Switched on Pop - ICYMI: We *do* talk about Bruno

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

The number one song on the charts is a bit of a mystery. “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the unlikely hit from Disney’s sleeper animated musical Encanto. Set in a mountainous village in Colombia, the film was a middling commercial success when it was released in Nov 2021. But in recent months it has become a pop culture phenomenon for a confluence of reasons: an expansive discourse on Colombian representation in media, fan videos on TikTok, and of course it's ear-wormy hits.  The musical is yet another notch in the belt for Lin Manuel Miranda (the auteur behind Hamilton and In The Heights) who wrote the now chart-topping song book. While Disney certainly commands vast commercial success, its musicals rarely see such crossover attention. The last #1 Disney musical number was “A Whole New World” from the animated Aladdin back in 1993. Where that song was literally uplifting, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is quite the opposite.  Bruno is the uncle of the Madrigal family, whose skill for seeing the future portends gloom and sends him into exile. In his namesake song “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” an ensemble cast trade verses about his ghostly presence (Bruno haunts the family home, living inside its walls). It is an odd ball song, with dark and bizarre lyrics. Sure it starts with a story about rain on a wedding day (which is not ironic), but then it takes a hard left into tales of dead fish, middle aged weight gain, and creeping rats. So then what makes it a hit? A distinctive concoction of salsa piano rhythms, familiar Lin Manuel Miranda-isms, and contemporary pop connections to Camila Cabello, Britney Spears, J Balvin, Bad Bunny and Cardi B.  Listen to Switched On Pop to solve the mystery of what makes “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” a hit.  SONGS DISCUSSED Lin Manuel Miranda - We Don’t Talk About Bruno, In The Heights, Helpless, Satisfied, My Shot, Wait For It, Say No To This Cardi B, J Balvin, I Like It Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee - Despacito Camila Cabello, Young Thug - Havana Britney Spears - Baby One More Time Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to Switch On Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So Nate, this week we have a musical mystery. Hey Charlie and Nate, it's Sarah from Berkeley here.

What is going on with We Don't Talk About Bruno? We don't talk about Bruno. The song has obviously completely taken over the world, and I want your musical take on what makes it tick. Yes, we don't talk about Bruno, smash hit off the soundtrack for the Disney film in Canto, which came out late last year. It's time to talk about We Don't Talk about Bruno. And this one is a bit of a mystery, because it's rare that a Disney song

makes it onto the Hot 100, and Bruno is currently at number one, having unseated Adele, and it could potentially be the biggest Disney song since the 1990s when a whole new world was charting. I mean, that kind of surprised me because what I've heard of this song, it's pretty unusual for a chart topper. Like, where did it come from and how did it get to be so popular? Right. So the essential details here are Encanto is the latest Disney animated film taking place in a fictionalized Colombia. It follows the Madrigal family. They each have special powers

except for the protagonist, Mirabelle. They have a forgotten uncle, Bruno. He's got a two-sided gift for seeing the future. Not everyone likes the future that he sees, so he goes into exile. The extended Madrigal family

are gossiping in this ensemble song featuring multiple characters, cousins, aunts, uncles, figuring out what's up with this exiled Uncle Bruno? Nice summary, Charles. Do the Little Mermaid next. Songwriter Charlie Harding explains Disney songs.

Spin a podcast or less is the, yeah, exactly. I'd listen. You asked why is it a hit? I think that's why we're here. I have my theories. I imagine you have your theories. What are you hearing? The very first thing I hear when I listen to,

we don't talk about Bruno, is the musical accompaniment. let's zoom in on the piano part. When I hear this piano part, I'm instantly transported to the world of Afro-Latin music, and particularly a style that originated in Cuba called Montuno. We've actually talked about this on the podcast before, way back when we dug into Camia Cabo's Havana. Right. So this piano motive is very characteristic of the style,

the way it features these kind of syncopated notes in the left-hand base. Yeah, played alone, it's almost not enough information to even tell where the beat is. Yeah, it's very disorienting. The right hand kind of grounds you in these arpeggiated melodies. Though actually now that I'm playing, it's also pretty syncopated as well. It makes you want to dance. I mean, that's the point of this. Yeah.

