Switched on Pop - Learning to love: Tate McRae

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Tate McRae's billions of streams and perfectly crafted hits can feel almost algorithmic, like an AI trained on 20 years of pop music. In anticipation of McRae’s third album So Close to What, out this Friday, we dissect McRae’s "SimplePop" formula, from her strategic, indescript vocal delivery to expert "vibe snatching" of Y2K sounds.  Through singles like "exes” and “sports car,” Charlie and Reanna trace her sonic lineage and discover why pop music needs artists who refine sounds as much as those who revolutionize them, seeing if there’s room to love her music in the process. This dancer-turned-singer might not be the next Britney Spears, but she could be this generation's Paula Abdul. More Watch Adam Neely's "Scotch Snaps in Hip Hop" Songs Discussed Tate McRae - "sports car" Tate McRae - "greedy" Tate McRae - "you broke me first" Tate McRae - "One Day" Tate McRae - "exes" Lisa - "Money" Halsey - "100 Letters" Cardi B - "I Like It" Beyoncé - "Drunk in Love" Ariana Grande - "7 Rings" Ariana Grande - "thank u, next" Tate McRae - "it's okay im okay"  Ying Yang Twins - "Wait (The Whisper Song)" The Lonely Island - "Bing Bong Brothers" The Pussycat Dolls - "Buttons" Missy Elliott - "Get Your Freak On" Missy Elliott feat. Ludacris - "Gossip Folks" Britney Spears - "Toxic" Britney Spears - "Gimme More" Cassie - "Me & U" Paula Abdul - "Straight Up" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of eater. We've just launched the new is 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. Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch non-pob. I am producer Rianna Cruz. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. So Charlie, you and I talk a lot about the new class of pop stars, right?

Sure. The young ones, you know, appealing to Gen Alpha, artists captivating the minds of those younger than I, chosen to shepherd us into the next era of pop music. Keeping us on. We got Noah Khan, who we've had on the show before. Yep. Teddy Swims, America's new favorite R&B, extraordinary

and back-flipping superstar Benson Boone I was kind of a Benson Boone skeptic until I saw those backflips at the Grammys as was I, as was I, and I'm still a skeptic don't get me wrong, but while these artists confound me, I also understand that every era

needs its white guy, singer-songwriter contingency. However, there's another name that also comes up in these same conversations. A Canadian phenomenon A dancer extraordinaire. The latest of the YouTube generation of pop stars.

I'm talking about Tate McCray. Is that her given name? Given name Tatum. So close. Oh, okay. Like Channing. Tatum, comma Channing, Tate McCray. Okay.

Taking us right back to the electronic sounds of the mid-2000s. I thought we were hearing something new. That is new. It's her latest single sports car. off of Tate's third studio album so close to what out this Friday? Yeah, what are we getting so close to?

Well, if you're like me, namely over the age of 23 years old, it feels like this woman came completely out of nowhere, netting billions of streams almost instantly. She currently has two songs on Spotify over 1.5 billion streams right now. These are the tracks

Greedy. And the track, And the track, You Broke Me First. So when listening to Tate McCray, I want to say up top that while I find it catchy, I do find it hard to glean anything from it. It feels a little shallow. And I'm not saying that for the sake of not trying, right? Like I watched Kate McRae live performances with friends on multiple nights. I've listened to her two albums that are already out. I've pulled fans of hers that I know because I know a lot.

And whenever I ask them, what do you like about Tate McCrae? It kind of just comes down to she's a great dancer. And that's not related to music. I don't know. You call her Shallow. You're a big fan of Lady Gaga. Got a great song called Shallow. What's wrong with being Shallow?

Perhaps nothing. I mean, people love her. Despite all this, she is emerging as one of the biggest pop stars. of this generation. Yeah, the music is lighthearted. It's party music. It's sexy music. It's fun.

