Sugar We’re Going Down Swinging Britney Spears – Oops! I Did It Again Skrillex – Bangarang DJ Snake – Middle Beyoncé – Love On Top Icona Pop – I Love It (feat. Charlie XCX) Iggy Azalea – Fancy ft. Charli XCX Selena Gomez – Same Old Love Charli XCX – 3AM (Pull Up) (feat. MØ) Hannah Diamond – Every Night Bronze – Thy Slaughter Danny L Harle – Super Natural (ft. Carly Rae Jepsen) SOPHIE – JUST LIKE WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE A.G. Cook – Superstar Ariana Grande – Side To Side Coon Sanders Original Nighthawk Orchestra – I’m Gonna Charleston Back To Charleston Spotify Playlist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter

Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, this week we've done something a little bit different. We reached out to our listeners on Twitter and asked for a crowdsourced recommendation for an episode. Wow. Really rolling the dice there. Anything could happen. We got over 40 submissions and there's some extraordinary stuff in here. We've got a little playlist. We'll give it to people at the end. So after combing through these suggestions, Charlie, what stood out? What caught your ear? There were two songs. They really captured me because they are dealing with this sort of internal frustration that I've been having, which is the cliche argument of everything sounds to recycle, to the same. All pop music sounds the same, right? But these two songs have brought that feeling

into a totally new context. Oh, interesting. You're talking about sort of the assembly line. sound of popular music sometimes. Yeah, exactly. So what I want to do today is I want to knock down one of our previous great episodes, and I want to try to declare the death of the pop drop. And on top of that, I want to suggest where sounds might be going. Yes, let's topple some false idols. Let's kill our darlings.

Let's expose the truth. So, Nate, you may remember that last September, we named this sound, this thing that had been happening for over a year. Right. This new musical section where vocals get all chopped up and after the chorus and this giant moment of hyper dance poppiness called this thing the pop drop. I have a hazy recollection of that, yes. Yeah, we talked a lot about it on the show. And what's wild about a lot of these recommendations and a lot of the things that we're seeing on the charts

is a really obvious me-toism. A let's take that sound which has been working and let's recycle it. So we have, for example, Selena Gomez has a tune, It Ain't Me. Do you know this one? No, I haven't heard it. Let's check it out.

Selena Gomez is not the only person borrowing the sound. We can even hear some of it on, the new Gaga track called The Cure. I have heard this one. Yeah, I mean, I hear these as sort of variations on a theme of a pop drop, but it is unavoidable. Oh, yeah. When you turn on the radio, it seems. So I sense that you feel that you've reached peak pop drop.

I think we have, and I have found a song, which is the final nail in the coffin of that pop drop song. It's Fall Out Boy's new single, Young and Menace. And this song is both a perfect pop drop and I think an absolute parody of the form. Now, for background. Listeners may know Fall Out Boy as the Chicago rock band who have been producing hits since 2005. They are probably best known for their song.

Sugar were going down. Do you know this one? You know that tune. Wow. Twelve years. It seems like a lot of it. long time ago. Well, they're this great rock band.

They've got a really strong pop sensibility, and they have released this new track, Young and Menace, which on one level is a personal story about the band's leader, Pete Wentz, who, you could say he's been a bit of a menace in his

growing up as a rock star. He hasn't been the best behaved. But I think that this song is also, at least I'm hearing it as almost a parody, of modern pop music. So let's drop the needle on Young and Menace. All right, hit me.

That was great. Okay, that was great. I love that part. What is that? Is that the same band? That was my first reaction, right? Wild. What is the first thing that you hear in this track? The first, like the first sound you hear or the first thing that I noticed?

What's the first thing you notice? The first thing I noticed was the vocal being doubled by another vocal pitched way down really low. Hold on to hear that again. It's for way too long. Oh, okay. Oh, Charlie didn't notice. that? I didn't notice that.

Advantage Sloan. Well, you know what? The first thing I heard was the moment just before that. The really high voice. The high voice. Yeah. The hint at the pop drop

at the very beginning of the song, just like the Gaga track, just like the chain smoker's track, just like everybody's doing. Yeah, you kind of adambrate the pop drop at the very start. Yeah, I see that. Exactly.

Which is the vocal thrown up octaves as opposed to down octaves. But I think in either way, it's pretty clear that this doesn't really seem like a rock band. No. I think instead it feels like they are imitating an electronic pop, hyper-pop sound. Yeah. I mean, can you even play this? Is this playable live?