And then so this belongs to this larger genre of Montuno, but the sound of this particular one, the way it's in this C minor key, the way it's kind of at a slower tempo, this is a particular tradition called Guahira, known for its kind of laid-back sultry and maybe kind of slightly mysterious sound, which is appropriate to the text of We Don't Talk About Bruno. Yeah, you're right. In fact, Lynn Manuel Miranda, the musical Auteur from Hamilton in the Heights, Moana,

who wrote this song, Bruno. He supposedly wrote this song on the spot when the screenwriters were like, we've got this spooky character, kind of a mystery, and he's like, okay, this is definitely a dark, slow piano Montuno. Interesting. I mean, you can hear it even from the very first notes, this kind of, the two piano notes that lead into the first chord. It's like there's something a little... It's dark. A little dark about it.

This is menacing. Yeah, we're in a minor key. And then this tense seventh chord that ends each chorus. Spooky. There's a lot of suspense here. So for me, what brought me into this song, even before I'd seen the movie and really knew what it was about at all, was the sonic references to Afro Latin music and the kind of sinister, slightly macabre, harmonic choices that are being made here. So that's what first got me into this song. Yeah. But I feel like that's just one part of the picture of this song.

Like, what are you hearing? The most curious thing about this song, especially being. now a pop hit, not just a Disney animated musical song, is that it's a piece with many characters. Like, each verse is a different person singing in a totally different style. Let's take a listen to the first verse, Peppa Madrigal, and her husband Felix. This is the first verse, so we're very much in that dramatic salsa, Guajira, sound. Right. When we get to the second verse, the next Madrigal, Dolores, she takes us into the world of hip-hop. Or maybe even like Latin trap. Definitely. Yeah, I like the sort of ASMR whispered rapping

that she's doing here. And like the bass kind of becomes an 808 at that moment. Yeah, exactly. What? That's cool. I didn't really pick up on that. There's more characters. There's more characters. We go to verse four and Isabella sings basically a ballad. Of my dreams would be promised and someday be mine. But the most rewarding thing about this song is when you get to the final verse, you realize that all of these characters who've all been saying, don't talk about Bruno, it's gossip. It turns out they're all talking about the same thing,

and all of their parts have been written so that they collide together into a metaverse. Everyone sings together. Cool. So there's kind of a genre and sound for everyone. My first reaction was like, well, this isn't very much like a pop song. It does too many things at once. Right. And then I realized, like, I feel like one of the biggest trends that we've spoken about on the show over the years has been the way in which song form has been upended, which genre has been upended.

Right. Artists like Drake and Future on their song, Life is Good, have two completely different songs mash together. brother. And artists like J Balvin, I tell you for us Man a house in Rosewood is too plush 100,000 for the chiefs ring on a finger look I don't flew or not to Spain to be in my domain

and automata. And artists like Jay Balvin decide to play with traditional verse-core structure and just make hook after hook after hook. So maybe we're kind of primed to hear a song like Bruno, which jumps from place to place because it's narratively compelling and it doesn't really matter if it follows a particularly set form. Interesting.

So as mainstream pop becomes more formally adventurous and experimental, there's actually more room in our kind of mainstream. taste for the kaleidoscopic styles of a song like we don't talk about Bruno. Yeah, exactly. I find that very persuasive, but I'm still pretty surprised at the success of this song. I feel like there are other tracks from the Encanto soundtrack that are even more plausible as pop hits, like surface pressure. Like, that is a pop chorus to me.

It's got a beat. It's got a repeating chord progression. It's got a melody that cycles around and round. I hear then, I think, oh, yeah, that works as a pop song. Actually, no surprise. Surface pressure is currently in the top 10 as well. Who knows? Maybe it could reach as high as Bruno.

Okay, so I wasn't wrong in my diagnosis of the pop predilections of that song. Yes, you are a pop oracle. Bruno is still, it's weird, it's different. It doesn't correspond to most of what's on the chart. So I'm going to need you to unleash your most esoteric theories as to why this song has become so successful. So I can truly appreciate it. You know I will. And I'm going to do so in the second half of the episode.

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Well, the first is that no matter what we do, we cannot escape Lin-Win-Wil Miranda. Okay, I think I can see that. Yeah, and he's been working this sound of putting together contemporary popular music and blending it with the world of Latin pop. He's been doing this for a while now, right? His first Broadway musical in The Heights does just this. Yes, but they press through the mess, bounce checks. There we go.

