Switched on Pop - Look What You Made Us Do

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Four years into Switched On Pop, Charlie and Nate finally reveal what was behind the entire series. We may have not been totally honest with you from the beginning. Back in 2014 we were more pop skeptics than fanatics. The genre was, to some degree, the sugar that made the musical analysis medicine go down. And then something happened. Just as people started to listen to the show, we too began to open our ears. Now, in our 100th episode, Charlie interviews Nate about how transforming the way you listen to pop can truly make life better. And we get raw about the constraints of pop and where we plan to go in our next 100 episodes. Songs discussed: Beethoven's 7 & 9Santana - "Smooth" Martha and the Vandellas - "Heat Wave" Zedd - "Stay" Pink Floyd - "The Great Gig in the Sky" Adelle - "Hello"  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Part of me wonders if we should start this episode with some piano and like the sound of whiskey being poured into click, click, click, click. So I have a seed. I think that'd be perfect. That's where we should start. This is a really exciting moment because we are celebrating our 100th episode. I don't know if that's particularly important, but I thought it would be a fun time to take a step back and reflect on what have we been doing? for the past four years and what have we learned.

And so rather than have a normal conversation, I wanted to grill you. Oh, okay. Yeah, that sounds appropriate for an anniversary. I thought it would be fun if I interviewed you. Okay. Wow. Table's a turn. Welcome to Switchdown Pop.

I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, why did you agree to do this show with me? I agreed to do this show because it was an opportunity to, do pop music theory, which is insanely fun. Yeah. And it's something that is not best done in isolation. It's a group activity, like Twister.

It's best done with friends and strangers. So that was a bit, that was part of it. You know, the sociality of it, the joy is spending time with you, bringing down pop music. Thank you. A big part of the impetus, I think, was Carly Ray Jepson. Right. St. Jepson was the, and remains the sort of, holy figure watching over us.

I don't really actually know how that came into your life, because it really was your insight. Right. So the idea for the show was after I'd used Call Me Maybe in the classroom to talk about how music theory works and pop songs. And then we were talking about it. And I think you were like, this is a podcast, right? Yeah.

We had cereal in our ears. Not like, you know, Frosted Flakes. No, we didn't it? Not Lucky Charms. The podcast serial. It had just come out. It had just come out. And we were like, oh, wow, you know,

talking about music on a podcast, that's perfect. You can actually listen to the music. Well, because I had had the idea to do it as a blog. And we realized that probably nobody wanted to read our writing about popular music, but particularly because it would be hard to illustrate what we were talking about, that if you could have an audio example, it would explicate some of the things that might be a little bit more esoteric. Right. I particularly was excited this one time you actually gave me your lecture

while we were driving playing Carly Ray Jepson. Yeah. But so you're asking why Carly Ray out of all? Because that's a paradigmatic pop song and presents exactly the sort of challenge of pop, which is to say this song on the surface is really simple and fun and silly and is something that's very easy to sort of reject out of hand as being sort of self-explanatory.

You know, why is that a good song? Because it's stupid and catchy and dumb. Well, I think that's what was part of when you first shared that song with me. I think there was a little bit of a concede of exactly that. It's like, Charlie's not going to like this song because Charlie, at the point, had really different musical tastes. I did. Yeah.

And you put the song on it. I was like, I don't know. Oh, interesting. I don't remember that. I must have rewritten some of this memory. But that's kind of the reaction you want someone to have. And then you say, no, wait a minute. maybe once we start to unpack this, you'll appreciate it more for the craft of it.

Right. And what were your expectations going into making a show that would deconstruct popular music using your musicological powers? I mean, I think we talked about the idea of the show as kind of like a Trojan horse, right? Right. that this was a way that pop music was sort of the sugar that made the medicine go down. Right. In which the medicine is like deep analysis and music theory. Right.

And pop music is kind of like, no, no, this is okay. It's going to be okay. Right. This might taste bad, but it's good for you. Which I think says something about our expectations, which I think probably at the beginning of the show we weren't entirely honest about. Wait, so what do you mean? Well, maybe less expectations, but more some preexisting biases that have probably

shifted. And I'm wondering what are some of the things that you came into the show with that maybe have changed? There's two Trojan horses because the show was meant to be a Trojan horse to deliver music theory through the guise of pop music. But then there was sort of a reverse Trojan horse where we became lovers of pop music by using music theory on it. Yeah. So I think it's safe to say that our evolution over the last, how many years have we? Over four years now. Four years. Has been seismic.

I mean, I just since, as long as I can remember, I was just on an upward trajectory of being more and more sort of snobbish and discerning and narrow about my musical taste. And the more abstruse and difficult and unpleasant it was, the more I wanted to be a part of it. Right, right, right. So that was in high school listening to jazz and in college listening to atonal, you know, new music, the Darmstadt school, serialism, Bartok's Drink, or whatever, whatever was most difficult. I wanted to be a, yeah, I wanted that. So then what shifted? I'll start with the big payoff, which is entirely emotional. Like, it's a better way of living. Like, I'm a better person. I'm a happier person. I'm a more compassionate person.