That's an interesting question. I want to get back to that in a second. Okay, table that. So in this verse, the first thing that he says is, we've gone too fast for too long. long, we were never supposed to make it half this far. We've gone way too fast for way too long.

Again, two readings here. One could read this as somebody who's basically saying, I'm kind of like a burnt out rock star who has partied too hard and who shouldn't have made it this far. I also am hearing it as just when he says that line. You're never supposed

to make it half this far. The little pop-droppy synthesized vocal comes in. And for me, it's almost like, hey, this sound has gone far too long and needs to die. This is like the equivalent of Jay-Z's Death of Autotune moment. Oh, what's that? That was when he did the Death of Autotune track was sort of a dig at all the rappers who were autotuning their boat.

Is this fallout boys equivalent right now? So I'm sort of hearing it that way. Because I think that they are making a self-conscious song that is playing to the expectations of what's happening on the radio. Both probably for their own success. But I think there's a little bit of parody in here. So they're trying to exploit it and kill it at the same time. Peak pop drop. That's what I'm talking about.

Peak pop drop. So the other thing I notice in this verse is it has this sort of underwere water electronic sound, a sound that you would not expect to hear in rock where all of the upper frequencies are filtered out. All the music is just in the lower frequencies so that the vocal really stands

out. We hear this in tracks all over the place from, we heard this on the Ariana Grande, Max Martin track. What was it? Into you, Charlie. The Ariana Grande Max Martin track, please. What?

I don't know how you could forget the experience of listening to that song. Just a little, just processing that. But go ahead. I'm sorry. So she does the same sort of sound. We've also heard it on another Max Martin track. Recently we talked about Katie Perry's chain to the rhythm. It has this same quality.

And we've also heard this sound on a bunch of Drake's tracks. We explore that thoroughly on another episode. Yeah. Well, you know, Drake actually records in an underwater studio. The underwater sounds. I think this sound is a referential of modern pop music, which is really drawing heavily upon electronic EDM stuff. And you catch this as well when the kick drum comes in.

You get this four to the floor. Duh, duh, duh, duh, sound. Oh, yeah. That sort of buildup that you would expect an electronic pop tune. And then we go to the chorus. What do you think is going to happen in a chorus? I kind of expect what happened in that first song we listened to.

Pour me some sugar mama. What was that called again? It's a pour me some sugar mama sounds like the 1950s version of sugar going down. Now you know where my head is always at. So I would expect something like that where everything kind of peaks in. in this massive, explosive chorus. But no.

It doesn't do that, does it? No, they're doing just what everyone else is doing on the charts right now. They have this, as I've called it too many times, a diminutive chorus. Nothing pops. All of the sonic characteristics of a chorus are just missing.

Instead, we get a very tongue-in-cheek reference to potentially the height of pop music. Britney Spears, Oops, I did it again. Ah, the year 2000, yes. What do you think that they're saying? It was all down from, for Charlie, it was all downhill from there. I think it's been uphill.

What was the question? What do you think this reference is about? Okay, so, okay, that's a great question. Because it is, like, I hear what you were saying earlier that there is something sort of smirky or, or satirical or ironic here. And this is the moment to me where I feel that most acutely Because it does seem to be a little bit an indictment of The pop music landscape by making this reference Right

I think it's I think he kind of gets to have it both ways because at once it's sort of it's it's sort of vent like a certain veneration Of pop grates and it's also sort of a little bit like pulling back the curtain and look You know look what we were doing it again No there's no debate that this is a reference because he used uses the exact same rhythm that Britney Spears uses in her tune. Deep references here, but I think obviously a cynical reference. He says the line, I only wrote this down to make you press rewind. And send a message I was young and a menace.

Well, now I'm connecting it to the psych assessment. Is this some kind of like clockwork orange-esque? brain laboratory that he's reporting from or something? I think that there, again, is a double meaning and partially in that clockwork orange direction. So first, there's actually a deep reference to the band, which I only found on genius.com, that Press for a Wind is a lyrical trope

that they've used on many of their other songs, so they're referencing their uvra, if you will. But there's also this, oops, I did it again. I only wrote that down to make you press for wine. It's like this is, I wrote this thing down because it's infectious. It's going to be stuck in your ear. It's an earworm. You're going to keep going back to it. And I only wrote it to do so suggests that it's a cryptic and sort of menacing commercialism to the pop landscape. Right. I think, I think that's what's coming across. I'm toying with you is what he's saying, basically.