It's not particularly deep. Well, I'm sure there's people like me out there who are unfamiliar with Miss McCray. So in anticipation of so close to what, which is all but certain to make a chart impact when it releases, I would like to listen to Tate McCray today and ask the question, who the heck is Tate McCray? And in that, I want to crack a personal nut. what is it about her music that connects with people? Okay, cool. So you're learning to love Tate McCray a little bit here. I guess we could call this a learning to love episode,

Learning to Love Tate McCray. All right. Where did we begin? Well, obviously, we have to go back to the beginning, right, and see how Tate McCray got to where she is now. First of all, and perhaps most importantly, she is Canadian. Maple syrup. 25% more expensive this week.

And Tate McCray. Tate McCray's got tariffs. I'm telling you, this music might get expensive. There's tariffs on Tate. Might be shallow, but it ain't cheap. Hashtag tariff Tate. But she is from Calgary in Alberta. And her mom was a dance instructor.

And assumedly as a result, Tate grew up dancing and is an extremely acclaimed dancer. When people say she's a great dancer, like they're telling the truth. Her big break came on the show, so you think you can dance where she came in third. And there's a quote that says Canadian voters could not vote. on So You Think You Can Dance, and she still came in third. So imagine what it would be like if Canada was in on the voting. She probably would have won. I've always thought that the name of that TV show is kind of cruel.

So you think you can dance is kind of how I hear it. Which means like I would be a great contestant on So You Think You Can Dance because they'd be like, you're right. You can't. You win. You're the worst. It's very combative kind of. It's like you think you can, you know, and then you got to prove them wrong.

The odds are already stacked against you when you start. Okay, so that puts her on the map. She came in third. You know what? If you're in the finalist, you're good enough. Exactly. You know, I can't get there. So who am I to say anything, right?

So that was in 2016. One year later, 2017, she has some eyes on her. And much like those in her class of pop star, Billy Eilish, Chloe and Hallie, Gracie Abrams. She starts posting YouTube videos of her performing her own songs in her bedroom. And her first song is the track One Day, which is a pretty simple singer-songwriter piano track. All right, not bad. 2010's kind of cursive singing.

Good vocal range. The melodies work. I like the rhymes. Not bad. Most of her YouTube era tracks are in this similar vein. But from there, she's been on a steady, consistent path of traditional growth in the music industry. She was signed to RCA Records in 2019, released her debut EP, and sold out a headlining tour off of that debut EP. Whoa.

It's kind of showing how... stupid I am for never hearing of her until the past two years because she has a huge fan base. She is currently the 76th most listened to artist in the world on Spotify. Oh my gosh. Wow. And her 2021 EP titled Too Young to Be Sad was the most streamed female EP of that year on Spotify. Whoa. That record, Too Young to Be Sad, had Tate McCray's first major song, the track, You Broke Me First. Where'd you get?

Yeah, you didn't care how about... That's one of the songs where I feel like I heard this song, but I didn't know the artist yet. I mean, I've never heard it prior to last week when I was researching Tate McCray, which is ridiculous, and I'm realizing, again, how stupid I see him, because it hits 17 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Whoa, yeah, exactly. It's like one of those things where it probably came in autoplay after I was listening to, like, Selena Gomez song or something. I was like, okay, interesting. I hadn't registered. Tate McCray then. Me neither, but it has 1.6 billion streams, as I said earlier. And that is no small feat, you know, especially for an artist who at that time had very minimal output.

Okay, so where should go from here? So you broke me first, came out before Tate's first album titled, I Used to Think I Could Fly. But her true breakout record was the album Think Later, which spawned her biggest chart hit, Greedy. There used to be a thing in pop music where everyone was using the same few synthesizer patches where you could be like, oh, I can definitively tell you that that's like the DX7 electric piano sound. It's harder today because there's so many software instruments and so many patches that people can use. But sometimes people who make music can hear a song and be like, I know exactly how they made that song. There's a patch in this instrument called Omnisphere. that is a sampled hang drum, like the hippie drum that the hippies play at the Burning Man and

music festivals and so on. And they sample it by playing it with a sugar packet. And it has this very particular sound of a sugar packet hitting a hang drum. It's a beautiful patch. And I've played with it before. And I'm like, that is that sound. Someone turned that sound into a hit. Good job. There's nothing wrong with using a preset on a synthesizer. But it's a weird experience of people who make music. Sometimes you're like, oh, that sounds like I'm playing an Ableton making my music. But again, she made the hit. Or more specifically, she didn't just do it. We've got writers Amy Allen, Jasper Harris, Ryan Tedder, and produced by Ryan Tedder, Jasper Harris, and Grant Bhutan. Kind of an All-Star Avengers pop writing camp. Yeah. I mean, that's one thing I know about

