Switched on Pop - The last decade of pop explained

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

We celebrate Switched On Pop's 10th anniversary by taking a deep dive into the last decade of pop music. From bubblegum pop to EDM, trap, and K-pop, we explore how the sound of pop has continually evolved—even when it feels like it’s all the same. Plus, we pull back the curtain on the show with a special interview: Sean Rameswaram, host of Vox's Today Explained, puts Nate and Charlie in the hot seat to reveal their best—and most cringe-worthy—moments from the past decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. It's a very special day, Nate. It is 10 years since we first started making this show. You know, it's amazing. We have gone from making the show in your living room together

with absolutely nobody but our mother is listening to now making a podcast. I'm in a closet. You're in your home office. And we have listeners. all over the world, including many of the leading makers of pop music today. That is a wild journey. I remember sitting across from you in San Francisco recording our first episode.

And then we were like, let's do an ad break. And then we're like, hmm, we don't have any advertisers. Well, let's take a break now to hear a word from our sponsors. Today's episode of Switched on Pop is brought to you by 21st Amendment Brewery, created right here in San Francisco, California. And then we were drinking 21st Amendment brewery beer, and we were like, let's just advertise this beer we're drinking. The first couple episodes don't sound that good.

They're not that bad. I think we kind of hit the mark fairly early on, but I took a minute to learn how to produce this thing. I don't quite know the best way to celebrate 10 years together, because frankly, it is the joy of my professional life, just getting to hang out every week and I want to keep on doing so. But I feel like we should take a little bit of a pause and look backward. I was thinking we could, on our 10th anniversary, look back at a decade of popular music and see what has happened. I think to perhaps

counter the prevailing narrative that all pop music sounds the same. Maybe if we look back over the last 10 years, we can prove that that's very much not the case. I love that. You know, when you have a sitcom that's been on the air for a while. They'll do a clip show for an anniversary. I feel like this is our equivalent of that, but slightly less solipsistic, because I think the best way to honor the last decade is by doing the same thing we do every episode,

trying to understand what's happening in pop music and what it can tell us about the world. Okay, let's do that. And then how about in the second half, we bring on one of the hardest hitting journalists around to grill us with some of the, some very difficult questions about the pod. Okay, not sure why we would subject ourselves to that, but, you know, I've been following your lead for 10 years.

I'm not about to stop now, Charlie. The whole thing's a partnership, Nate. Let's get into the music. You know, there are so many ways we could look at the last 10 years of music, so many big trends. Yeah. The rise of streaming, social media, so much about culture has changed. But let's focus on the sounds and especially the sort of genre changes. So if we go back to 2014, what would you say is sort of the prevailing sound of that moment?

2014. Okay, casting back, I'm hearing big bubblegum pop smashes. Yeah. Katie Perry. Lady Gaga. Carly Ray Jepson. Bieber. I think of this moment as the still optimistic Obama era. And I feel like the song that captures it so well.

this bubble gum pop feeling is Pharrell Williams happy made for the soundtrack of the film, Despicable Me Too. It really was an age of innocence, wasn't it, Charlie? We could just be happy. No problems whatsoever. You could dance alongside a major YouTube meme with Jimmy Kimmel, Tyler the creator, Issa Ray, Magic Johnson, Jamie Fox, all having a great time clapping to this silly children's movie song. And the verse of this song expresses that optimism to me in a way that I don't think we would encounter in 2024.

It's very sparse in terms of the instrumentation. Perel's vocal is like very naked and raw and unprocessed. The song is so earnest and simple. And this is from an artist who used to make some of the most transgressive pop. music around the world. Yeah. It's not just the happy message of the song that feels like a decade ago. The sound of this feels like another moment in time.

Yeah, people are now calling this recession pop. All the happy music that happened sort of post-recession. I think that this is sort of after the fact label, not an actual genre, but there is a vibe of music that was happening in this sort of bubble gum era. Obama core, perhaps? Obama core. Yeah, for real. I feel like if like happy and all that was the sort of shuffle, have a nice time, wedding dance music.