Exactly. Yeah. After his cynical message, what do we get? we get the complete fragmentation and dissolution of every sound we've heard so far. It's like stepping into a fun house of mirrors. This is, and this is the peak pop drop. I think this is the most amazing pop drop I've ever heard. Yeah. We obviously get the chopped up vocals that we've heard in so many other tunes. They're pitched all around.

and underneath a what is it? I don't dare to try and suss out what's happening in that section. It's an immensely controlled rhythm section. Some of that rock guitar is in there. There are just all these insane gestures and sounds moving and sweeping through and messing with your mind.

It's so delicately tied together. It's almost like turning your radio dial really fast and happening to get a bunch of different styles of music that fit in the same rhythm because it's very disjunct. Like it's very, the seams are showing. It has the dubstep qualities that we've heard from Scrilex. It has a lot of that pop trap quality that we have heard from DJ Snake. Totally. It brings these things together. in a way that, again, is controlled, intentional, catchy,

but I think also a bit of a parody. And I get this feeling of parody in the composition itself. Ooh, interesting. Okay. I don't know how to completely describe this collage aesthetic, but there's a moment where you think it's over, but it's not. Right. There's a sense of closure. Yeah, that's...

And... No, it's gonna keep on going. There's another entire section waiting for you. Yeah, that's pretty wild. I think Fall Out Boys is taking the form, distilling it down to its essence, playing it back, making you press rewind. And it makes me reflect on, hey, all the other people that are doing this pop drop sound, one, can't do it nearly as well. But two, probably nobody should repeat this again because this is enough. I buy it. I totally buy it. It's like after we covered Beyonce modulating four times and love on top, it's like everyone else was like, nope, now no one else can modulate again.

There haven't been a lot of pop modulations. Yeah, especially the multiple modulations in a song. Yeah, this is such a maximalist and very like aggressive and intense that it at once makes you feel the sort of desperation of the. lyrics expressed in a musicalized form and makes you go, wow, this song has pushed this technique to its limits and is doing so kind of with a wink at the same time. So I think Fallow Boy have done an extraordinary job here, but I don't think that they are the best parodiest out there. Oh, okay.

I'm intrigued. So there was once a queen of meta-aware, hyper self-conscious pop art distilled to his essence into parody. And that throne for a long time I think was held by Lady Gaga. Yeah.

But I believe that there is a new ascending queen. Who is? Who will talk about right after the ad break. Oh, brutal. Brutal. Okay. I wait with bated breath. Convierte your passion in a

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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 border 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. Nate, at the top of the show, I made a bold statement that too much pop music is sounding too alike and it's getting to me. But we are in luck because there are artists who are turning these pop clichés into brilliant artistic parodies. And I'm talking about more than just

the pop drop. I want to double down on my bold statement by suggesting that there is a new ascendant queen of art pop music who is consciously using these cliches in a way that highlights both the ridiculous elements and the best elements of pop. And I'm very excited to share her with you now. I'm very excited to hear about it. I like your prognosticating here and you're proclaiming. You're like looking at your watch at 10.30 p.m. on April 26, I pronounce the pop drop. Deceased. Bold statement.

Well, I will keep you in suspense no longer. The artist who has got my attention is Charlie X-C-X. Oh, we have not heard from her in a while. Charlie X-C-X, also known as Charlotte Acheson. I guess I should have known that X-C-X was not her real last name, though. No, no. We first talked about Charlie X-C-X, I think on our third episode about her song, Boom Clap, And she is known as a great songwriter, but also as a really great co-writer.

She has written alongside Icona Pop, Iggy Azalea. She wrote the Selena Gomez song, Same Old Love, which we've covered on the show. Really? Oh, fascinating. She's been all over the pop charts for a couple of years, but we've been ignoring her. So we've been missing out because I think that Charlie XX is this really aware pop writer who has a, almost war-hawlish-like character, like Lady Gaga has had in the past, but for me, almost to a whole other degree

in her understanding, celebration, and parading of the form of pop music. Cool. Yeah, okay. Let's drop the needle on Charlie X, X, X's new single 3am pull-up featuring the artist Moe. This is off of her latest mixtape called Number One Angel,

a co-production with many of the artist, on the PC music label. Let's check it out. Take me there. Wow, that is relentless. I dig it. What do you feel about this song? I think I'm into it.

