Switched on Pop - The Life Changing Magic of Music in 2015

Episode Date: January 17, 2016

Charlie and Nate reveal the life changing magic of how to tidy up the music you missed from last year. Annually, hundreds of publications release best of lists. These lists are supposed to make it easier to discover and celebrate the year in music. But with so many lists how can we know what is truly the best? Well we’ve found the definite source what’s great: Rob Mitchum’s Top Albums in 2015. Also, the major trends you might have missed and Jake Birch’s Mixed On Pop about The Weeknd’s “I Can’t Feel My Face.” Featuring: Wiz Khalifa – See You Again Taylor Swift – Blank Space Mark Ronson – Uptown Funk Adele – Hello Carly Rae Jepsen – I Really Like You The Weeknd – Can’t Feel My Face Duke Ellington – Prelude To A Kiss  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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records. Nate, I've got a question for you hit me do you

have a musical New Year's Resolution? Ooh, a New Year's Musical

resolution like play more augmented seventh chords sure um write more songs about falafel about just write more songs i commend your specific goals though well that okay yeah let's let's start let's start big more songs and then a subcategory songs about falafel songs about yeties songs about donald trump ooh ooh hopefully fewer of those protest songs protest songs what about your musical resolutions for 2016, Charlie. So I actually have the same resolution every year. It's a little bit embarrassing. Have you heard of the life-changing magic of tidying up? I have. Yes. I haven't read it, but, you know, I've heard people speak of it. Right. So it's this book about how to basically clean your house, and I spent the whole week applying it to my apartment, uncovering all the

buried things in the closets and the drawers of my life, you know, getting rid of all the things that I don't need, finding the right home for the things that I do need and the things that bring me joy. And so my resolution is to apply Mary Condo's method, the life-changing magic of tidying up to listening to music. Whoa, okay. Talk me through this. Okay, so I'm actually not all that good at listening to music

right as it comes out. And for me, it actually kind of it piles up, unlisted until, honestly, basically the new year where I'll go back and listen to all the things that I missed the year before. Sort of a annual catch-up. Yeah, exactly. So this process

used to totally stress me out because there's so much music every single year. But I think I finally found a way to tidy it my musical life, enjoy the things I missed, and I think other people will appreciate it too. I can't promise that it won't change your life. All right, this is a good way to begin this new year. I'm excited.

Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So today on Switch on Pop, we're going to look at some of the mega trends from 2015, we're going to share the definitive list of the things that you missed. This is my way of tidying up, finding all the things that slipped through and, you know, we're hiding in those drawers.

Right. The dust in the corners. Exactly. And then stick around for later in the show. We have a great contributing piece. We're calling a mixed on pop going deeper into one of the soundscapes of one of 2015's best songs. Awesome. Cool. So just before the two of us took a break for the new year, I was asked to contribute some musical analysis

to the Billboard Pop Shop podcast discussing the major trends of 2015. And, you know, I was really sad that I didn't get to share them with you. Yes, I'm dying to hear it. Charlie, what did I miss? So I got a little crazy. I went into my really analytic mind. Did you make a spreadsheet? I made a really beautiful spreadsheet of all the keys and modes and beats per minute of all the top songs for the past two years. And I ran an analysis on all of them to see what the heck's going on. Oh, God, that's so sexy.

It's got really nice charts. Yeah. No one makes a spreadsheet like Charlie Harding. Oh, I wish I'd be known for something better. Oh, well. So I have some research-driven insights off of last year and what happened. I just want to know, did you hear anything in particular about 2015? Was there anything that stood out for you? That's a great question.

Perhaps, I've never articulated this, but perhaps there's something about kind of merging hip-hop and R&B. Like those two genres are getting closer and closer. Right. An artist like The Weekend or Fettiewap or Drake, they're all kind of right in the middle of that Venn diagram of R&B and hip hop and pop as well, frankly. Oh, for sure. I don't know. Maybe there's some genre slippage happening.

Okay. And that's something I'm very excited about. So you're reading the tea leaves. Maybe I can dive into the spreadsheet and confirm what you're saying. Yes. Yeah. Back up my wild claims with some hard. If you will.

Okay. So you're right, of all those songs that charted to number one this year, there wasn't a single one that would really fall into the genre of hip-hop, but there was a lot in R&B. Interesting. And is that different from previous years? Last year, there was some hip-hop that came into the number one, and definitely before that as well. Interesting. Okay. So when we look at the numbers, there was a big change from this year to last year.