The other major trend that was happening in this moment was EDM. A sort of hyper-festival, white guy, bro-y version of electronic dance music just becomes EDM. And it's everywhere. Artists like Zed, Kelvin Harris. The Vici, Justin Bieber dips his toes in. Rihanna dips her toes in with We Found Love that we talk about extensively in our book. My favorite track of this era is 2015's Lean On by Major Laser featuring DJ Snake and Mo. I don't know how to pronounce the, there's a little accent in the O.

Yeah, it's, it's M and then it's got the Scandinavian O with a line through it. But we're maxing out our linguistic knowledge here, but let's call her Mo for now. We get synths that sound like a steel drum, four-to-the-floor beat, quintessential EDM riser, where everything gets bigger and it's going to explode. And then Mo's vocal becomes an instrument. Now, I should point out that this is sort of a later EDM track that is more down-tempo in the made-up subgenre of tropical house. Just like electronic sounds with Latin inspiration. There's a tiny moment of background Latin percussion in the song just to give it some, quote, authenticity, unquote.

A little kunga breakdown there. Yeah. And the thing that really stands out to me listening to now is the presence of a pop drop. This post chorus that's almost entirely wordless. Right. And that essentially functions as a reduced and slightly sanitized version of a massive Ibitha-style EDM club drop. And then you sing the title line at some point in there. Right, right.

Though EDM is no longer the main sound anymore, I feel like it gave us this pop drop form that continued into other styles. Like, you can hear it in Billy Elish's first number one hit, bad guy years later. That's not an EDM track, but it has that instrumental pop drop kind of vibe. I mean, it even filtered into the world of country music. Listen to I Had Some Help by Post Malone and Morgan Wallin, which is topping the charts right now. That's got a pop drop. It's a little, maybe it's a little abbreviated, but I mean, this is our legacy, Charlie. You know, this will be on our tombstone.

Here lies Nate and Charlie. Coiners of the pop drop and the T-drop. Yeah. We need to come up with some terms that are not drop-related, but hopefully we'll have another 10 years to do that. Yeah, all we've accomplished in 10 years. Okay, so we've got bubble gum. We got the EDM thing.

Yes. Seems like the decade is going to be great, right? Like, all optimistic, happy times. I mean, what could possibly interrupt this bliss? Well, we have to go to 2016. Do we? And we're not talking about politics. The sound of popular music really becomes infused with the sound of trap, the subgenre of hip-hop,

that births in Atlanta and then just goes everywhere. And though it had been developing for years, I think one of the songs that really captured public attention was 2016's Black Beatles by Ray Shremmered, the hip-hop duo, which combines Slim Jimmy and Sway Lee. their name is actually ear drummers backwards, and the song features Gucci Main. This is so cool to revisit because at once it is such an iconic track of this moment. And also listening to it now, it seems to represent so much. many of the changes that were happening in hip-hop at this time. Number one, this is almost exclusively sung. Oh, yeah, right. Like, what? That's something we take for granted now. So it kind of has like that emo rap thing developing on top of a little bit of mumble rap leftover plus the trap beats.

It's the post-808 and heartbreaks, post-drake, post-hayah kind of world that people like Ray Schremmer inhabited. And by this point, it was not even novel to hear rappers singing. And I think the fact that they were so young and so cool and so popular indicated that this was just the

new sound of hip-hop to a degree. And really, I think the sound of pop, like, if you listen to Post Malone, who is a folk singer turns rap star, turns country star, has a song called rock star. I've been fucking hos and popping pillies, man, I feel just like a rock

You know, those heavy 808 distorted kicktrums, the skittering high hats, the slow tempos, the just overall, hazy, dark vibe. That is just the sound of pop music. And I think both rock star and Black Beatles are also claiming that this is the biggest sound. They are claiming rock stardom. They are claiming were as big as John Lennon. Yeah. You remember the mannequin challenge, Charlie, that...

I do. When would this dance? Should we do that right now? Nobody can see it. Great radio move to have to freeze. Right. This becomes this huge meme. People pose like a mannequin in an impossible pose as the camera moves around them

with Black Beatles playing in the background, and that helps propel it up the charts. But also, I bring that up, too, because I think it signals the burgeoning role that social media starts to play in pushing artists to a bigger level of exposure as well. Yeah. Okay, so we've gone from this Obama era optimism of bubblegum pop and EDM to like kind of a darker timeline. Yes, the politics change, the culture changes, the sound changes. Trap becomes kind of everything. The darker themes of Trap embed themselves in pop music.