Tate McCray. She's definitely one of those artists where there's a lot of bigwigs behind making these hits. They're trying to make pop smashes. And Grady is a pop smash. It peaked at at three on the Billboard Hot 100 and was on the chart for nearly a whole year, which is pretty cool. Greedy was the first time. I heard Tate McCray. And I like the song. Call my attention. I was like, who's this girl? I need to know more

about this girlie. But at the same time, she has all these people behind her, and I know Tate is a real person, okay? So follow me when I say this. But I think in the least combative way possible, I feel like Tate McCray is an AI-generated pop star. I feel like two years ago we would have said like industry plant. Which like, you know, if I didn't know she made YouTube videos, I would say the same thing.

But she just has a traditional trajectory as far as artists in the industry go. I think her music to me feels like you put the last 20 years of pop music through a blender. or an AI aggregator or whatever you call those, and it spits out songs like Greedy. But in spite of that, or in part because of that, it's an incredibly catchy song that immediately gets your ear. Pop music often is the blender.

It's the place where genres come to meet, get diluted, and turn it into something incredibly infectious. Through the saturation of greedy, I've come to understand that there's three aspects to the Tate McCray song formula. What's that? Tate McCray is a master of what I call simple pop and one word I'm trying to coin a term here and by that I mean to make a Tate McCray song you need three things

one you need a lack of identity lack of a distinguishable personality I'm talking we ran the vocal timbre of 60 pop girls through an AI generator and this is what we got okay you need a lack of chorus or more effectively a misplaced hook. I find a lot of Tate's songs to be choraless or have a hook that underwhelms or shows up at different places in the song than the chorus, which I find fascinating. And three, you need a lack of originality. Ooh. I don't mean this in a bad way, mind you. This is learning to love Tate McCray. I think there's space for her. But we've talked extensively on the show before about this idea of vibe snatching, right? She has a pension for interpolations, taking sonic elements

from things we already love. There's a lot of sound likes in Tate McCrae's catalog, songs that are near rip-offs of perhaps more notable or interesting music. Okay, so Simple Pop is empty personality, dangling hooks, and inconspicuous vibe snatching. Bingo. Okay. So using this rubric that we've concocted, I'd like to look at three songs of Tate McCraise, one from her last album and two singles from this upcoming record. Once again, let me say the title, so close to what? What? And I'd like to unpack what's going on with them and see if we could glean anything from the success of her music. It's so close to we couldn't figure out the next thing.

So close to TKTK. Journalism for it to come. So let's start with the other single from Think Later, the one not named Greedy, the track X's. Okay, so right away, I don't like this song. I love it. You got me there, Charlie. I really like this song too. I want to go on the record and say that this song is one of the biggest earworms I heard last year.

Absolutely. Right off the bat. Absolutely. But it has a lot of the formula that you're talking about. Like right off the bat, the vocal is almost flat. I don't mean pitch-wise. It's just like a little monotone. It's not got a lot of emotion in it.

Two, the dangling hook. Now, this song is fascinating because I don't know any other song that is structured this way. It opens with the post chorus. Right. Yes. And then goes to a chorus, and then goes to a verse, pre-chorus, chorus, post-chorus. I've never heard a song structured that way. Maybe there's one or two others.

And I think I know why. Which is that clearly Tick McCrae is being heavily influenced by her producer and co-writer Ryan Tetter. And Ryan Teter has gone on the record. He's taught classes. I actually teach his method of writing in my classes. And in an online workshop he did for Studio.com, he described his way of writing melodies as basically like generate as many hooks as you can. When you think you have your best hook, make it your chorus.

Then top it. Make a better hook. And make the thing that you made your chorus. Make that your verse. So that your verse is as catchy as another song's chorus. Your chorus should be even catchier than that. And the way that he then structures a song is put the hooks all over the place to make sure it's as hooky as possible.