I don't know if I like it or not, but I find it kind of irresistible. I think that is part of its intent. I'm going to do something that is a little a characteristic of our show. Whoa. Before we go into what is making this song tick, I think we need to know a little bit about

the people behind it and how it's made and the influences it's drawing from. Cool. I accept this proposition. Thank you. We need to go back a few years. This new label out of London comes out. They're called PC Music. It's a bunch of electronic musicians

in their 20s, founded by this producer named A.G. Cook. Huh. It's known for robotic, hyperpop that feels like it's K-hop with Max Martin hits distilled down to their purest form and sped out by an artificial intelligence. Huh. Whoa.

Cool. And when you look at the dozens of think pieces about PC music, people describe them as potentially the next big thing in music. But overwhelmingly, the adjectives that you heard were synonyms for plastic, fake, neon, polyurethane, Bubble gum. These were the words that described their sound. Yeah, interesting. There is this great quote from the Guardian. Sam Wolfson writes that this music is part intellectual response to the prevalence of marketing and pop culture and part antagonistic refreshing of the most critically ridiculed music from the past decade and packaging it as if it's the future.

Yeah, that sounds like a pretty accurate assessment of what I just heard. He further describes some of their music as like a malfunctioning bopet. And what's extraordinary about this label is that it's actually not a real label. So first of all, they don't really have like an office. They don't have a formal record label. It's really just a conglomerate of these different electronic producers and singers who have a sort of cult status pseudo-celebrity. They rarely give interviews. And when they do, they're entirely staged.

they are almost like performance artists in pop star imagery. Fascinating. Like a collective, perhaps. They're a collective. Yeah, exactly. A.G. Cook says that he, with this group, is trying to make forward-thinking pop music, something that pushes the envelope. And he wants to make things that are upbeat, happy.

They're almost juvenile. And I want to go into the sounds of PC music, what they're completely. prized of because I think that they're going to give us context for the Charlie X-E-X-E-X album, which was produced by artists from across this label. Yeah. Huh. So what I was saying is that this is pop art music. It's pop music to the nth degree.

It's super self-aware. And it's also, it's intentional. It's trying to make, it's not pop music. And it's not, not making fun of pop music. It's somewhere in the middle. You can't figure out if it's performance art or not. Yeah. The umbrella quality of their sound is just super pop.

And I want to give you some examples. This is Every Night by Hannah Diamond. So robotic. Wow. This is wild, Charlie. Check this out. This is bronze by The Slaughter on PC Music's Volume 1. That is completely blowing my mind.

It is. It's like, um, the simulacra. It's like Bodriard meets pop music or something. It's a little too, usually pop producers find ways to soften the edges of their perfectly quantized computer-made

compositions into something that sounds more organic. Here, it's kind of the opposite. It's like, let's go further into that metronomic precision and sort of lifeless vocals to make it sound as artificial as possible. But beyond just the robotic, quality of the distillation of pop music. It even has this Europop dance sound,

like a sort of sports anthem kind of quality. You can hear it in Denny L. Harrell, I think is the producer, with Carly Ray Jepson. They did a track called Supernatural off of PC Music Volume 2. Nice. So this is what's funny about them. You have this Europop quality that starts really big, but then recesses down into something.

small and constrained. And this is the other character quality of PC music. It has this restraint to it. Just as much as it's super pop, it also holds back. Let me show you in another example, what I mean. This is Sophie.

He's all over the Charlie XX album. He's also working with Rihanna right now. Big producer. He has a track called Just Like We Never Said Goodbye. And I think you'll really get the idea of intentional restraint of that hyper EDM energy. Cool.

Hey, real quick, this is Charlie from the future. We originally published this piece in May 2017. Since then, Sophie identified as trans and now uses she, her pronouns. Okay, back to the music. You have the biggest grit on your face. Oh, my God, yeah, and I feel like my eyes are like, why does sausage? This is so... It's again, but my reaction is at once, like, completely captivated and also, like, slightly disturbed.

Yeah, exactly. And so do you hear that sense that there's, it feels like it's going to be enormous. The song has this obnoxious, loud, trancey, but there's no drums. It never, it just never goes anywhere. It stays at this almost breaking hyper energy. It has that restrained quality. The last thing that we need to discuss about PC music is their simplicity of melody.

their songs are meant to get stuck in your head. This is A.G. Cook, the label's founder, and this is his track, Superstar. Huh, that is, yeah, again, it's wonderful and familiar and slightly unsettling. It has an almost nursery rhyme-like quality, right? Yeah, but it's so aggressive that it takes away any sort of comfort that you might get from those rhymes.