The first thing is that music slowed down. And the second thing is that it got happier. What do I mean? The average beats per minute of the number one songs in the billboard. Last year, the average was 122, which is like 120 beats per minute is your sort of absolutely normal pace of any song. And this year it slowed down to 94. Whoa.

Okay, that's quite a drop. Can we hear 122 BPM? What does that sound like? Sure, sure, yeah. And then here's this year with 94. The slowest song we had this year, the weekends, the hills, was a dragging 57 beats per minute. That's slower than, you know, your heartbeat. Unless you're really athletic.

So I'm not talking about you or me. 57 beats per minute. That is lugubrious. That is lento. That is multolento, my friend. So things have slowed down. But what's funny is that the other trend is that we have. more major songs than minor songs. Last year, there were more minor songs than major songs.

And so I feel like we have this playing with modality and speed, your happy, sad, switcheroo. Yeah, because you would normally expect sort of more sadder, minor songs to be slower. That's what I would think. And perhaps happier, more exuberant songs to be faster. So slow happy songs, that's a very specific place to be. In fact, you were talking about the blurring of genres. And I think one of the ways that this is happening is through this playing with major and minor in the speed of songs. So one

of the big songs of last year was Wiz Khalifa's See You Again. It's been a long without you, my friend and I'll tell you all about it when I see you again. And this is a really slow song at 80 beats per minute.

But the funny thing is, this sad song, See You Again, it's about lamenting someone passing, was an Major key. Yeah, that's so... That is really funny. Okay, but it's not the only one, right? Taylor Swift's blank space, also pretty slow. It's kind of a dark song about disgruntled love. And it's also in a major key. Yeah. Okay, now I'm very confused. I've got one more for you. Oh, okay, please. My favorite song of last year, which we dedicated an entire episode to, Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk. Indeed. 115 beats per minute, so a little faster, sort of that more normal. pace. Now this is probably the most upbeat song of the year, the happiest, you know, the number

one dance party song. Minor key. Okay. So clearly the American psyche in 2015 was very confused. Certainly something is twisted, though. You're right. Slow and happy. Yeah. Okay. I'll have to, I'll have to ponder the ramifications of that one. I have to do some deep meditation on this. Maybe our listeners have some insights into why that could be. Yeah. If people have insights, they can always tweet at us at Switched on Pop. So if two years ago was fast and sad, and last year was slow and happy, what do you think we're going to get this year?

Okay, wait, I can do this. Fast and happy. Yeah, like happy, happy, super happy, super upbeat, all major songs. Yeah. I'm predicting like a return of ska. Right. Or like CNC Music Factory. style dance pop.

I'm not one to make predictions. I think both of us are much more about examining what's there, but I wouldn't mind hearing fast, happy songs. Why not? Sure, yeah. If we're not going to engage in making predictions about a year to come, I think it's only appropriate to look back and see what did we miss.

What was the best of 2015? And this was all for me about that decluttering. The life-changing magic of tidying up. Yes. The start of a show I mentioned that my yearly resolution is to declutter and uncover all of the things I missed in the year before. But this stuff always stresses me out because the process of finding the best is laborious, right?

Indeed, yeah. Like, there are dozens of publications and hundreds of blogs that all claim to have the top 50 albums of the year. Right, right. Okay, what is the methodology to these listicles? Like, really? Yeah, that's based on thousands of points of data meticulously combed through by whole teams of engineers. I assume. Yeah, of course. So then, but which one should I listen to? Is, you know, traditional and go to Rolling Stone or Billboard, maybe NPR music, maybe Pitchfork. Who actually has the best? This is, this is a question I never knew to worry about. And now that I do, it is also really stressing me out. So thanks for that.

That's kind of the thing about the life-changing magic of tidying up. I think it's not a problem until you've read the book. You didn't realize how much of a mess you lived in. Yeah. I was blissfully. ignorant of my problems until you introduce them to me, Charlie, so. Well, but now I have an answer. Oh, thank goodness. So last year, my buddy Rob forwarded me the best of, the best of all lists. It's like a metal list of all the best of lists. Whoa, okay. It's this list that goes around the internet each year, which has created this master score, they call the consensus score, of what are the top 50

albums of each year. And I was able to track down the originator of this list, Rob Mitchum. Rob Mitchum. Rob Mitchum, as a science writer for the University of Chicago, as well as a music writer for Pitchfork and other publications. I'm really excited to welcome Rob to switch down Bob. Yeah, thanks for having me. So you're the owner of this definitive list of albums for the year. What motivated you to create the list? Right around the time in the fall or late fall when year-end lists are coming out from different

publications. I kind of realized that I hadn't paid as much attention to music that year as I would have liked and probably missed a lot of the sort of top critically praised albums. Right now, I have more access to more music than I've ever had available to me at any time, but I feel like I'm totally overwhelmed by this sense of choice. And I feel like it's actually gotten harder and harder to find the best stuff every year. What's with that? Yeah, I think, you know, going back several decades, you really only had sort of the big music publications. So like the Rolling Stone list or the spin list.