So I feel like if you're feeling underwhelmed by the like formal chorus, section, it's because Ryan Tider doesn't write choruses. He writes hooks, and they are everywhere. They're dangling throughout the song. I like that. I mean, I said, I love this song as well. But yeah, the chorus to me is very anticlimactic. I feel like there's, one, too many syllables. And two, it's kind of nursery rhymy in the sense that it's repetitive enough to get grading after a while. Dut, da, da, da, da, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. I don't know. Ryan Tedder is a hook machine.

He writes these melodies where you're like it's almost too much. Like they have these moments of nursery rhyme like qualities. Right. But then just when he's going to repeat it too many times, he switches it up in a way. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. that gives you enough interest. At the same time, I think that your third quality is evidenced here in the chorus, which is the vibe snatching.

What's you hearing, Charlie? I'm hearing this rhythmic structure that I learned about from the YouTuber Adam Neely that he calls the Scotch Snap. Ooh, I like that. It's called the Scotch Snap because I guess it comes from like Scottish fiddle music, as well as just the Scottish speech pattern. It's a 16th note followed by a dotted eighth note. And it goes, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da.

He has a whole video about this scotch snap that in poetry, I guess, is also called a troki, where you have a quick, stressed element, followed by an unstressed long element. And he gives the example of teenage mutant ninja turtles. And he has this great playlist of all these songs where it is like the sound of 2010's hip-hop. You can hear it in Cardi B's, I like it. It's in Beyonce's Drunken Love. You got me piti, baby, baby, I want you. Ariana Grande snatches it for seven rings.

And thank you next. It is the sound of the 2010s. And when Ariana did that, she was even accused of cultural appropriation by using black sound. Because even though the Scotch Snap originally came from Scottish music, it became coded with black hip hop. And like all black music, that sound becomes whitewashed, appropriated. And after Ariana Grande, everyone just started doing this. speech pattern, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. It signifies, I'm making cool popular music,

and it's everywhere in X's. So there it is in the chorus. It's also in the pre-chorus. I'm a, I'm a. Right? Yeah. Point being, it's all throughout the song, and her speech patterns throughout the song

are a sort of sing, rapping, clearly hip-hop-oriented. The beat has trap 808s, trap hats. This is trap pop. It's simple pop. It's the sound of 2000s, hip-hop beats, Timbalin, Daneja, Britney Spears kind of thing, but also mixed with 2010's trap beats and speech patterns that are highly contemporary. So, vibe snatching complete. It is probably the textbook example of Simple Pop, and not just in its construction, right,

in how it was made as well, because allegedly, she wrote this song in 30 minutes. That's common, though. There's so many great songs that are written fast. It was fully finished in 90 minutes, so, you know, really quickly recorded, produced, mixed right off the dome. So it makes sense they're pulling on this large internal library of music culture. Totally. I mean, this is one of the things that Ryan Tedder does. We've talked about it on the show when he did, what was that song for Top Gun 2?

Oh, the One Republic joint? Yeah, I Ain't Worried. Ryan Tedder of One Republic who produced X's and most of Tate McCra's music wrote, I ain't worried in the first time I played this song in my household. My wife was like, oh, I love young folks by Peter B. Yarn and John. So Ryan Hunter is a great mimic, but he also takes these sounds and turns them into yet new hits. That's not an easy thing to do. I don't mean to deny the talent that it takes to write these songs and have that really deep sense of what is popular, what a good melody is.

he's able to build these things over and over and over again. So it's a certain style of writing Simple Pop. And X's is a great song, but it's not immune to the mimic formula. I thought it sounded like two specific songs. It's funny that you mention the rapiness of it because I thought it sounded like a Lisa song. Lisa, who was in Black Pink, went solo, raps. Her song, Money, has a similar rhythm to it. Some money.