So for a couple of years, PC music has been making this very strange, super pop, robotic, simplistic, restrained bubble gum pop sound. And across the internet, people have been predicting that this is either the next big thing or that this parody is the death of pop music altogether.

They have struggled to find their audience. They haven't ever. had a real breakout smash, except for in these sort of underworlds of music criticism, until working with Charlie X-E-X. And I think we're going to see more and more of their sound with other artists. So I want to listen again to 3am within the context of PC music. Cool. So do you hear 3am in a slightly different context now?

Yeah, I do. I hear it as like one of those PC music experiments, except with, instead of that robotic singer we have a real person like Charlie XX is just kind of dropped into the middle of that though even though they change her vocals too they all they they put some weird gating effect on it

or something where it sounds like it just like swoops in and swoops out really quickly there's like no decay to her voice at all she's definitely embracing the sound and I think bringing it into a slightly more listenable terrain if you will

yeah totally and the song has a nice arc too, you know. Yep. Well, let's talk about that arc and how it works. We open up with the same method that we are hearing in the Fallout Boy. The same thing that we're hearing throughout the pop drop. The hint of the chorus from the very beginning with this high, almost obnoxious vocal. In this case, it's not chopped and sampled, but it has that same quality.

Yeah, there it is. The foreshadow of the feast to come. Exactly. This is a technique we hear all through pop music. It's called Don't Bore Us, get to the chorus, put the hook up the start, and give us a hint of what's to come. And as we said, PC music is trying to distill the sound of pop music and regurgitate it back in a hyper pop form. And so they too use this, don't Boris, get to the chorus. It's a technique we've heard other artists use like Ariana Grande and Max Martin in their song side to side. Right, so this is, again, this is like Uber Pop. Uber Pop. It's using all the right language of pop music and distilling it to its essence. Ah, gotcha, yeah. Aside from just the textural quality, I want to pay attention to the composition of the verse

because it's simple nursery rhyme-like melody that we expect from PC music. It's basically made of this really simple walk down the major scale, right? Right. That is what we call, yeah, consecutive scalar patterns right there. It's the easiest melody anybody could sing. It will immediately get stuck in your ear because of that. Right, and it has that internal repetition that creates a very hooky effect for a listener. And she starts in a low octave so she can eventually walk up the scale to build energy, a great pop writing trick.

Very effective. Basically so that they are immensely sticky, they stay in your ear. but the melody stays simple all throughout. And as the song builds up the chorus, where you move up into a higher register, the melody gets even simpler. She just walks down three notes of the scale. Yeah.

And the melody culminates at the end of the chorus with doubling down on the home note, playing it over and over again, drilling it into your ear. Doesn't get much more textbook than that. I think that the chorus has this PC music-like quality. It's simple, it's a high melody, it's robotic, and underneath it is this restraint. The whole thing is driven by this underlying rhythm.

Yeah, I do hear what you're talking about. And we never get much more than this rhythm. It's this simple, syncopated kick all throughout. Yeah. Incidentally, that's the same rhythm as the Charleston. The dance that was a pop music craze in the 1920s. I'm not, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going to let you go down classical master's route. You can't stop it. It's happening.

No, no, it's over. History repeats itself, my friend. So I think this rhythm really matters because it supports the most important element of the song, and we haven't even called it out. It's the tempo. The song is really fast. It's a lot faster than things that we hear on the charts. It's almost comical.

Really fast. Yeah. And I think that they use a fast BPM in order to bring out the parody quality, to bring attention to the roboticness, the simplicity of the melody. And the song is over 130 beats per minute, I believe. And that's a lot faster than most radio,

which is 120 and lower these days. So I think if you compare it to other things you might be listening to, it really stands out. And this kick drum makes it stand out even more by syncopating the rhythm, so it feels like it's moving even faster. Yeah. And on top of that, you get a vocal singing in really fast 16th notes. So everything feels frantic.

It has this manic-like quality, right? Yeah, that's a good descriptor. It's a little stressful. listen to it. I think that this hyperactive tempo supports the lyric in the meaning of the song, which, although simple, works perfectly with the music. The lyrics are just another cliche. It's about a broken up relationship that gets back together after a 3 a.m. phone call. But this song captures that 3 a.m. feel really well. You know what it's like when you're staying up all night. it's 3 a.m.

You're way over tired and you're just buzzing from too much coffee. Yeah, I do. I think that this song has that feeling of that your heartbeat is like going way too fast. You've been cramming. There's an exam. You can't sleep because of all that caffeine.