Everybody seems to try their hand at it. Even Taylor Swift has a trap-styled song called Ready for It. We started this conversation talking about how pop music can often be criticized for all sounding the same. The thing is, there are these moments where sounds kind of coalesce and bleed into every available genre and audience. And I think Trapp very much did that to the point of exhaustion. Pop music needs to change sounds every couple of years. And I think the next big evolution that we get requires looking outside the U.S. and looking towards global music, especially Latin pop and K-pop.

And so in 2017, Latin pop becomes a huge commercial force and changes the sound of popular music. Yeah, I feel like the release of Despacito by Louis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee in January 2017 was a real, before and after moment for the state of the pop music industry. To be clear, this wasn't like, oh, Latin pop suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was like more, I think, that this new decentralized approach to listening based around streaming services allow these new voices to enter mainstream pop consumption. And yes, Despacito got a little bump. from Justin Bieber,

but that came with its own baggage. And I feel like now we can celebrate that song in a Bieber-free kind of way for putting Latin pop back on the map. Yeah, and then you get these huge commercial hits with songs like I Like It by Cardi B, where she features Bad Bunny and Jay Belvin, two of the huge up-and-coming Latin stars,

Bad Bunny from Puerto Rico. He had bubbling up hits like, Delays from 2016, J. Velvin from Colombia. He had had hits in the mid-2010s with like 6am and Mi Hinte, but I like it really puts them in front of a new audience. Part of this track's crossover repeals, of course, that we have English language rapping, but also Spanish language as well. I'm glad you're listening to this tracking to marking this new sound on the charts, introducing these new artists who will become superstars in their own right?

I mean, Bad Bunny was the most streamed artists globally for like two or three years in a row after this. It also highlights another key trend of the past decade, which is the rise of samples and interpolations. I say rise. I mean, obviously these things have been part of pop music for multiple decades now. But as we've discussed on this show, this is like a decade of saturation

in terms of interpolations being used in pop songs. And here we have an interpolation from Pete Rodriguez's 1960s salsa hit. And it not only becomes the backbone of the song, part of the pleasure of listening to it is hearing the old and the new kind of collide in this really satisfying way. Also demonstrating that it's not like Latin music is anything new. It had huge commercial success in the 1960s as well. But what definitely changes in this decade is the number of Spanish language hits on the Billboard Hot 100. I mean, it's really wild. If you go before the year 2000, there's only about 10 songs in history that are on the hot 100, which are predominantly Spanish language songs.

In the 2000s, there's like, I don't know, a couple dozen. Yeah. And then same in the 2010s. There's less than 100. In the 2020s, Spanish language hits have grown exponentially on the charts. Wow. We've already had 214 in this decade, according to my count. Wow.

And, of course, everybody wants to be. get on board, right? All of the English language artists as well. I mean, you mentioned Justin Bieber. You know, Drake gets in on this trend. DJ Snake makes taki-taki. Even K-pop groups, like Super Junior, are using Latin rhythms. Check out the song, Lo Siento. That's so fun to hear. I also remember Chicken Noodle Soup by Jay Hope and And Becky G. coming out in 2019, another trilingual bop. I feel like this is the, obviously, the next big trend looking globally. K-pop becomes this huge phenomenon in the late 2010s, obviously bubbling up for multiple decades.

In 2009, Wonder Girls had a hit called Nobody. Sye, of course, had Gynum style in 2012. But then, you know, BTS come on the scene. Their song, DNA from 2017 gets on the charts. Their song Fake Love from 2018 goes on the charts. charts, but I want to look at Black Pink and their song, do-do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do. Spell that for me, Chuck. D-D-D-U, D-U, D-U, there's hyphens in between each one of those, by the way.

And it's all caps. Capitalization. This is getting too complicated. Let's just listen to the song from 2018. Do I detect a pop drop, Charles? Yeah. I don't think you just detect a pop drop. I feel like this is the maximalist version of everything that we've already heard so far.