Forget when a butter things I like. Scotch. That's the Scotch. That's the Scotch snap. That's basically the chorus and the post-corrhose of X's. Yeah, it's pretty close. I'm skeptical that these are actually directly inspired by each other, but rather exist on the same playlist of Simple Pop Together,

which is like take trap beats, use rap cadences, pop hooks, blend them together. Like, this is what you get. Fair, fair. Okay. There's another song that I think X's Vibe Snatch is. from. And before I say it, I want to give some context. So looking at Tate's career, she started making music in 2017, which was the height of the cursive singing epidemic in pop music. Nate did a really great episode on it a while back, but it's the way that songs are sung, the voices used,

syllables are elongated. The grand pooh-bah of cursive singing at the time was none other than Halsey. The same year that Tate McCray started releasing music was the year that Halsey's second album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom dropped. My personal Halsey album, kind of a deep cut, but the track, 100 letters, reminds me of X's, kind of to the tea. Same tempo, same playlist, no doubt. And I'm hearing a couple similarities.

Obviously, the way that they're singing is the same. they both have extremely percussive beats to them. They both have this guitar riff within it. And I'm hearing kind of the same plucky synth throughout the two of them. So I'm not here to evangelize Halsey. You know, I think her music is excellent. But it's another vibe snatch in the sense that she's kind of using the simple pop AI amalgamation formula where she's taking all of these songs, putting them into an algorithm, and then boom, it's spitting out X's.

As I said, I don't like the song. intellectually. But when it plays, I want to move and I love the song emotionally. It's good. It's grown on me, is what I will say. Okay. So we have X's. I think the song works in spite of its flaws. And X's was a song where I was like,

as perhaps uninventive as it is, it's not going anywhere. She's not going anywhere. Greedy I wrote off as a fluke, but X's is how I knew, at the very least, Tate McCray would be interesting to watch. So after the break, I thought we'd take a look at two of the singles from Tate's new record. Say it with me, Charlie,

so close to what? And see if they also fit the simple pop formula? Exactly. Convierte your passion in a new business with Shopify and batter records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of the best. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitates on your website web, in the social and in any place. That is music

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But that's the eternal mystery of Tate McCray. It's what is that what? What is the what? And there's a little bit of what on the new records lead single, the track, It's Okay, I'm okay. It's okay. Okay. You could have pitched this beat to a lot of other artists five years ago. Right.

And that goes back to the first point on our rubric, the lack of identity. I think again, we're seeing this track in the Y2K. K-influenced canon, but it's okay, I'm okay, is the lead single. It's trying to set a tone for the record. And on this song, we have a couple of attempts from Tate to establish a vocal identity because the thing that gives me the most pause about her is the vocal. The vocal feels very indiscreet to me. Here, she's using different techniques to kind of put her stamp on the song in a way that I appreciate. One of those things that she's doing is flipping. from her regular voice into her head voice.

And then moves into a rapping chorus. Okay, so a couple different vocal styles from chest voice to head voice to sort of rapping voice, mixing it up. And there's little flares that she does that I do appreciate on this song. She sings the words, fuck that in a way that I find very pleasant to listen to.

Yeah, she's leaning into it. Yeah. That's funny. I like that. Very Ariana Grande-esque, I think, the way that she rhymes that with that in the same couplet, but sounds good. Also, a similar vocal delivery. A lot of Ariana is not the big, high note, belty sort of thing that you might associate her with. It's actually this, like, very soft, delicate vocal, playing a lot with, like, air, breathiness and doing that same kind of thing on that moment. A lot of comparisons I hear about Tate McCrae is that also she sounds like Britney Spears or she's the new Britney Spears as I hear. And I don't know if I necessarily agree with the full comparison, but I think the way that they sing, they both use the quote unquote baby voice, you know, that you and Nate have talked about in the listening to Britney series. Yeah, but Britney is far more percussive in her singing. Very inspired clearly by Janet and Michael. There's a lot more vocal fry. There's a lot of personality in the way that she uses the voice.

And I'm still getting to know Tate McCrae's voice. Right. I'm not sure that this music is about big vocal moments. Like, I think that she is a dancer, this music is doing what it's aiming to do. It's dance music that has a consistent vibe all the way through, more like a hip hop track rather than EDM, big room, drop in the middle of something. Her chorus kind of comes and goes, as you said, and it's just like every moment is a hook. And so that it's dance music.