I'm a more open-minded person as a result of letting pop into my life. Huh. So there were the, I feel like I'm in a like, I'm shilling drugs now. So this, so these judgments that you were holding on to about maybe, you haven't even named them.

What were some of the earlier conceptions about popular music? Okay, so I probably drew a certain moral corollary, that there was a direct line between music, that is challenging and music that is good with a capital G, as in like good for you, good for society, good for the world. Right, right. And that conversely, music that was simple, accessible, and unchallenging, was bad inherently.

Which we'll have to even sort of maybe deconstruct because I think so much of our show has been showing that things are not as simple or unchallenging potentially as they seem. Right. Right. Or popular, I guess, is another metric. Certainly. Right. Right. You know, the more like, that just seemed clear to me. And certainly as a result, of reading a lot of Teodor Wies and Grun, Adorno, who I think subscribes to some of these notions, the German philosopher. And then there's a whole other level to your musical taste, right?

It's not just what you prefer and what you don't prefer. It's that there's actually these, your taste is laden with, like, ethical consequences. Yeah, there's moralistic implications to, oh, you listen to that. I see. And that's probably, I think, when you brought Carly Raid to me, I was kind of like, oh, this is not the guy who used to show up to college music classes wearing a tie.

Something has changed. He's moved to California and he's wearing loose fitting shirts. Oh, man. You know, I was once walking down the street and these two, my cousin Jake reminded me of this at our toes. These two girls walked by and they were sort of like checking me out. And I was really pleased. And then I heard them say, oh, that guy, he dresses just like my grandpa.

I was like, oh, man. That's funny. So there was this moral, you know, imperative to listen to challenging music. Right. And I think as a result of letting pop into my life, I've dropped those associations, certainly. And it seems like the things you were holding on to were maybe seeping over into other... Right, in my interpersonal relationships. Certainly.

Yeah, absolutely. And the way I thought about people, the way I judge... It's a very judgmental kind of mode to being. Right. Certainly. Okay, that's the macro. Take me down to the micro. Okay.

So James Joyce wrote three books, basically. And there's probably more written about James Joyce than just about any other author. Right. You know, maybe he said Shakespeare or something. And in some ways, that's like maybe a metric of how talent he is and how important those books are. Sure. But in another way, maybe it's a metric of how much. those books present opportunities for analysis and interpretation.

It makes me think of Chuck Klosterman's book, What If We're Wrong? Okay. Which is all about, what if we're wrong about our tastes and wrong about how things become canonized? And he points out that, for example, Moby Dick was an absolute failure in its day. And it only came back around because there was this sort of revitalization of the novel. And there was a... a movement long past Melville's death, at which point people are like, oh, this is a great book.

And in his analysis of canonization, suggests that perhaps what becomes popular and canonized does so saying more about the culture of the time of canonization than it does about the actual work in its original form. That's fascinating. And that's important. But that's not what I'm talking about. I went way to. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the methods we have.

have for analysis and interpretation are most robust and developed based on historically what we've privileged as the things worth analyzing. Does that make sense? It makes sense. I mean, I think you could probably relate that to your sector of academia. Yes. Right. Okay, so musicology right with a capital M. Yeah. How much of musicology focuses on, traditionally, has focused on a narrower set of composers. Yeah, yeah, no, right. I mean, I, you know, as a grad student, there was still a comprehensive exam that was entirely, or mostly focused on the great Central European composers from the Renaissance through the romantic period. So, so yeah, there's certainly a geographical and temporal bias in the discipline itself. And, you know, there's just been centuries of

music wiesenshaft that's been that's like the German word for musicology music science what my advisor David Josephson likes to call music wiescen shit

and as a result that we have these incredibly elaborate sort of formal tools for breaking down symphonies and string quartets and sonatas right

we don't have very advanced tools for breaking down a pop song And so a conclusion you can draw from that is, oh, that's because pop songs are comparatively simple and there's not a lot to say. But maybe another conclusion you can draw is like, oh, maybe no one's bothered to spend the time to think about how to analyze pop music. And thus, there's not this robust mechanism for doing so. Right, which of course is not to suggest that no one has bothered. There are incredible thinkers in this, but it certainly is a minority of the field of academic music writing. Yes, I think that's fair to say.

Yeah. So, okay, so we're in the micro. Right. Okay. So it's like, here's an interesting question. Like, what can you learn about Beethoven by listening to Carly Ray Jepson, for instance? Right. Approaching popular music with this sort of tabula rasa approach of like, you know, what are the methods to use?