or maybe Paa Zop and Jop from the Village Voice, if you were, particularly in tune to music criticism, that kind of told you what the consensus was about the top albums. But, you know, around about 10, 15 years ago with the rise of the Internet, you just got so many more music publications out there, which is great because each publication has its own sort of, you know, demographic and focus and sort of genre preferences. And so you get a lot more music covered,

but then sort of organizing that, diaspora of music critics into one central list that really tells you the story of the year is, it's a lot more difficult. So my humble spreadsheet, which is really just a lot of data entry, it's nothing fancy, kind of attempts to sort of create that simple snapshot of the year. So how is something that proclaims to be the list to end all lists actually constructed? So I just opened up a Google spreadsheet and started dropping, all the lists I could find in there and figuring out some ways to sort of come up with

something of a consensus list across all of the music publications that release album lists. Very cool. So once I had done a little bit of work on it, I thought, you know, other people could be interested in this. And so I just put it out on my Twitter and, you know, expected a few people to find it interesting, but surprisingly, it got around. So let's get into the meat of it. what are the top results from this year?

Yeah, so this year, of the three years, I've done this, had the most dominant number one album. It was Kendrick Lamar's Pimp a Butterfly. The Kendrick album is just extraordinary. So what you're saying is that there's basically, across all critics, consensus that that that is. is the best album and that there wasn't a lot of variation in it. It's the number one album on more than half of the list that I posted.

And it appears in almost every single list somewhere. I think at this point it's statistically impossible for Kendrick not to be the number one album. Yeah. So just going down the list, the top 10, we had Kendrick Lamar, Sufion Stevens, Courtney Barnett, Jamie XX, Tam and Paula, Father John Misty, Finn Staples, Grimes, and Slater Kitty. Okay, yeah, that is a lot of good music. So, okay, so we got some consensus. Are there any surprising results that you saw?

Yeah, you know, I think this year, hip-hop did a lot better. It had more consensus than previous years. That really seems to be a genre where there's not a lot of rallying around one album. Obviously, this year we had that with Kendrick Lamar, but also the Vince Staples album was very high up this year. The Future album, the Drake album. So there were some bigger releases from that area of the music world. What overlap are you seeing here between the Billboard and your list of lists? Are there certain albums that are making it on both the top 100 as well as on our top critically reviewed albums of the year?

Yeah, the one I was kind of interested in, both for commercial reasons and because of the timing of its release, was the Adele album. Yeah. Which came out pretty late in the year for these types of lists. It appeared in three lists, though it appeared in the top 10 on two of those three. Rolling Stone and Complex both put it in the top 10. I don't really know what would be the most commercially successful album, even in the top 20 or 30. I think there's a couple of interesting ones. I mean, some stuff that we looked at this year was the Carly Ray Jepson album, Drake's album,

Casey Musgraves, and we were particularly fans of Justin Bieber's album. Yeah, the Carly Ray Jepson one was actually one of the more interesting ones. One thing I like to do is compare the U.S. publications to the U.K. publications and just see sort of cultural differences across the Atlantic. And where it stands right now, not a single publication voted for the Carly Ray Jepson album from the UK magazines. Wow. If you strip those out entirely and just look at U.S.-based publications, it's actually the number nine album. Do you think the Brits still have beef with Canada? What's up?

It could be what it is. Yeah. This top albums, 2015, list is publicly available to the internet. It's a Google spreadsheet, and we will post a link to it on our site. There's a lot to discover in here. This is exciting. Every year when this comes out, I go through and listen to at least the top 20 because there's always albums, and I listen to all those albums in the top 20. There's always things that I've missed and discover exciting, awesome new things. Rob, thanks for joining us on Switched on Pop. No, thank you for having me. It's a great conversation. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it.

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So last year we did this episode on the weekends, I can't feel my face. one of, I think, the biggest songs of 2015. Oh, yeah. Still, I think it's still stuck in my head, actually, since that episode. Yeah, it's a song that keeps on giving. I mean, it's got that Michael Jackson style of vocals, your crazy, funky baseline. And, of course, it's got that concealed message of drug abuse, which is subtly placed in the whole structure of the song that we uncovered in our episode.

