Switched on Pop - Invasion of the Vibe Snatchers

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Why do so many songs sound familiar? Because the number of chart topping interpolations — songs built off of old hits — has roughly doubled in the five years. It’s everywhere, you can’t escape because many people are embracing it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchedon Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. The other night, I'm watching the Jerry Brookheimer, Tom Cruise, Top Gun Franchise reboot film, Top Gun Maverick. And there's this scene

where they're playing beach volleyball to team bonding montage. It's scored by this song. I ain't worried by One Republic. And I'm thinking, I know that vibe. it's the whistle that alerts me to the fact that this might be

something I've heard before. Where have I heard that whistle, Charlie? It immediately took me to Peter Bjorn and John's song, Young Folks, from 2006. Yep. That song seemed to have launched a whole indie whistling vibe that took

over popular music for a minute. I mean, check out Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zero's home. Or tighten up by the black keys. One year later, Foster the People, puts up pumped up kicks 2010. What a fascinating mini trend you're elucidating here. So this vibe, this sort of indie rock whistle trend,

runs its course by the early 2010s. But now a decade later, it's back. This one republic's song has gone to number 12 on the Hot 100, and it is very much playing on nostalgia, as is the film which it's soundtracking. And in fact, I Ain't Worried is more than just nodding to that vibe. It is a

direct reference to the song that for me started at all, Peter Bjorn and John, because technically Peter Bjorn and John have a songwriting credit on I Ain't Worried. I ain't Worried is an interpolation of young folks. Right. The interpolation, which

is a term that's distinct from a sample, because a sample is when you actually use, the recording of an earlier song in your new track. But an interpolation is when you replay some of the musical material from an existing recording, but you're not actually using the original recording. You're recreating it yourself. It seems like a very common technique in contemporary pop music. Yeah, I was kind of surprised by this one because I took my time to recreate both. I haven't been able to identify at any particular moment exactly where the music is being interpolated.

Like, it kind of feels like it's just borrowing the whole vibe of the song. Like, if we take the drums, for example. Mm-hmm. Here's the groove of the original, young folks. And here's the one republic. I mean, similar, but not identical. Yeah. Similar in both kind of rudimentary rock drum grooves either way.

You can't copyright a beat. So that's not the problem. How about the baseline? Baseline can give us some melodic information, some harmonic information. Potentially, you can copyright a baseline. Here's the base from the Peter Bjorn and John. And then One Republic. Interesting.

The two baselines follow the same harmonic progression at first, but then the One Republic baseline goes in a different direction. And also the actual melodic content is not the same. So, I mean, they're pretty, if you're, played these back to back, I wouldn't be like, oh yeah, those are the same song. They sound very different. We're not here to talk about drums and bass. We're here to talk about whistling, aren't we? Because that's what you can copyright. Definitely a melody. Here's the Peter Bjorn and John. I'm on the edge of my seat. Digging the MIDI whistle check. And the one

Republic. Originally, these songs were in different keys, so I just transcribe them to be in the same place. Just to be sure, what if we play both melodies on top of each other at the same time? A, I love it. And B, they're clearly not the same melody. There's some overlap. Like, there's a note that they hit at the same time. This is true. The Peter Bjorn starts high and then descends lower and lower and lower. The One Republic starts low, rises up, and then goes down in a similar arc as the Peter Bjorn around the same time.

But yeah, they're different melodies. Peter Bjorn and John. You keep, I won't stand for this John Erasure, Charlie. P.B. and J. Thank you. I stand corrected. Okay. But your point is well taken.

When I played this one Republic song for my wife, Bess, I was like, do you recognize this? Does it remind you of any other song? And she was totally baffled. She's like, I don't know what you're talking about because she thought I was playing her the Peter Bjorn and John. Like, these songs might not be in the same key, have the same chords or share the same melody, but they definitely have the same vibe. Because what's happening here is a type of interpolation.

In this case, the songs feel, its arrangement, it's instrumentation. And it's working because the song is a hit. It reminds us of the old one. And yet it's a new song. And it's just one of the many ways that pop music today is often referencing the past. through interpolation, whether a direct lyric, melody, or instrumentation, all of which I'm jokingly calling vibe snatching. Mm, goosebumps. In fact, I think we've entered a new era in interpolations. We've talked about it on the show.