Right. We have EDM pop drop. We have Trap 808s. There's a bunch of synth pop that's happening in there that might be pulling from that early bubblegum era. There's some amazing rapping that comes in. This song has everything. K-pop is like a baleen whale, you know? It just kind of sucks up everything.

I don't know. My kid is really into animals. So I think I need to explain everything through an animal metaphor. Okay. Well, okay, how would you describe it? Mr. Sceptical over here. It's the kitchen sink of pop music. It's the best of everything.

Oh, kitchen sink. Wow, never heard that meta before. Could have had a bailian whale, blow on your mind. Instead of we're just doing a kitchen sink. The balean whale. That might be our new little motto. I like the idea of being able to hear all of the trends we've been discussing within a single song. I think this is part of the formula for the success of K-pop.

Like, there's something for everyone here. Right. And there's never a dull moment in these tracks. It's like every second almost is capturing your attention in some way. It's just like a Sonic Wonderland or something. To your point, I think no matter who you are anywhere in the globe, because there are so many references, there is something for you. And seemingly every pop star wants to get on this train.

I mean, Black Pink collaborates with Dula Lipa, Lady Gaga, Selma Gomez, BTS collaborates with Nikki Minaj, Halsey, Coldplay, Benny Blanco, Snoop Dog. It's like, you want to cross-pollinate these audiences because people see that this is a global phenomenon with a ton of success. I like how you describe the sound as maximalist, Charlie, but there's also, I think, a countercurrent to that sound that we find in the last decade. Yeah. Reflected in the new accessibility of recording and production tools to anyone, not just someone with a fancy recordings to do. Like you referenced earlier, you and me recording this podcast, you in your closet, me and my bedroom. Right.

What about bedroom pop? So like the things you make with off the shelf, affordable equipment, kind of hushed, a lot of MIDI programming. What are you thinking about? It's got to be Billy Eilish. Ocean Eyes recorded by Billy Elish when she's only 13 in her home bedroom. Her brother, Phineas, produces the whole thing on a laptop. They use like a $100 microphone. And the song, of course, wasn't her biggest hit, but it really did break her out to the public.

The song only went to 84 in 2018, but then she releases when the party's over in 2018 goes to 29. And then Bad Guy in 2019 goes to number one. Right. I feel like there's this whole generation of DIY pop stars that follows. Little Nas X comes to prominence with Old Town Road, which uses a beat that he bought offline. Steve Lacey goes to number one, someone who makes entire songs on his phone. Right, right, right, right. This is a very new age.

They've always been garage bands, of course. This is something else. This is like garage band on your phone, which you used to come pre-installed with an iPhone. Exactly. And I hate to use the word democratization. It's completely overused because this has nothing to do with politics and equal access to voting. But this is an era in which there is greater access to making music. I think the flip side of that, maybe less a genre trend, but just one of the biggest metatrends that is still unfolding right now is the way in which fans have access to.

really kind of deciding what is going to be the biggest recording. We now live in a time where no-name artists like Oliver Anthony music can pop up on the charts because a bunch of people choose to stream and buy his songs. And of course, major acts like Harry Stiles, BTS, and Taylor Swift fans are known for coordinating their listening to game the chart position of new releases. So I feel like the current era of fandom that we live in belongs at this moment to Taylor Swift. And I feel like her album, The Tortured Poets Department, is a perfect example because it was met with like very kind of mediocre critical praise, but it broke seemingly every major record, right? It's like the most pre-saved record ever. It breaks streaming records on its first day and its first week. It has

15 weeks at number one on the Billboard 200, which is her biggest chart topper ever in her career. All 31 songs from the deluxe edition go on the Hot 100, including the entire top 14, which has never been done before. What? I know. I didn't realize that. That's bananas. The fandom has kept this album just at the top of everyone's mind, which is not at all to take away, you know, Taylor's contribution of endlessly touring and marketing this album. I feel like the song that best represents the meta narrative of the album,

and even her whole career, is I can do it with a broken heart. It's like a song for her fans, with her fans. About her whole career and breakups. You can even hear the audience in the background. I like ending this part of the conversation here, Charlie, because the idea that listeners, fans are in the driver's seat is very appealing to me. Whether that's always the case or not, I really like the idea of empowered listeners. And listeners, for better or worse, I feel like have taken a lot of responsibility.