And it's embedded in this song. It's in the tempo. It's in the lyrical acceleration. But like PC music is want to do, the song also has this restraint. It never really blows up. Probably, I think it supports the lyric because at 3 a.m., you probably don't have enough energy

to really let it go. Yeah, no, I totally know what you mean. And yet, there is kind of a happy ending, in a way, to this saga. Your dismissal of the lyrics of this song suggests to me that you may not have paid much attention to them. I, in contrast to my usual technique, actually did this time. And if you're not paying attention, as you and I, again, are wont to do.

You don't notice that. The lyrics shift. So at the end, she's talking about pulling up at 3 a.m. for a late night booty call. Right. But after kind of having this come to Jesus moment when Moe steps in and starts singing with her. Yeah. But by the time we get to the final chorus, she's saying, it's 3 a.m. and you are calling, and then,

I can't believe I used to want this. No more, no pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up, right to your love. No more, pull up, pull up, pull up, pull up. So there is an arc of progression there. And afterwards, the song disperses even further. The frenetic quality falls out, and we're left with that washy synth sound,

which maybe supports the protagonist, letting it all go and preparing to rest. Yeah, I buy that. Well, I made multiple bold claims about this track. I hope that we can see that in breaking it down, that this song is really brilliantly embracing the tropes of pop songwriting, taking them to their logical conclusion, doing so really effectively,

and doing so in a really singable song that, you can't get out of your head. Yeah. I want to suggest that Charlie X-E-X is a master of her craft. She can take all of the structures of pop music and give it back to us in a way that says that she knows everything that she's doing. And with the support of A.G. Cook, who is the producer on this track and the founder of the PC music label, I think the two of them are really the masters now of pop art music, I think sort of displacing Lady Gaga who wants to help the throne.

I also want to say that beyond just her understanding of composition and pop cliché, Charlie XX is also playing with the image of pop music. You have to check out this music video of her performing on Kimmel, where her and A.G. Cook performed the song. bounce. The song has zero miracle content other than bounce. Yeah. That is about it. So what's happening is she's dancing on this stark white stage, which is coated in feathers. And she's also wearing feathers. Everything's in white. She's dancing frantically all by herself, jumping all around the stage, out of breath. She's dancing like nobody's watching her. Like she's at a rave. And hilariously,

behind her is A.G. Cook, the label owner and her producer, he's lying face down on the ground as if he's passed out, and she's just dancing all around him, not paying attention. Really? That happened on television? It happened on TV. And I think that it's making fun of this pop cliche. You hear it in a lot of verses. You dance till you drop that. I think it's really mocking that rave culture, the individualistic narwhis. narcissism where everyone's dancing all around you and you're in your own comfortable bubble by yourself no i'm totally convinced you know between this song and the fallout boy song we listened to earlier i find it totally persuasive that artists kind of fed up with the status quo are starting to release their own tracks that sort of poke fun at the the assembly line nature of pop today so is it too much to say that the pop drop is over and that writers need to be conscious of how they use

the cliches that Charlie XEX, A.G. Cook, and PC music so intelligently toy with. It's never too much for me. So let's do it. Let's declare the pop drop dead. And if anybody sad about that, there's good news. The good news is that in our listener recommendations, there is so much extraordinary, good, new music that I'm really excited to check out. And we'll make sure to share that playlist of recommendations with everybody on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, well, I think you've just sketched out some possible new directions. You're never supposed to use the phrase new directions. Whoa, okay. Sorry, Charles. If you don't get the double entendre, just say it aloud a couple of times. People stupidly use it

all the time, especially in marketing, billboards, advertising. It's ridiculous. Oh, my God. That's great. Anyway, Nate, it has been a pleasure. I'm excited to explore new sounds with you. real soon. Till then. Switched-on-pop is produced by me, Charlie Harding, and me, Nate Sloan. Editing by Bill Lance and designed by Luke Harris. We are a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can catch all of our past episodes on the Apple Podcast app, where it would mean a lot to us if you would leave us a review. I'm still waiting for a review in rhyme. We have a playlist of over 40 tracks submitted by listeners. Go check it out. I assure you like me, you'll discover some very cool new stuff on there.

And we are always looking to engage on the Facebook, on the Twitter. Reach out to us at Switched on Pop, and let's continue the conversation. We'll be back again in two weeks with a new show. And until then, thanks for listening. Euforia of Calvin Klein, the new collection Elixir. Three new elixires perfume intense. Solar, Magnetic, Ball. Pulsed in the banner,

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