Yeah. With examples like Olivia Rodriguez crediting Taylor and Paramour, for instance. Mm-hmm. Or Beyonce giving credit to Robin S. Mm-hmm. Even Elvis, an old one, interpolated hound dog. It's different lyrics than the original. Right. Lado's big energy samples the Tom Tom Club sound, but also interpolates Mariah Carey's fantasy.

And this is just not stopping. There are so many of them. Like check out Rita Aura and Ammanback's bang bang bang. Bang bang na na na na na na na bang. Bang bang. Oh my gosh. Think of me trouble. This song's released in 2021, but it sounds like it's from the 80s. Does it remind you of something? Axel's theme from Beverly Hills Cop. maybe? Yes. Wow. The song is Axel F, written by Harold Fultermeier, who, to bring things full circle, also wrote the Top Gun Anthem. Whoa, double goosebumps. Okay, we were just incepted, but I want to keep going deeper on this trend of interpolations. We've heard previously on the show, the song

Betty Got Money by Young Gravy. This is not a Rick Roy. Which is both a sample and an interpolation, because they've updated a lyric from Rick Asley. never going to give you up, which is officially this time a Rickroll. It's an interpolation nation. It is. That one went to number 33 on the Hot 100. And here's a sneaky one for you, another recent one. Just this year, the singer Ian Dior, who was famous for the song Mood, amongst many others, he has a song with Machine Gun Kelly and Travis Barker called Thought It Was,

with an interpolation that I actually found pretty hard to notice. Challenge accepted. Lost my mind. Chasing a filling in the hills at night. Closing time. Oh, you got it, man. Dun, dun, done. Closing time.

Open all the doors and let you out into the world. I'm a Dan Wilson head. What can I say? Friend of the show. Closing time, of course. Semi-sonic. Classic. Major 90s hit.

Yeah. Sonic. That is a weird one. Doesn't it feel like there's an invasion of the vibe snatchers? This is just everywhere. Or I could be kinder and say that we're in the air of the rise of the interpolation. I mean, either way you put it, Chuck, it's a phenomenon that is worth understanding. Whether you see it as a positive thing, like, oh, we're rediscovering, reviving these classic songs, and that's a good thing.

Or whether you see it as a bad thing, like, oh, this is just derivative, unoriginal, uninspital. Either way, the question I want to know is like, why? Why is everyone interpolating? Why is everyone vibes snatching? The first question I had to ask myself was, is this just some kind of confirmation bias? Like, am I hearing it because I want to hear it? Am I noticing these things? To be sure, I went to the year and Billboard Hot 100 and looked at every single song from 2010 to 2021 and counted up whether or not they contained an interpolation based off of genius.com's database. which is user annotated. So there's probably some user error in there. So I'm really just looking for the trend. But what I found is that roughly from 2010 to 2015,

about 10% of songs had an interpolation on them on the Hot 100 year-end chart. Okay. And then there's this inflection point in 2016. And from 2016 to 2021, about 20% of songs had an interpolation on the year-end hot 100. That's double. Yeah. Wow. So we could speculate why this change.

Like it could be the rise of social. media and TikTok, streaming as a dominant form of listening. 2017 was the year that streaming outpaces album sales. And so that timing makes sense. We could say that we just maybe live in an age of nostalgia. Everything is a remix. Wow. But I wanted to get answers from the people in the business.

So I spoke to about a half dozen songwriters and producers and a handful of managers, A&Rs and publishers, all people with songs making or representing songs on the Hot 100. and most of them wanted to remain anonymous around this issue. I'll tell you what they told me right after a quick break. 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.

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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. First, on the positive, we definitely are seeing a shift in citation. After years of dialogue on the role of cultural appropriation in pop music, artists are perhaps listening a bit more. So, Beyonce, we talked about on the episode about Break My Soul and her album Renaissance, she's giving credit to folks who maybe she didn't need to on her last record because they weren't exact interpolations.

Robin S, for example, on Break My Soul. but in doing so she gives cultural and financial credit to the forerunners of dance music, the people that she's quoting. The second thing I'm hearing is that part of it's what's happening in songwriting sessions. One songwriter told me that every single time a session starts, Spotify is open, people are listening to music talking about what they're viving on. And it's not uncommon that in a songwriting session, you might pull Spotify back open and be like, huh, we need a cool snare sound or like a synth sound. Let's go check out another song we really like. So maybe interpolations are coming in because the music is in the songwriting session room. But there's another significant trend that I think is playing a very important role in the rise of the interpolation.