There's more attention on the ethics of listening and consumption than I feel like there were 10 years ago when we started this podcast. And I think the listener is ultimately sometimes more important than the artist themselves. Because listeners are the ones who interpret these songs and create meaning and use them in their lives. And sometimes reclaim these songs in powerful ways. So I like ending with the listener in this post-mortem of the last 10 years of pop. This is the time of the empowered listener. So maybe it's time for us to give our listeners a chance to go. go behind the show.

What a lot of great popbacks do is they reveal themselves constantly in their music. Maybe we don't do that as much in the podcast. And so in the second half, I want to bring on one of my favorite journalists to ask us about our greatest learnings, failings, and favorite moments from the show over the last decade. 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. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app.

Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminals. aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period?

I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up

instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Switched on Pop is back. I am not Charlie nor Nate. My name's Sean Ramosveram. I host today explained. But in keeping with the themes of today's show,

I'm a fan. And as a fan, I'm here to grill these gentlemen on how this thing happened. So let's just get right to it. Charlie, Nate, 10 years ago, the Halcyon Days of 2014. Why was that the right time to start a music podcast? Tactically, it was in media

the dawn of podcasting with cereal and great podcasts like today explained around the corner. It was also the launching pad for, explain our journalism writ large. Fox.com is getting started. Everyone wants to explain everything in the news, and we felt like music was perhaps under-explained. They needed a podcast.

We were definitely drunk on cereal and startup and the other flagship shows of the second-grade podcast boom. And simultaneously, we were reading articles by the musician Owen Pallet in Slate. in Slate, who also performs as Final Fantasy. And he was breaking down Katie Perry's teenage dream using harmonic analysis. And Charlie and I were like, we want to do this. But maybe not in written form.

Maybe we should do it as a podcast where we could actually play music and listen to it. And ultimately, the thing that actually got us to sit down and record was the fact that we were going to be moving out of the city we'd been living in together, San Francisco. And this was like our last chance to do something together. Aw. So we recorded our first episode. And then we kissed. No, we did.

We'll. I hope you kissed while listening to Final Fantasy. How has the show changed since then? How has it changed of the course of 10 years? Because the industry has changed. Yeah. I know it's jumped around from a couple different places. I know it's gotten more ambitious.

Those are my outside. opinions and observations, but tell us how you guys think the show's grown and changed over a decade. Well, I'm going to spin your question and say that what hasn't changed is our deep belief in project-based friendship. There's no better thing to do than get to hang out with your best pal every single week, make a podcast together. You guys, you're going to make me cry. Virtual embrace. You know, I answered with sort of like the big media trends. I think one thing that has changed in media is a very different media landscape where traditional media has declined in so many ways in number of journalists employed public trust. Of course, there have been some

big moments of success. I think Fox Media is one of them. Obviously, the New York Times has a great subscriber base. But the role of our job, I think, has really changed from we are tastemaking, needing to explain the things to you, to more like, you can get everything you need anyway. You're just going to trust us to go do lots and lots and lots of homework and try to distill this giant ocean of music down to something which we can understand. Nice. I feel like we've become slightly more endemic as listeners. Like we're less outsiders a bit.

Like we were when we started the show and we'd be like, what is this new sound that we're hearing? You know, what is this synthesizer? What is this drum machine? What is this vocal fry? And now I feel like we're a little bit more steeped in it. but we still aren't stands, so we're able to have a certain critical distance. But I like being there, a little one foot in, one foot out.

Very professorial of you. Professor Sloan. Just slapped on my elbow patches. Wait, that's the other big thing that's changed. I've caught up to Nate and I get to profess part-time as an adjunct professor now. So I'm working on my elbow patches. And you moved to New York. I did move to New York City.