You've got your piano montuno. You've got the rapping. Mashed together. We've heard this sound. But it's more than just the genre connections. There's a certain way that he writes. There's a lot of sort of like musical genre tropes and things that he does over and over again that feel familiar. And if you've been exposed to his work, which is really hard not to have been, you're going to be more primed to enjoy Bruno.

Okay. I'm intrigued. What are some of the tricks in the Lin-Manuel musical playbook that we might encounter here? To be honest, while I enjoy his work, I'm not enmeshed in it in the same way that my wife is. And so I had to call on Bess to answer this question. Nice. Okay. Wow, bringing the big guns. I love it. Our Lin-Manuel Miranda whisperer. Do you know what we're going to be listening to? Lin-Manuel Miranda. Do you know what it's from?

Hamilton. She hadn't seen Encanto. What? This is the hit song from the movie The Canto. Okay. She's never heard this song. God, this sounds just like the Maria Reynolds song. She's referencing a song from Hamilton.

And I said, no, please, sir. That's what it reminds me of. It's the bodice-ripping song. No, no, say no to this. My fish will die the next day. Yeah. No, no. He told me I'd grow a gut.

And just like he said. This is it. I did it. Did I solve your linemen well? Myristery. That's the best I got. That was awesome. Right.

So the song Say No to this from Hamilton has this very similar no, no, no quality as the Bruno song. In fact, Limonwell named the character Bruno. he liked how no, no, no, no, no, worked. So he relies on some common tricks. That's amazing. Bess, you're on the payroll. I'll let her know. For me, there was one moment that brought me right back to Hamilton.

And it's in that ballad section sung by Isabella that you referenced earlier. And it's when she does this particular kind of vocal embellishment. It's when she sings, he told me that my power would grow. On the word grow, there's this specific kind of melisma, like grow. It's a subtle thing, but it's exactly what happens in the song satisfied in Hamilton when the Schuyler sisters are singing. And it's actually in the same exact key. They do the exact same melodic motive on the word Eliza.

Me that my power would grow like the grapes that thrive on the sky. Okay, that's wicked subtle, but also wild to me because that was the other thing when I played this for Best. She was like immediately singing Satisfied. Okay. First of all, it's very satisfied. God, I hope you're satisfied. And, you know, it's not the only thing the songs are borrowing because Satisfied also does that like mash-upy thing. This is what Best told me.

Satisfied is a companion song to Helpless. It's a reaction to Helpless. And they're sung on top of each other at a certain point in Satisfied. Okay, so Helpless is the other Skylar sister song. You hear Helpless. And then in Satisfied, that little melody comes in again. You have these characters colliding. So Wild.

So Wild. only that, what are we going to call that embellishment? We need to name it. Call it the Lynn Jump. Not only does it share the Lynn Jump. It also shares that characters mashing up their different perspectives, colliding on each other, just like Bruno does. I feel like Bruno and Satisfied are begging for a mashup. Maybe someone already has, but if not, there's an opportunity there and we're offering it to you. Wait, Nate, I've got one more Lynn Manuel thing that he does. A Mirandaism? This might be, Mirandaism, this might be more of a musical cliche,

but he loves to completely cut the lights, zoom in, light spotlight on one character in the middle of a song at the peak drama. Right, right. So it happens in Bruno. Of my dreams would be promised and someday be mine.

You get the same thing in the song, wait for it from Hamilton. What is it like in his shoes? There it is. It's in my shot from Hamilton. I imagine death so much Oh my God, wait, this is so good. That's amazing, Chuck.

We need a name for this one too. I almost think of it. It's like running off a cliff, kind of. Like you're going higher and higher and higher than you just are in free fall. It's very effective the way he does it. So we have the Lynn Jump, which is the little melody thing, and then we have the free fall.

When you jump off the cliff and everything is gone, and you're just like floating there, waiting to see what happens. Works for me. Works for me. Okay. I'm sure there's like infinite more little cliches and things that he does. They work. They keep pulling me into the songs.

I totally agree. He's been doing this stuff for years. The songs are wildly popular. And it just kind of makes sense to me that at this point, that one of them or several of them would end up charting. But I think the reason why Bruno of all songs on the Encanto soundtrack is the one that's going up the charts is because it feels extremely connected to the language of contemporary popular music. I hear at least four references.