It's got this long, drawn out. vibe. Her voice kind of blends into the track. This is made for dancing, for a dancer. I hear you, and I think that's very apt to bring in Tate's dancing background. But my primary issue with this song is the chorus. I think this is probably one of her worst choruses. It feels like nonsense a little bit. It carries so much steam through the verses. And I feel like a song should lean into the chorus perhaps and kind of get bigger. But as soon as we get there, we pull back. We minimize.

And I feel like it deflates the song. Rihanna, look what you made me do. Touche. Che. I check it once, then I check it twice. Oh, look what you made me do. Look what you made me do. I think this like very serious spoken down chorus done to a hip hop beat is almost a cliche at this point,

which is more your third point than your second point in your simple pop formula, perhaps. Well, right. I mean, a generous read of the Tate McCray song could see this decision as an artistic choice. The song is about somebody else wanting Tate's man. And the chorus is her just repeating, it's okay, I'm okay, over and over again, in a kind of feigned nonchalance. You know, the song kind of collapses. There should be this explosion of energy, but really it all minimizes, and it becomes very internal over these 808s, which kind of simulate the like turmoil that she's probably experiencing seeing someone else go for a man.

Yeah, how okay are you when you usually say, it's okay 17 times? Right. Clearly very not. If you say it's okay, more than once, it's not okay. So we have vocal techniques trying to establish identity. We have the minimized chorus. Third point, the lack of originality. The beat of the song is near identical to a Y2K classic right from the beginning of a song. So I'll play the top of It's Okay, I'm Okay, and see if it rings any bells for you, Charlie.

It's very yin-yang twins or something. But it's so close, but the bells aren't ringing. What are you hearing? Let me play for you at the beginning of Me and You by Cassie. Oh, yeah. That's it. I honestly don't remember that song. I also feel like that descending minor plucky thing over electronic hip-hop beat was like just commonplace in the 2000s.

Fair enough. I mean, it's a similar situation to X's then, right? Where it feels kind of like the sound jarble of all of these aesthetics that were popular 20 years ago. So if you thought it's okay, I'm okay, had Y2K vibes. The latest single is even more 2000s focused, and that's the track, Sports Car. Okay, whispered vocals, very Brittany, right? Yeah. I also mentioned the Yangang Twins.

Now is it appropriate to play Wait, the Whisper song? Basically a tape of cray beat. That's literally the chorus of sports car. Exactly. I also, by the way, when I hear The Whisper song can only think of the Lonely Islands Bing Bong Brothers. When I hear that song, I only hear the joke version of it. What are you listening to? Just that new Bing Bongbong Brothers. Wait, and now let's hear Tate McCray again.

It's that mixed with very obvious vibe snatch to me. And that's the Pussycat Doll's classic buttons. Yep. I mean, the 2000s had this whole obsession with Middle Eastern and Indian sounds. I mean, it's entirely from the world of Missy Elliott and Timbaland. Like, get your freak on. Or another Missy track featuring ludicrous, gossip folks. That's a sound that Brittany obviously uses on toxic made by the Swedes, Bloodshy, and Avant.

But I'm also kind of hearing the electronic production style and harmony. of Britney's Gimme More. That's not a Timbalin beat. That's a D'Anga beat. D'Nja was a mentor of Timbaland. Do you know who was also mentored by Timbaland? Who. Ryan Tatter.

No. Yes, Ryan Tetter worked for Timberlin for a number of years. And so when we're hearing Tate McCray, we're hearing this lineage of those 2000s electronic hip-hop sounds through Ryan Teter from Timbaland. And so I think even though, yes, I really am hearing the Pussy. Cat dolls.

Buttons is not a Timbalin track, but it is a Timbalin vibe because his influence is just all over the place. That makes a lot of sense because when I hear Tate McCrae, I hear Timbaland more than anything else, but there's a direct lineage from Timbalin to Teter to Tate. Exactly. The Apprentice is now the Jedi. So going back to our simple pop rubric. Yeah.