And it's all about financially backed publishing companies looking for new revenue sources. Hi, I'm Justin Shukad. I am president of Primary Wave music based in New York. Primary Wave is a publisher with financial back. and owns a lot of catalogs. Justin, they're president. He subscribes to this age-old wisdom in music. Once a hit, always a hit. So a music publisher's job is to make money

off the songwriting copyright of a song. They make money every single time that song is streamed, but they also try to get TV placements and covers that help build the value of that copyright. That is music publishing. It's just taking what was, recreating, enhancing. The one thing that's never changed has been these iconic evergreen songs.

And all publishers want to rework them, but most never focused on it. Over the last few years, there's been this sea change in publishing. Financial firms have started offering large payouts to buy up artist catalogs on the theory that listener data from streaming provides forecastable future revenues. And some folks are getting big checks, $400 million to Bob Dylan for his catalog. Neil Young got $150 million for 50% of his catalog. Steve Nix gave up 80% of hers for $100 million. Primary Wave bought that one.

When you buy a catalog for heightened multiples, you need to drive revenue into that catalog. How do you drive revenue? You drive revenue through sync. You drive revenue through big ticket items, stocks or biopics, and guess what? You drive it through covers and then even further into interpolation.

So if someone interpolates your song, the rights owner to that song is going to get a credit and paid publishing royalties, which also enhances the likelihood could that maybe you hear that cool interpolation and we'll go check out the original song. So it's kind of a double whammy. I asked Justin how he came up with this

strategy. I'm a hip-hop, long island boy. Who said it better than anyone? It was Puffy. The king of it. Man, he's taking hits from the 80s and make him so crazy. Diddy, the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy, he's been doing the interpolation game for a long time, very successfully. But it took going

to Hollywood for Justin to realize that what Puff Daddy was doing could play out for countless other artists. One day Justin's talking very colorfully, if you will, with Ezekiel Lewis from Epic Records, who tells the story of Jerry Brookheimer. Yeah, Top Gun Guy.

Brooke. He tells me, like, I sat with Brookheimer and his crew of fucking, you know, TV executives. And here they have this monster film franchise. They're working on picking songs for the 2020 bad boys film, Bad Boys for Life. And Zique is working with a who's who

of writers and producers in LA making the best records and the first meeting he hits seven or eight, nine records and Brockheimer's team's like he got nothing there. Zheek's like fuck. And then he comes back

two weeks later he goes, I hit play again. He brings in the black eyed peas in J. Belvin's song, Ritmo. Which interpolates Corona's 1995 hit Rhythm of the Night. And their eyes fucking lit up wide

because it had an interpolation of a record guys fucking new from the 90s. So it was like, and when he said that to me, I'm like, that was an aha moment. And then I started connecting the box. Huh. He shifts his whole strategy. He says he's done chasing new stuff and instead tells his team,

We own the best songs out there. I go, we want to be creative. I'm like, great. Let's focus on that. So I ask him, how do you even start? Like, how do you get someone to write a song with your song in it? We literally make lists on a weekly basis on songs. and pitch ideas.

And sometimes we'll have the original idea. And, you know, like, you can't just pitch an idea in an email. So we'll have our in-house producers maybe create the idea that we've articulated. And so it'll be a pitch idea to stand out like something that's, you know, a little big, not fully cooked. But, you know, you're putting the ingredients together. We'll send them an idea and then maybe they'll bite. There's no marketplace for these kinds of ideas and pre-produced tracks. Justin says it's all about relationships.

He's been doing this thing for 30 years. And he lands songs consistently successfully. Take, for example, that Ian Diora song that samples closing time. I mean, it's funny because closing time actually happened. You know, we actually did a camp. A camp is a songwriting camp where songwriters and producers get matched up to make songs together. When we do these camps, we'll take one of our songs that were just going to create with the mindset of how could we really extract more income from the song. So the Ian Diorland was obviously closing time.

It was just, we knew again, just classic melody. And we were ripping it. We probably had like six or seven different versions of it. So they've hosted this camp specifically to leverage interpolations in their catalog. And they've got multiple versions of closing time that they own. They need to get it to an artist. So Justin passes it to an R guy, who knows Ian, who passes it to Ian, who likes the song. They cut the record.