What am I going to learn from this? Just having a completely open mind. Maybe you're going to come away with that from that experience, not only having more insights into, call me maybe, but maybe some insights that you could then go apply to other styles of music as well. Yeah, I think one of the big shifts in the way that I approach anything that I hear now, and I try to apply really to any art,

is rather than approaching a work with my preconceived set of judgments in particular taste, I like to think about what is the piece trying to say? What is the language that it's using to say the thing it's trying to say? do I have any idea what that language is? If not, go learn it as much as I can. And then come back around and ask,

hey, is the thing that it's trying to do, doing it effectively using the language that it's using? Which is maybe a little bit circular. I got you. I got you. Is the work doing the thing that's saying it's trying to do? And do I get it? And what I've found is that most of the time when I don't like something,

it means I just don't get it. Right. Especially if it's a whole genre. If there's a whole body of kinds of work that I think is like it's just off-putting that usually is an indicator for me that I just don't get it

and I need to go get familiar with the work I have to understand the language that it's using and so when we talk about comparing contemporary popular music and seeing what we can learn about Beethoven one of the sort of Pandora's boxes

that we've been talking about more and more maybe on our own and less on the show has been about timbre and so when we think think of tambour, tambour being the color of sound and the actual sort of texture of a sound. The available timbers for Beethoven were the symphony, or the orchestra, rather. And sometimes he would extend the orchestra.

There is one example of which he brought a musket into an orchestra. Beethoven? Yeah. What symphony is that? I'm going to have to go through my notes. I'm not sure you're thinking of, you're thinking of Franz Joseph Hayden, who has a rifle in the creation? Or no, in the season, sorry? Hold on a second.

We're going to back check this. there's a few examples of firearms. There's certainly the cannons in Chikovsky's 1812 overture. I'm pretty sure there's Beethoven. I'm not going to find it right now, but I was looking up as I was writing something. So maybe I'm wrong. But in any case, the point being, the orchestra was limited. And today, surprisingly, if you think about it, the orchestra also requires a huge amount of space.

It takes place in a giant symphony hall. And now the way that people are creating music, there's sort of an infinite number of samples and synthesizers available on each computer that can establish wholly new and original sounds. And so the quality of sound is all of a sudden privileged in contemporary music, as opposed to melody and harmony and rhythm, these qualities are all also very important. But if we don't understand the language of timbre, it might scare us away. Yeah. No, that's a great example. And tambour is one of those things, right? The texture, the color, the sound of someone's voice. We have very limited vocabulary to describe that. And understandably, because the available

sets of timbers are so broad today and in fact are way more complicated by the fact that they can be synthesized. Not long ago in history, a timbre would probably necessarily correlate to an instrument itself and its subtle variations between its types. Right. I might object. I think there's a certain technological determinism in your argument there in terms of the historical evolution of timbre because there's also there was a high intellectual demand for music that was just more interested in other elements like harmony and form and counterpoint right because of the sort of specific societal resonance that those qualities had right right you know in the post-enlightenment era or whatever okay so you've you have learned things then that we can take from carly ray japsin back to listening to

other kinds of music. Yeah, absolutely, right? Tambor, the way lyrics and music interact, certain properties of harmony and repetition, and perhaps even more, yeah, fundamental concepts, like, you know, the idea of a key, for instance. This is something, we haven't really gone into depth about this on the show, but we will someday. Sure, sure. Right, the idea, you know, via, and this is coming out of music theory literature by people like Mark Richards and Philip Tag, but the idea that in classical music, it's all very predicated on things belong to one tonal harmony. That's why you have Mozart's symphony number 40 in G minor. That is the key, and that's important, right? That is in G minor. That is the tonal home of that piece. That is

something that is like such a given in the world of classical music. Right, whereas we definitely do not have like Kendrick Lamar and D. Kendrick Lamar's Wesley's theory in the key of yeah. No, and not only that, I mean, when we've dug into a song like Hello by Adele maybe, you know, we've talked about this. We maybe called it like harmonic ambiguity, I think. But there's like an even more fundamental question is like,

what key is this piece in? Is it an A flat manager or F minor? And the answer is it's, there's no answer to that. It is both. It's like what Richards calls a. double tonic complex, you know? It also maybe makes me think, are we asking the right questions? Is this really what we need to be looking for?

Well, no, sorry, let me just finish that thought. So that's what I'm saying is like that idea, that Tonal Holmes can be not just one note, but like multiple harmonic centers simultaneously. That concept is something you could only come up with if you were listening to pop music really closely. Right. Could you just explicate that really quickly? Yeah.

It's like, you know, you know the idea of a binary. star a sisygy whoa i've always wanted to use that word no what's a sisyg like two stars orbiting around each other so closely that when you look at them with your naked eye it just looks like one star that's kind of how hello by adele operates those two keys are constantly being exchanged as the possible tonal home of that song like revolving around each other what key is it in i believe it's in well what two keys are then i believe if i'm Remembering correctly, I think it's an A flat major slash F minor. Okay.

And usually these will be keys related by, that are the relative major and minor. Okay, so we could like play an A flat major and an F minor. Right. And you can kind of play them back and forth. Yeah, there's only one note different between them. And they just kind of merge as the song cycles through, which back to that episode fits the sort of textual meaning, which is this sort of in-between place where there's like remorse about a relationship

and it's sad, but it's also reflective so it's kind of happy, it's a happy sad memory. Yeah. You know? Yeah, and so it makes sense that we're moving back and forth between this major and minor.