Sports car has that vibe snatching lack of originality. It has the dangling hook, as you called it. I like to think of it as a misplaced chorus. Again, we have a whisper sung chorus with very little melody. And the primary hook of this song is not the chorus itself, but I see it as again the pre-chorus. This is the Ryan Teter Fly Hooks Everywhere method. The pre-chorus is the most singable part, no doubt.

Misplaced choruses all over the place. Simple pop. I feel like we're being kind of. cruel here because I'm nodding to these songs. I don't think that they are meant to be thought about. I think these are made to just move. And clearly they're moving people. Maybe they're moving us to madness, but they're also moving people on the dance floor. No, I think I'm being moved. I mean, at the outset of the episode, I wanted to ask the question, who is Tate McCray? Why is for music popular? And perhaps more cynically, why should I care? And when I pulled my inner circle of

Tate McCray superfans, why they like her. I got two similar answers across the board, right? She could dance and she has sex appeal. And I think I've cracked the code, Charlie. It's the Pallum formula. Yeah. I think I've cracked the code. Tate McCray is not Britney Spears.

But in fact, she is this generation's Paula Abdul. Oh. Yeah. That is a jam. Capital J. Jam. Straight up. A lot of people draw comparisons

from Tate McCray to Britney Spears, and I get it, you know, the Y2K sex icon, pop star vibe. But really, I think she's more similar to Paula Abdul, a pop star, who is a dancer first and musician second. And there's nothing wrong with that. The dancing, as you've said earlier, influences the music. I feel like maybe we don't give the dancers enough credit. Like the people that did the choreo at the Super Bowl. My gosh. Real.

Like the choreographers, the dancers, they're never, the front and center. collecting the royalties, but it is a big part of what makes a hit a hit. Right. And I also think like pop music needs people like Paula. We need a pop music B team. You know, pop music at its core is formulaic. It's derivative. And if everyone was Madonna all the time, the genre would be unsustainable. Nobody could keep up. So you're getting into like a bigger theory of how pop music works. Like you've got your superstars who are the innovators who are your A team. And then your B, team are the regurgitators that maintain a sound for some period of time might get huge themselves

and give DJs like yourself, DJ Costanza, the opportunity to spend multiple records that all fit together. Exactly. All right. Let's hear it for the B team. Let's hear for the B team. I'm not saying pussycat dolls is like pushing any boundaries, you know, but when I'm at the club, like, I want to hear, I hate this part, you know, like shit like that. It rocks. And I also think because she's a dancer, Tate McCray in a way raises the bar for everybody else, you know, because it's catchy music and no longer should middling pop stars feel comfortable just standing on stage. Tate McCray makes them dance. We want harography. We want showmanship, chorio. And sometimes, I also think it's okay to give in to the nostalgia cycle. I would like to be reminded of songs I

already like. That's why I like them. I want to hear him all the time. It's why people do interpolations. So what you're saying is that in this larger analysis, we're getting closer to answering the question so close to what? And that what is the it factor that makes Tate McCray special. And I think we've gotten closer to cracking the nut of learning to love Tate McCray than personally I have ever been before. Let's see if I can spin it around. Universal, easily singable vocals. You got hooks everywhere. True. No shortage of hooks. And you've got a Las Vegas buffet dinner of every kind of sound you could possibly want something for everyone in the production. I like the reframing, Charlie, it positions Tate McCray as perhaps the pop star that we didn't expect.

Maybe not the pop star we necessarily thought we needed, but... The pop star we deserve. Exactly. Tate McCray is the pop star that we deserve. And at the end of the day, I can't hate on that. Maybe I've learned to love Tate McCray. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by... Art Chung, engineered by Brand McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.

Our theme music is by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Arc Iris. Remember of the Fox Media Podcast Network and production of Vulture, which is part of New York magazine. You can subscribe at NYMag.com slash pod. You can find this on all social media at Switch on Pop. Subscribe to our newsletter where we'll be given you hot goss in the pop music sphere right now. We're running a bingo all year, Pop prediction bingo. So get your card through our newsletter.

And we'll be back again on Tuesday with a brand new episode. episode. Until then. Thanks for listening.