I lost my mind chasing a feeling in the hills at night. I like this version of the story because when I heard thought it was, I mean, I guess you heard closing time right away, but it kind of accepts the song enough. It changes it. They've made something new from that material. But that proactive approach isn't the only way of leveraging your existing catalog of songs. There's another side to interpolations.

It's the vibe, and you can't copyright the vibes. But you can't stop people from trying. Here's the thing. As you're saying about in songwriting sessions, people probably being inspired by things, sometimes vibes sneak their way into your song in a way that maybe you didn't intend for it to do so. And then you get in trouble. Justin gives me an example. The Maroon 5 Memories song.

You know, listen, do you hear an interpolation in that? Here's to the ones that we got. Cheers to the wish you were here, but just to the. I heard Pockabelle's canon. I don't know. You hear anything, Nate? No, I don't think so. We're both wrong.

Yeah, there's a Bob Marley, no woman, no cry. Now, I mean, it could probably be argued, but, you know, they came to us well in advance before. We didn't pitch that. I would love to tell you I pitched it, but we didn't. One of the managers I spoke with, Lucas Keller, called this preemptive. musicology. Basically, people hire musicologists like yourself to check that their songs don't

infringe and to avoid costly lawsuits like the famed Blurred Lions case where Robin Thick and Farrell Williams had to pay Marvin Gay's estate for using the vibe from Got to Give It Up, even though the songs don't really share exactly any material. You don't want to end up in that kind of situation. And so people will either

change the song or reach out just in case. I got a call from the attorney. He goes, listen to you. He goes, I'm going to say his record. He goes, we think we're safe. We went to a musicologist, but I know it's Marley. And he goes, I don't want to get in a pitching match. And the guys are comfortable.

And he made me an offer. And by the way, you know as well as I could. I could have been a fucking pain in the ass because I got, I could have had my, my, my, my thing out thing. And I heard the record. It was obviously memories. That's the real. It was the number of record. But I appreciated the way he did it.

And, you know, I was on the fence about, you know, what I thought. And we took his offers. So just as these songs weren't the same. Musicologist says they're probably not the same. But there seems to be a great area here. And people are giving interpolation credits just to be safe. It's a very fine line. There's no textbook on any of this stuff.

Like, why clear it? Do they like Adam Levine, Emberon 5? Do they really want to fuck with the Marley franchise? Like there's so much money involved, you're almost better off. I'm just saying it's kind of like schmuck insurance. Like, you know, why mess with something that could hold anything up? Like, that train is too fucking big is what I'm guessing at the end of the day. I feel like we're back at the beginning of this conversation.

Why is one republic crediting young folks as an interpolation when we listen to each part isolated? We saw they didn't actually map up. It's because of what Justin was just describing. It's not worth maybe getting entangled in a potential lawsuit, both the financial and the publicity fallout from that. Like, just get the interpolation credit and move on with your life. On a giant Jerry Prokheimer production, I don't think people are messing around. Nobody wants to have a controversy with this song. The song might have been an intentional placement.

As we've heard, Brockheimer loves interpolations. You know, maybe that's what he's going for. Maybe he gave that brief. I did try to reach Interscope Records, the label for One Republic, but didn't hear back. But I do know that this is just one song that's part of a much larger trend of interpolating old songs into new hits. I even confirm this over email with Hypnosis, one of the largest publishing investment management firms. They too are making interpolations a part of their strategy. You might think that this sounds crass or shady. It's just business. But the reality is audiences

love these songs. They've doubled on the year on Hot 100 in the last decade. And for Justin at Primary Wave, it's simply about the music. When we hear something, what is that melody that brings us to a moment that is already identifiable in our world. And that's what, that's why interpolation work. They bring us back. That's the musical reason for it. Does songwriter Jenny Owen Young's playfully put it to me this way? No new hook will ever be as hooky as a hook that's already hooked you.

Switchdown Pop is produced by Rianna Cruz, edited by Jolie Myers, engineer for Brandon M. Farland, illustrations by Ira Scott Lee. Leave, community management by Effie Bar. Our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashok Hurwa, or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Ultra. You can find more episodes of Switched-on-Pop wherever you get podcasts.

I'm talking Spotify. I'm talking Apple Podcasts. And I'm talking our website, www. www.switchedonpop.com. Also, we love hearing from you. What interpolations are you hearing on the pop charts right now? Hit us up at Switched-on-pop on Instagram and Twitter.

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