We keep splitting the difference. We keep moving to opposite cities of each other. We're just going to end up in Ohio eventually. It's got to be what happens. How do you think your listeners have changed over the course of a decade? I feel like one of the biggest changes is that our listeners have given us more and more feedback as the show has gone on, which kind of makes sense. I think as the show has grown, you're just going to get more people talking to you. But what's been remarkable about that is how the overwhelming, the overwhelming.

quality of that feedback is really nuanced and in a lot of cases has fundamentally reshaped the show. This would not be the same podcast as it was in 2014, if not, for listeners emailing us and sharing, like, this is what I thought you missed. This is what I think you could do better. I'm not sure if you got that right. And I give a lot of credit to Charlie here for Charlie, because when I get an email like that, you know, and I get defensive Charlie is always like, no, our job is to hear this person out. And if you do that and sort of let your defenses down, then I think invariably you find

something to learn about and improve. I've been delighted that we have a super dedicated audience and continues to grow and that more and more over the years we've heard from artists who are making the pop music and are like, oh, you talk about this thing you did on your show. And I put that in my song. And I'm like, whoa, that's very cool. So I don't think the media is supposed to relish in the fact that it influences what people also do. But that's very rewarding to see that the terminology and analyses that we've contributed to pop music has sort of made its way back around.

I'm going to ask about a difficult moment in the course of your 10 years because I'm sure it's one that you could not have foreseen when you launched this show in 2014, which is that you would become a conservative. media flashpoint. Are you guys comfortable talking about that moment, reliving a trauma? Well, we canceled Beethoven in 2020, and he has not been heard from since. But take that as a yes. He hasn't released anything since. He hasn't shown his face. Have you seen him anywhere? I haven't seen him. Only when I look up. He's in your eye. He's in your For those who can't see this audio recording, I have a Beethoven poster above my head. It's awesome. Well, you're flirting with cancellation yourself then.

Always. We've made Beethoven persona non-grod, and we did that by making a four-part podcast series with the members of the New York Phil Harmonic about Beethoven's Fifth, which is, you know, the most tried and true way to cancel the most famous classical composer of all time. Classic route. You guys took the classic route. That was a wild experience. Basically, after spending months and months making this podcast series... With the New York Philharmonic. And pouring our heart and soul into it.

And then sending out a one-sentence tweet about Beethoven being elitist. Which, to be clear, we could have phrased better. I may have called it. No, no, hold on. We didn't even author that tweet. That tweet was authored by somebody else. We're not going to throw anyone on the bus. We didn't write this tweet.

Who will not throw under the bus on this celebration. And it was not that Beethoven is elitist, but rather in his time, elitism with the classical music became an issue. Yes. And that tweet resulted in, let me see if I can remember, an op-ed in the Washington Post saying Beethoven should not be canceled, an op-ed in the New York Post saying canceling Beethoven is the latest woke madness for the classical music world. A tweet from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas saying, Roll over Beethoven, you're canceled. And Ben Shapiro tweeting,

let me put this as gently as possible. Go fuck yourself. And in your defense, Nate? Oh, in my... You're sending me up here. I thought you're telling me to go fuck myself. I've never said that to you. Well, I think the work speaks for itself.

And really, maybe the saddest part of that sort of tempest in a teapot was that it over... it overshadowed the contributions that Anthony McGill, Lelan Easteret, Deborah Borda, Yop van Svaden, David Lang, all these incredible musicians from the Philharmonic, you know, who took the time to talk to us and reflect on what Beethoven means to them, that all that was kind of overshadowed.

That was like the biggest bummer of it. Four years later, I feel like I also learned a lot from that experience in the sense of people really care about music. I mean, this is something that people hold so dear to them that an assault on a musician or style of music you like is not just this kind of abstract commentary on the value of a piece of music. It's like evaluation of who you are as a person.

Keeping that in mind has been something, I don't know, very instructive. I think you're giving a bit too much leeway to conservative pundits who were literally looking for something to take down mid-pendemic when everybody was stuck at home and they needed some controversy to stir up. Because my favorite thing about all of this was that in this series, which was largely you know, sort of praiseworthy in celebration of Beethoven's work where we also took a critical look at some of the institutions of classical music, we saw that the listenership was really engaged across the entire series.

And I think that third episode where this whole hullabaloo happened, there was no change in listenership, which is to say all the people who were criticizing the show didn't actually go and listen to it. It was all the same listeners who had been listening through the series. Classic. And so we just found ourselves in the middle of this tornado that was, there just needed to be something that week.