Yeah. No, totally. Philip Tag has another great example that's a little older, the great gig in the sky off Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. Listen to that a lot in high school.

Very obnox. It's a great. It's like, it's another song that teaches you something about harmony or teaches you something that the rules of tonal harmony is given to us by, you know, yeah, by Mozart and Beethoven wouldn't, which is that that song doesn't have any tonal home. It moves from one loop of harmony to another. There is no tonal base there. Well, and I was interrupting earlier. I was asking like, so what? So, okay, great, great question. Why are we even, why are we asking that question is actually an important precursor? Right, right. Once you're not assuming that every song has one tonal home, that can change the way you think about the harmonic journey of any given song. It's less dualistic. It's less monodistic.

No, it is more. There's two. There's a double tonic, so it is dualistic. Well, I think it's less dualistic and it's not about a structure. of home in a way, arrival back to home, but rather a lot of contemporary pop requires us to sort of sit in more ambiguous harmonies. Yes.

Okay, there we go. Okay, yeah, I'm with you. The way of hearing a symphony is a teleological way of listening. Right. Where you're listening for the end goal. And it's all about the journey from A to B, you know? And popular music doesn't do that.

It doesn't have that A to B aspect. again, it's so fundamentally different. It just sits in this, you know, usually the repetition today of a four-cord loop. We've seen it in almost every song we talk about these days. That's not like moving from point A to point B. That's more, it's just like, eh, you're just kind of chilling in that repetition. Well, an easy criticism is to say, well, it's simple, it's stupid, it's lazy. But back to what I was saying earlier about timbre, it's the most contemporary

popular music just isn't privileging harmony as a language. And so in the same way that classical music doesn't privilege percussion in the orchestra. Not only is it in the back, of course, so that fits in the sound, but there are fewer musicians and it's just not as important to the music. Contemporary music is not privileging harmony in general and is instead privileging percussion in rhythmic complexity and certainly tambral variety. Yeah. I just want to to refine a little bit of that. Of course you do. I mean, maybe it's fair to say that intense syncopation is a more prime desideratum of contemporary pop. And more drawn-out, harmonic progressions that take place over long periods of time is not something that

popular music privileges either. Generally, not right now. And that's totally fine. And that's sort of back to the point of like, part of me asking this question of like, why does this question matter is that it's a leading question. Okay. No, but I have another answer too that is a huge part of this, which is, of course, to answer your question of why, it's like American popular music is inherently what the scholar George Lewis would call Afrological in nature, right? The sound of American popular music is the sound of African and African American music.

Right. And that's not the case with the central European hits of the 19th. 18th century. And so I know I came into doing this project with you initially where the majority of my formal training and where the majority of formal training in conservatory comes from a urological perspective. And so a lot of what I was trying to do early on in this show is like, how do I map on the things I learned about 18th century classical harmony? Because it kind of is like, you can map a lot of stuff onto it. But because these music do privilege such a different qualities of music, I started to realize that I don't know if I was approaching it with the right

set of questions because they were based in a whole set of assumptions and knowledge base that I probably, when starting the show, saw as like a superior knowledge base. Right, which is the product of deep, longstanding racial associations with certain ways of music making and certain modes of analysis. Yeah, absolutely. And we should be even more broad in acknowledging the influences of American popular music as it's Sansa day not just African, Afro-American also Afro-Caribbean Latin X, Asian, I mean Hawaiian music is a huge part of all Polynesia of course the Polynesian anyway I mean you can keep going this is the beauty and the challenge of right

of hearing American popular music is it's the expression of a pluralistic nation and with all the attendant's beauty and complexity and of course all all the attendant inequality and injustice that is latent in those histories. So, yeah. That's a good place for a brief pause in a moment of introspection and, to be crass, advertisements. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

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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. So I don't know if it's absurd to ask this then, based on what you were saying about the sort of hierarchies of musical tastes and analysis and how that's informed what is taken seriously. And I wonder if there is any sort of sense of restorative justice that you bring to your work as a musicologist and even in, to the podcast. I hesitate to adopt that term because I don't, because it's more appealing in a way to just normalize these modes of listening to the point that you don't have to justify the idea of this non-hierarchical, non-hierarchical listening. Right. There's almost a sense of like, if you're trying to prove it to the hierarchy, you're still in a mindset of hierarchy. Yes. Yeah, I suppose that is. And I think that's a

pitfall we fall into, you know, including in this discussion because we do, there's a, the tendency to say, well, to use Beethoven as a benchmark, say, you know, as a way of valorizing Carly Ray Jepson, right, reinforces that hierarchy, certainly, even if the aim is to raise one of those figures up, you know? Yeah, I feel like sometimes, I feel like sometimes when I'm making those kinds of analogies, it's almost under the assumption that the person I'm speaking with might have that sense of hierarchy. And I've kind of like already flattened it for myself, but it's my way of slowly tilting it.