Okay, cool. I'm curious to hear what the reasons are because, again, I don't hear this as belonging. to, you know, the typical top 10, this kind of dramatic, multi-character, Broadway-style musical theater number. Like, what is it doing up at the highest reaches of the top 40? That's because the first reference I hear hasn't been on the charts for a minute now. You ready? Cautiously. I got nothing.

Are you kidding me? One more time. One more time. Just the first two notes. No, no, you don't get this. That's not, that's, that is patently different. The beginning of Bruno, which we already talked about on this episode, those opening notes as being mysterious. That is entirely different than Britney Spears.

Those are not the same. I don't know. This is the most diminutively silly connection I've ever drawn. Maybe it's nothing. It's not a connection. Just strike it from the record. Okay. I got another one for you.

Okay. Wow, you're not after a great start. God, I hope I can win you back. All right. All right. The verse in Bruno where things go into the ballad world. Uh-huh. Are these chords familiar to you?

That is one of the most ubiquitous chord progressions in pop music. Okay, but what if you spin it around and you play it like this? Despacito does it like this. Bruno does it kind of in the inverse. Okay, you're warmer. You're warmer. It's not the complete Pratt fall that was your opening solvo here. This is your, I'm giving you partial credit for this one. Thanks. Yeah, you're right. This is one of the most common chord progressions of all time. It's just a pop chord progression. But the connection to Latin pop is significant. Yeah. Right? When we hear we don't talk about Bruno.

I think it's due to the overwhelming success of Latin music on the pop charts in the last. a handful of years, right? Like, it makes me immediately think of a song like Cardi B, Bad Bunny, and Jay Balvin's. I like it. Right. It's got the same salsa-style piano montuno. It's got the 808 heavy bass. And when we go to the Whisper Rap verse of Bruno.

Right. Dolores's verse. Yeah, we're in the land of hip-hop drums, an upright bass that sounds processed to be very, contemporary and if you'll bear with me okay keep on listening yeah we get this verse with a bunch of different characters later on and Bruno we haven't listened to yet and it's got this particular drum sound he told me my fish will die the next day those claps yeah this is a moment in the

song where we're trading characters trading characters and underneath we have these claps right but it's not like a crowd clapping those are electronic drum machine claps that feel like they're coming from a song like Camila Cabello's Havana, for example. I mean, that last reference brings the most true to me. I mean, I mentioned Havana already as another appearance of our Muntuno and the Quahira sound. So, yeah, I feel like that's a, I'm comfortable with that as an anteced. And I like hearing those handclaps there.

I'm less skeptical than I was when you started. I do hear the modern references. now in Bruno, even though they're kind of like buried under the surface. I do detect them. Yeah. I mean, it's smart production. Like, this isn't just a song in an old school musical tradition by any means. They're using contemporary hop language and moments as minuscule as the sound of a clap to make us feel like it fits more comfortably on the Hot 100.

But to be honest, answering this question of why does any song work? Yeah. Man, it's a million extra musical reasons. TikTok, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Sure. It's tons of kids watching a Disney film, loving it. Right. But then it's the song just working.

And this is a weird song. Like, we haven't even talked about the fact that there's a lyric about a dead fish in the middle of the song. It is truly bizarre. And I think it is a mishmash of all of these things. the success of Latin pop, the empire of Lin-Mmanuel Miranda. Right. The way that a piano Montuno from salsa just makes you want to move a certain way.

And of course, all of the subtle references to contemporary pop. Charlie, that's enough for me. I mean, when I listen to Bruno now, I'm not going to be so mystified. I'm going to be thinking about all of those connections. And I'm just going to be enjoying having a wonderfully weird and different song at the top. of the charts. I think that's awesome. Switched On Pop is produced by Nate Sloan, me, Charlie Harding. We're edited by Jolie Myers, engineered by Brandon and Farland,

illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, and Community Management by Abby Bar. Our executive producers are Nashak Kerwa and Hannah Rosen. Remember the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of our show anywhere you listen to podcasts, and our website, switchonpop.com. Also, we love hearing from you on the Twitter and the Instagram at Switched on Pop. Tell us what you're hearing in Enkanto. What are the Lin-Manuel Miranda Mirandaism that we missed and the other sonic references to pop that are layered in there?

We're eagerly awaiting your response. We'll be back on Tuesday with a conversation with the electronic dance duo Sylvan S.O. It's going to be really fun. And until then, thanks for listening.