There was no other good news. And so... You found yourself in the middle of a fight that really had nothing to do with you or your work. But let me ask, tell you. Tell us about a fight between you two over the past 10 years because I see the brotherhood thing. I see the kinship, the professorship. I see it all.

But surely you two disagree and not just about the merits of brat, let's say. I am frustrated that Nate is not as into brat as I am. But I think we have that. This also frustrates me. I know. Thank you, Sean. I appreciate your camaraderie. I feel like we've had exactly two meaningful arguments making this podcast.

I can only think of one of them, which is the great Ariana Grande debate of whether in the song, Break Free by Zed and Ariana Grande. This is the part when I say, I don't want you. Whether she sings at the end of one of the most beguiling couplets in modern popular music, I only want to die alive, never by the hands of a broken heart. Don't want to see you cry tonight now that I've become who I really are. And I insisted that this is what she sings, despite the syntactical nonsenseicality of it. Arianna Grande corroborated this in an interview where she said the producer Max Martin told her, don't worry about the fact that it doesn't make grammatical sense.

Singing R has a nice, you know, rhyming assidence to it. So that's what you need to do. And then Charlie comes along and he's like, no, listen to this really closely. Turn up the volume. You're going to hear that she actually bails at the very end and puts an M on the word. Because she literally can't help. She just physically can't sing a grammatically incorrect word here. And I listened to it and I was like, that's bullshit.

shit. We have never reconciled this debate. We are on either side of it, which makes you the final judge. I'm going to play you break free right now. Oh, wow! You're going to have to decide. What a treat. And let me just do a little screen share right

here so that you can see the official lyrics on Spotify say, now that I've become who I really am. Where do these Spotify lyrics come from? I sometimes What is it the honest?

Lyrics provided by music's match with an X. So that doesn't seem like the most trustworthy source. Okay, because I love you both, I'm going to say she left it intentionally ambiguous so that people like you could fight about it. Now I feel like she's saying arm. Like she says, become who I really are and then throws a little M at the very end and we get arm. Every time I listen to this song from here and out, I listen to this song, I'll the time. This is all I'm going to hear is this argument that you two are having over the course of a decade.

I misquoted the lyrics just for the record. It's don't want to hear you lie tonight. Not whatever I said earlier. Thank you for the question. See, this is why we don't have meaningful arguments because it's such a gracious person. We have one other argument, which is that we have a segment we've called Switches Brew where we recommend songs to listeners. Nate hates the name Switches Brew. It was an idea by our fantastic editor, Art Chung. And I think it's a great thing. Play on Bitches Brew, the great Miles Davis record. It's a place where we're switching it up. It references our name.

We're brewing up a different mix of music. The more you talk about it, the more I hate it. I mean, it's certainly seasonal, and this is the season. I once did say to Nate, I was like, fine, you come up with a better title. He hasn't given me one yet, so that's, I think that... It sounds like you launched the show in October of 2014, and here you are celebrating in October of 24. Maybe you should just like own the sort of spiritual connection with Halloween. It sounds like a morning talk show on ABC hosted by like Jenna Bush or something.

I really strong, profound. Not there's not there's anything wrong with any of that. But just for our show, it's like I don't like it. Sorry. I wish you guys luck figuring that. Maybe for the 20 year. Do you want to tell us what you think the next 10 years look like? like for Switched-on Pop.

I hope we have a job. I love doing this. Smart. One, I hope we have a job because the media is crazy. And I just hope that we come back around and collectively to see that we need journalism, even music journalism,

as an essential role in discourse. I'm obviously slightly frightened by AI. Have you all caught on? I don't know if people have been sending you Google LM podcasts. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes. Scary. Yeah, yeah, I've heard these.

Where Google's AI will create an audio program based off of anything you input into it, and it makes it sound like a podcast. And I don't know if you've heard this, but I have gotten many messages that say that the male trained AI voice sounds like Nate Sloan. And so I actually took our entire book and put it into Google LM, and this is what it output. You know how much I love a good deep dive? Yeah. And you really came through this time. These switched on pop excerpts. It's like they crack the code on what makes a hit song from Outcastacea.

What I love about this book is that it doesn't just tell you about music theory. They really get my voice wrong. So maybe I'll have a career in the future. Charlie, you've changed. That was a little uncanny. Is that wild? Is this your side hustle? Do you provide Google what's the voice words?