But I do agree that continuing to use those analogies is, it does reinforce. No, I think it presents a challenge for us to continue to find other benchmarks to, and especially non-Western benchmarks. At the same time, I do, I do,

you know, Beethoven-like Joyce, has shaped the very, the very way that we talk about music, because his influence is so outside. eyes, you know. So it can be productive sometimes to go back to those sources and think about, oh, what are we, you know, learning from Beethoven and how do we unlearn it? I sometimes just think of Beethoven as popular music. Can we, let's, let's throw on the finale of the seven symphony right now.

How many times to hear that? It's a straight up carnival. It's all, no, and he's, and he's, and he was a revolutionary, right? He was, he famously dedicated the third symphony to Napoleon. And then when Napoleon turned out to be a jerk, he literally crossed it out. But no, he was a radical. He was, yeah. And I don't mean it just in their time, but also to say, like, there are some cultural reference points where it's like, I have an assumption that people who went through public school education probably still had some music education.

And if they listen to one thing, they probably heard the fifth symphony. So for me, the fifth symphony or the ninth symphony are just pop songs to me. Totally. O2 Joy is a straight-up pop song, no doubt. So then maybe I should ask you, something we've talked a lot about is our idea of what switched on pop has become, and particularly the on-pop piece of that. So for you, how has your idea of pop music shifted? Yeah. At this point, I think of pop sort of from a three-pronged definition or something. Fork or spork? We're talking spork.

Spork gets all contained. Yeah, and I want to laugh it up. One, you know, pop is music that is popular in the sense of you can measure using various metrics, like how many people are listening to this music. Right. Whatever a lot of people are listening to is popular. And so that's beyond any specific sound or stylistic properties. It's just like, if you can measure what people are listening to, then whatever is the most popular is pop music, right?

Right. Okay. So thing one, pop is pop. Pop is pop. Prong, too, is the sound of pop. That pop does have a sound. Right. So it's changing, but.

Yes. And that's what's wild about pop is that it's morphs. It's protean. It changes. Yeah. Right. Like if you threw on Motown. Right.

Right. And then you put on like Z. Yeah. They're both pop. They couldn't be further from each other. I mean, if you wanted to, we could have a lot of fun drawing the vectors that get us from one to the other. Yeah. So prong two is like pop as genre.

Boundaries are constantly shifting. But it is a discreet genre unto itself. That is separate from other styles. That is separate from jazz, hip hop, R&B, etc. Well, we don't want to tumble down the genre of rabbit hole. But yeah, okay, so pop a genre. And then prong three. And then prong three is music that is, and this is more elusive, but I think,

but music that has somehow seeped into some kind of collective conscience, conscious, excuse me. So even if we can't measure it that it's there, what's a good, like jingle bells is a good example, right? I think we had an amazing one. something which is no longer pop, but was pop in the first prong, but is still in the third prong of any millennial.

Oh, smooth. A song that played forever and then disappeared, but has this sort of like cultural, like if someone played it, everyone would know it of a certain generation. Yeah. Okay, so I see. Okay, so that's one,

okay, that definitely fits into prong three, the sort of ghosts of pop. Yeah, maybe that's sort of nostalgia. But that's not, I don't know, because that is prong one. That was a huge,

that was. You're right, right. A crazy pot. What about songs like jingle bells? Yeah. Songs like... Or the national anthem, which we've talked about. The national anthem.

And then there's others. Like, you know, the Nokia cell phone ring would probably fit in this category. It makes me realize that the music which fits in this category are like old patriotic anthems, which does a lot about the role of music and contemporary nationalism, which is that it's actually except for the national anthem, not that important. Right. Like there used to be a lot of nationalists sort of anthems and patriotic anthems that are just not as big a part of music making. And so our shared language tends to be popular music, tends to be things which are popular. And they get played at the Super Bowl. They get played at the political rallies.

They get played at these sort of things have merged. But then we have jingles. And I don't know. There's probably, I imagine listeners probably have some really interesting ideas of other ways that music keeps into our life. But it's not top 40 radio. Yeah. I mean, certainly, and in the age of like online virality, there's probably a lot of examples of this too. And what was that album that just came out on Instagram?

Tierra Wack? Yeah. The album that was like 15 songs, each song is one minute. It can be posted to be an Instagram video, which has a one minute constraint. And a lot of people are saying, hey, this is, you know, this is an album. And it's just different distribution points. It's still music. Yeah.

Yeah, that's Tierra Wack. And that's a really, yeah, no, I think that's a good example. It might not be top of the charts, but it's part of some collective conscience. Which is to say, of course, the charts of commercial viability don't necessarily reflect what's happening culturally. They are not necessarily exhaustive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. Right. Okay. So I asked you of the switched on pop, how is the idea of the idea of pop? changed for you. And I'm hearing, A, you have a sort of much wider set of definition than you probably had in the past, which was probably more focused just on which part of it? The genre of pop? Yeah, the first two, I guess. The sheer popularity being inherently canceling out that whatever merit that music might have. And I've definitely observed that your musical taste have changed.

You still listen to plenty of jazz and get great enjoyment from it, as do I. but you are bound to throw on pop radio and have a good time. Oh, no, it's totally. And this comes back to like the pharmaceutical aspect of it. Like it's a better world when you open your ears to the sounds around you. Or let me put it another way. Like, you know, the expression, don't judge someone before you walk a while in their shoes. Sure.

Like, don't judge someone until you've heard an hour in their ears. or something. Do you know what I mean? Like, I'll have to fine tune that. But, okay, because music is not just sounds, as we've just been discussing, right? Music is community. Music is a set of values. Music is a way of being in the world.

And so often when we shut ourselves off to other kinds of music, we're really shutting ourselves off to other groups, identities, ways of engaging. Right. When you listen to other music, our episode about One Direction, is a crystalline example of this for me, because that was such a voyage. Right. From the beginning of that episode,

just being like, I don't need to listen to this music. It's trash. I know that. Or even it's not for me. It's not for me. I think I sort of came in with being like,

well, that's for like. Okay, right. Yeah, you were a little more generous than I was even. Yeah. You're like,

this might not be bad, but it's not for me. No, I wasn't generous, though. And then at the end of it, it's not to say that our conclusion was, oh, this is music for me.

I listen to One Direction every morning. when I wake up now, you know. It's like, but I understand why people listen to one direction and what they get out of it. But it's not just understanding because you actually, I observe, you have more joy. Yes, no, no, totally, totally. I genuinely enjoy it and then pick another totally different example that's like death metal or something. Right.

You know, another genre that you might be like, whoa, that's not for me. Right. And then, and again, I don't listen to death metal every morning. Right. But now I get it. I enjoy it. And I understand why people listen to it and what they get out of it. And that makes me not only understand the music, it makes me understand people in a much deeper way.

It's like it's empathetic listening, you know? It's like, yeah, I don't know if you are citing this influence. We've maybe talked about once or twice on the show this really important book, which was Carl Wilson's book. Let's talk about love. Yeah. which is an analysis of the culture of taste around Celine Dion. And it was one of the most influential books I've ever read in my thinking about music, because it really is about the deconstructing taste as a role in mostly just reinforcing class structures more than anything else.

Yeah. And it was a beautiful book. And so I know we both share having read this, but I don't think that we are on this journey uniquely together with our listeners. I sort of get the sense that there is a shift in the cultural relationship to popular music certainly through a whole history, a decade's worth or more of pop-tomist writing. But I wonder, do you think the way

in which we are listening to music and what is available to us and its ubiquity, what's shifting? What's changed? Has something changed? Yes, to answer your question, I agree. There is a sea change in the way, pop music is now seen to be symptomatic or even generative of the world we live in. So that probably wasn't the case, you know, in the era of Patty Page, how much is that doggie in the window? Like, I mean, to say that pop music was just, you know, what the kids are listening to, those crazy kids.

Like, it doesn't have any meaning in our world. Is that mapping on to just technological? ubiquity of culture and mass media? Are you saying that in early Brill building, pop music, the beginning of the 20th century, that it simply wasn't as ubiquitous in people's ears and identity because it didn't have the same kind of reach? It's a great question.

I don't know. We'd have to, I'd love to know what listeners think. I think it has a lot to do with the internet and the voices that, weren't necessarily being heard that have a lot of the voices of women, queer people, people of color, that weren't always being represented in the mainstream music magazines and music press, suddenly being able to say, no, this music has a lot of meaning for me in my world. And that ramified outward back into those music journals who, I think, inspired by the incredible

engagement, takeaways, fandom of people online where like, oh, this is a different way of listening to pop music where you,

pop music reflects and shapes the world we live in and we need to pay it its due in that respect. Yes, absolutely. I have more and more people in my life

who are just musically omnivorous. And on a basic level, we'll go to a Pandora station and listen to classical while they're studying, jazz when they need to focus even further. But then they'll switch to some down-tempo, hip-hop beats

when they're feeling in a different mode of studying. And those are all different, just study music. And then are happy to listen to electronic dance music, throwback house, 90s music, house music. And they're kind of like just moving between genre simply because it's a click away and people have curated all this stuff. It's immediately available.

I owned like 40 CDs when I was a teenager. a lot because they were expensive. And they were much more important to my identity, but I was also a teenager. Right. But it's not just the availability and generic blurring that has given rise to what, you know, some people have called the Pop-Octomist Revolution or whatever.

I think it's a recognition that the way we think about race, gender, sexuality, politics, class is filtered through the music we listen to. So it's not incidental to our lives and to our society. It is imbricated. Yeah, I think I missed that important connection and what you were saying earlier. Yeah. I didn't say it well.

So no matter what your taste, you better be interested because this stuff matters. It matters to what's happening in your world. Like if you're ravenously reading political blogs because they matter, you better be ravenously listening to pop music because it, too, is having. significant cultural weight and emotional cues on the ways that we are performing our identities in the film. No, okay, so Charlie, and here's, I'm going to turn that around on us. Yeah. Sort of use this 100 episode as also, you know, a state of the pop union.