No, which makes me think that maybe we could get a nice lawsuit going. fund the show you got to grow your ambitions in the next 10. Exactly. Yeah. Get some of that Google money for the show.

Now we're talking. Maybe less cynically though. Like I really hope to keep doing this because one of the things about pop music is it's so often it's the media for youth. And I think that aging alongside pop music is a great deal of fun.

Keeps you young. Keeps you connected with people who are creating culture. And more than that, like I think what's so fun about pop music is that it is always changing. And every time I start to get get bored by something, something new happens, a brat drops, and my whole life is upended.

There's a lot of documented research which shows that most people stop listening to new music in their third decade of life. And I really hope to do the opposite, not just for us, but also for all of our listeners, so that as our listeners are also growing up, they continue to be engaged with what's happening in popular music. It's always got something to delight you with. It's always got something to tell us about culture. I hope we can continue to find new voices to highlight on the show. I think though Charlie and I's partnership is the core of what we do, the people who have worked on the show with us, our Chung, who Charlie mentioned, Julie Myers, our engineer, Brandon McFarland, our producer, Rihanna Cruz, our illustrator, Iris Gottlieb. You know, that team and those collaborations,

have been such a valuable part of honing what we're trying to do and trying to share and all the musicians and journalists and industry professionals that we had on the show and have shared their insights. That's definitely not something I think we anticipated 10 years ago when we sat down across from each other and started this. And I'm excited to see who else we can bring into the fold over the next decade. Also shoutouts to all our former team members like Nashak Kerwa, who executive produced the show, former producers Megan Lubin, Bridger Armstrong, engineer Bill Lance, community manager at me Barr, designer Luke Harris, Zach Tenorio on ad music and all of our partners at Vox Media. Shoutouts to all the people who have made this show what it is for 10 years, especially you two.

If I, as a listener, may be so bold as to thank you for your work and your dedication. to dissecting what we all know is the most important music, popular music. Tell us, if you dare, where you see this beast going in the next 10 years. My first reaction is that if I were better at predictions, I would work in A&R

or run a very successful music label. I'm not that worried about AI replacing artists, definitely concerned about songwriters to a certain degree. I think artists are essential. like we participate in pop music because we love the people. We want to know everything about their lives. We want to see ourselves in them.

In terms of the sound, I think it's just going to get more adventurous. We're going to hear things we don't know what they are. Like new sounds are just constantly being created. And perhaps that's the most exciting part about new adventures and technology is the way that sound can be sculpted in ways that haven't been imagined yet. I don't know what that is, but I'm sure it'll be cool. I'm going to co-sign what Charlie said and also predict the exact opposite. I love it.

As music becomes more technologically spectacular and resulting in all these unheard sounds that Charlie just described, I think there will also be an equal and opposite reaction in which people will return to a more kind of fundamental type of music making. I predict the rise of the amateur musician, the people getting together and playing music, acoustically and jamming and like returning to the basics.

Like every day I read an article about run clubs, right? There's going to be this. I predict the same thing with music. There's going to be music clubs. There's going to be like people just wanting to make music in this really direct and sort of primal way that will represent the antidote to all of this AI generated music that Charlie just brought up. So I see it going in both directions in the next 10 years.

I'll join you in that club. Well, I hope you'll have me back in 10 years to see if you guys were right are just so, so wrong. Thanks, Sean. Thank you, guys. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Switch on Pop is produced by Rianna Cruz, engineering by Brandon McFarland, edited by Art Chung, illustrations by Arniz Gottlieb.

Remember over the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is a part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at NYMag.com slash pod. You can find more episodes of Switchon Pop anywhere you get podcasts, and you can talk to us on social media at Switchdown Pop. If you've been listening for 10 years, I mean, first of all, wow. And second of all, what are some of your favorite moments or least favorite? Or lowlights from that time. We are trying to grow always.

So we'd love to hear from you. We're going to keep on doing this thing as long as you let us. So we'll see you again next Tuesday. I'm going to go see Stevie Wonder right now. I'm so excited. I think we're going to talk about Stevie. It's going to be great. And until then, thanks for listening.

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