Yeah. I think moving forward, it behooves us. I totally agree with what you just said. That is listening to pop music is a way to understand people, right? Yeah. And that's not just true of pop. That's true of country. that's true of Christian rock

that's true of reggaeton that's true of all I won't keep going you get it there's like so many well it's true that maybe our taste is more omnivorous there's also more sub-genres than ever and in order to really understand where people are coming from it behooves us to listen

to really dig into those just the way we did with one direction to drop our biases to approach these different styles with open open ears and see what we learn on the other end from listening to them, you know? So one of the things I'm hearing from you and you're leading to is, and I wanted to ask you about where do we want to take the show? Yeah. And we're going to have some really exciting announcements coming very soon about, and the show is going to, I think has a big life ahead of

itself with, yeah, I'll just leave it at that. There's going to be some really exciting things coming forward. But I'm interested not so much in sort of where we're distributing and how frequently, but rather the questions that we're asking and how we're asking them. What's exciting you for past episode 100? I think what's exciting me is bringing in more and more voices to be guests on the show and to recognize, you know, the limitations of our backgrounds and our ability. I mean, concomitant with everything we've been talking about like, you know, our ability to hear is limited by who we are and what we're exposed to in our biases and so on. So the more people we can bring in to help break down

music with us, I think the more we're going to learn and the people listening are going to learn. I think asking questions, so you ask, but you ask what questions do we want to ask? What are you curious about? This conversation has been largely reflective and I'm curious about looking forward into the things that, I mean, as an academic, maybe you are want to feel like you have some solidity in your knowledge base and you are working through ideas that you have some fluency in. What are the questions which feel more uncertain but are intellectually intriguing that you, and culturally and personally and, yeah, that you want to one that's come up a lot in on our show and in the classes I've talked.

this year. Yeah. I think is a question about the sort of obligation of music to be politically and socially engaged. Yeah. What are the politics of pop in that sense? And this is something, yeah, that I think we, that people are discussing a lot and we, and I'd like to think about it too. And to do so in a way that is particularly, you know, as everything we do through privileging the music first, I guess, is like, what do artists owe? And what does a song owe to the world in terms of its moral message, its engagement with issues of the day? Yeah. That's something, I don't know, there's no answer to that.

I want to keep thinking about it. There's one that I've really just started to unpack that I'm really excited to approach more, which is this idea of psychological distancing and the way in which so much popular music does create cues of what is culturally acceptable. there are also things undeniably that happen in popular culture, which lead to the most toxic parts of our culture, certainly issues of sexism and racism and anything that has an ism at the end of it. I don't mean to diminish any of them, but they are all present in popular music.

And I know that I feel as though there have been times where, like, I'm just not going to cover a song because I really don't like the message that that thing is saying. And so I filter it out of what ends up on the show. And I don't think that that's the right approach. because so often you'll still see a thousand people on a dance floor singing lyrics, which I think that if you just said aloud in public or if you were on television and you said aloud, you would be fired from your job immediately and banished from society. What I'm really curious about is how is it that in popular music, we do have all sorts of representation issues that persist and are in the lyrics of our favorite songs that, I think in visual mediums and other art forms, there's been more dialogue on.

And I'm really particularly interested in how do we exist in the cognitive dissonance of maybe holding a certain set of values and then the art that we consume does not fulfill those values. And yet we like enjoy it while dancing with our friends and the happiest moments. Well, that's a great question. And it's a question that is somewhat unique to music. because what you just said, speaking the lyrics of a song out loud in different contexts radically changes them. Right. Why is that?

It's because music does something to us. It does. The sound of a song changes our relationship to those words. Is that good or bad? You know, that's hard to say. Which is, I asked you at the beginning of this conversation about what are some of the sort of pre-existing biases that we brought into the show that we've unpacked. And one of them, which we don't name often, is that I know that for both of us,

we never listen to lyrics first. I don't know if it's musical training or if it's just some sort of way of listening and I know when I ask people this question always when you hear music, what is the first thing that you notice? And for a lot of people, it may be lyrics. For a lot of people, it's groove.

I probably tend to hear harmony and rhythm a lot. I listen to a lot to harmony. Some people are just totally tuned into a melody and can hum the melody. But embarrassingly, when we had to perform at our friend's wedding, we couldn't memorize two verses of a song because we're just not lyrically driven.

And I think that actually says something about the art form itself. You actually don't need to listen to lyrics to be having a great time. There is so much happening. And so it's very easy to distance or just have no relationship to them. I verily have a relationship to them.

And so I think it totally supports your point that it is a sort of false notion to say that lyrics removed completely from themselves would actually show their true meaning. They don't necessarily. No, I totally agree. Other things that you're interested in pursuing. You know, I'm interested in that third prong we identified earlier.

Yeah. Which is to recognize that top 40 pop might represent what is being statistically, you know, most bought, streamed, spun, etc. Right. But that it doesn't represent the totality of what is pop music. Yeah, yeah. And so continuing to explore country music, which we have. have so much to learn about. A lot of Latinx musical traditions that we have so much to learn about. We've talked about, you know, African music a few times on the show is becoming, you know,

an increasing element in American pop music. Like, we, we have been so neglectful of covering K-pop and J-pop. K-pop. Oh my God. I know. I know. We're, oh, it's something I'm really thrilled about as well. I really want to widen this idea of what is switched on pop. And some of the earlier notions, I think, when we first started the show of, let's do the thing where we take the Trojan Horse of Pop Music and teach music through it is not at all where I'm at right now. I'm excited to have conversations about what is the music which surrounds our life? Why is it there? What is it doing to us? And I think there's just so many different genres, subgenres, and questions and artists that we can work with that are not necessarily just the things

that are in the top 40. Amen. I had another question that came up that I'm interested to peruse with you over many more episodes. As I was talking about this idea of being able to listen obneversely,

having access to listening to everything, I am really interested to go deeper into the cultural implications of music production and music listening. How can we be

ethical music produce? How can we be ethical listeners when we may be borrowing our joy from cultures we do not belong to? Are you talking about cultural appropriation? Yeah, I know. And so particularly I'm curious about how does that apply as a listener? How do we think about what we're listening to, what we are bringing into our lives? I don't know what to do with this question because I think I really need to think on it more and spend time talking with people who have thought about it more. but I think that there are

social political implications to wide access to consumption. Are there ethical boundaries to our consumption even if we have access? Even though we have access, does that mean we have permission? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks.

And on that, I mean, to what you said, I think we, I'm really excited to bring more people into the show. When we started doing this together, it was largely because I wanted to keep having a long distance musical friendship when you were moving to New York and I was in L.A. We didn't even talk about on the show for a long time. We wanted to trick people that it sounded like we were in the same room and we edited really

tightly to make it sound as if we were together. But largely, I wanted to be able to hang out every week. And it was really fun. And we got really lucky. And a lot of people wanted to join the conversation. And in that, there are issues of representation. I want to make sure that we're not just representing our views on music. And I think we've been able to bring on some guests who have really widened everybody's perspective. And I'm excited to, and I'm excited to to bring in more guests, guest hosts. I want to let people take over the show if they want to take over the show. I feel zero attachment and power to this microphone.

I definitely want to share this microphone a lot more. One thing that does come to mind for me is that even in booking, I've realized that the people who are available because press agents are saying, hey, you should have this person on your show, are not always the people that we need to have on the show, which is not the only way we go about it. But which is to say that there have been times where I've realized, oh, we really haven't been as representative as I would like to be in who we're bringing on to our show because the reality is it takes way more active outreach. And I'm excited to commit to doing outreach to people whose voices have not been represented enough on the show. So that's something that I really want to bring together in our next batch of episodes.

I second that and I'll just add that along with that I'm excited to continue to use and respond to. the ideas and feedback we get from people who listen to the show. Oh my gosh. It's so wonderful. Because like you said, that was something we could have never anticipated when it was just you and me before anyone listened, I guess. We had a year of just having fun. And, you know, it's been absolutely the most incredible part of doing this show is to get ideas, comments, criticism from, you know,

know, just ridiculously smart and like crazy diverse people who listen to this show and turn us on to new music and new ways of thinking and sometimes write like essays, you know, to us that we're just reading like with our jaws on the floor because it's so insightful. I often don't know how to respond and sometimes I take way too long to do so because the comments are so thoughtful and just yeah smart already the show has improved a hundredfold from those listener comments and yeah i'm i'm just excited to continue to assimilate those into what we do and make this the expression the show is an expression of a larger community of people thinking about pop music and not just our from our domes to our mouths and out into the world right on i'm with you i have

one more thing that i want to bring into the show what's that in the coming episodes lots more fun music Lots more having fun, hanging out, having a great time, because we are talking about pop music, and as much fun as it is to get super wonky, I also really enjoy the amount of joy that it brings. Better living through pop. It's literally the cheapest drug you can take. You're going to start using that Dr. Sloan and start peddling a bunch of snake oil, aren't you? No, because I have nothing to gain. I simply turn on the radio and feel better. It's free medicine. It's a beautiful thing. This episode of Switched on Pop is produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan.

Our mixing and engineering is all done by Bill Lance. Our design is Luke Harris. And our fantastic community manager is Sarah Terry. And because it's our 100th episode, I feel like we have been actually neglectful to thank the most important people, which are our partners, your partner, Whitney Graham and my partner, Best Calb, who have been just overwhelmingly supportive of us making this show from when it was a fledgling idea that took. lots of time to what has grown and have just been incredible supporters of the show and have improved our ideas throughout. No, I mean, right. We could have every credit could be, you know, edited by Whitney Graham and Bascow because every single idea we have is filtered through their brilliant minds and ears. So, yeah, that's well.

Thanks. We're going to be back again in two weeks, as always. And, you know, we're going to keep doing this past 100 episodes. Thank you all for being with us. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.