Yeah, the delicious interplay of light and dark. Yes. I thought that we had done justice for this song, but just as soon as we released the episode, we heard, something missing. Yes. In my other life as a guerrilla vaudeville performer, I met a music producer named Jake Birch and we were talking and told him about our show. He tuned in. He really dug it in something completely unprecedented. He

volunteered himself as our first field producer and created this brilliant segment called Mixed on Pop. Yeah, so Jake uses his ear as a music producer to break down what makes I can't feel my face great. And quick note, this next piece does include some references to drug culture, so

if you have any little ones listening, this might be a good time to tune out. But if you don't have any little ones, sit back, spark a fatty, and check out what Jake has to say. Oh, geez. Check it out. Hello there, switched on pop.

I'm Jake Burr. producer, songwriter, and mixing engineer. I really appreciate you bringing up the drug influence on this song, as there's a moment in what you're calling the bridge that I'd like to look at. This moment comes at the end, and you almost played it in your show, but cut it off in the episode right before the final chorus. Here it is from The Weekends, I Can't Feel My Face. There's something really cool happening with the vocal

that enhances the secret drug anthem, as you guys have called, it. There's this kind of out-of-control sonic unhinging that I imagine is similar to the out-of-control feeling one might have on a heavy coke bender, and it's all done through the use of delay. For those of you that don't know, delay is the repetition of a source sound, where the repeated sound is heard shortly after the source. Here is a very simple delay for you to get an idea of what I'm talking about. Now, how did I just make that happen? Well, delays can be created through various means. While these days, delays are usually made digitally, as in the delay you just heard, they actually have their origins in the analog domain. Some very early

examples of prevalent use of delay can be heard on some Elvis records. Elvis would stand in the live room of the studio and record his vocals onto a tape machine in the control room. To get his signature slap-back delay, his vocal will be played off of the tape recorder, then through a speaker in the live room and be picked up and re-recorded onto the tape again by his vocal microphone. You get that? He sings into the mic, it goes onto the tape, then shortly after it comes off of the tape, back into the room he's singing in, through his speaker, and back into his microphone. Now, because there was a space between the record head and the playback head of the tape machine and because there was a distance between the speaker and his mic, the reproduced sound was printed

back onto the tape machine at a later point than Elvis's source vocal. Here's a fine example of Elvis's signature slapback delay heard on Heartbreak Hotel. Well, since my baby left me, well, I find a new place to dwell. Well, it's down at the end of lonely street that... So the use of delay began as what is called a spatial effect. Recording studios tend to be acoustically dry or dead spaces relative to the natural world. So it can be musically and sonically pleasing to inject a sense of acoustic ambience that emulates a larger or more lively acoustic space. In the case of Elvis, this technique was used to impart not only a pleasing sense of space, but also a stylish sonic signature.

As these kinds of sounds became more desirable throughout the years, purpose-built delays became a standard tool in the recording studio. While delays are used to create a sense of space, there are times when they are fully employed as special. effects. For instance, delays are quite prevalently used in dub reggae records to extreme effect. Follow me for a second. You have a source sound fed into the tape delay. That delay prints onto the tape and then goes to the output. Now if you take the output of that sound, which is now delayed, and feed it back to the

input of the tape delay, you have what's called a feedback loop. What you get is your source and then your delay and then your delay and then your delay and then your delay and then your delay and then your delay. This is called feedback. If you increase the volume of the output of your delay, beyond the volume of the input to your delay, you get a crazy dub feedback loop that seems to spiral out of control like in this King Tubby track. I hope you followed that and that you're with me so far because this is about to get a little crazier.

So let's take a look at this moment in I Can't Fleeve. feel my face, which is a little bit Elvis and a little bit King Tubby, but all the weekend. If you listen carefully, you'll hear what starts out sounding like a dub delay, but then the pitch and time go totally out of this world. This effect was likely achieved by a digital emulation of an analog delay. I say this because what is happening is that the pitch and time are changing together, which is a natural artifact inherent to analog delays. Remember how originally delays were made on tape? While some of the first purpose-built delay devices were literally loops of tape that had multiple

record and playback heads, and because you couldn't change the distance between the record and playback heads, the way to change how quickly the delay was heard after the source was to alter the speed that the tape moved through the machine. So if you wanted faster delays, the tape had to move faster. It had to be sped up. Now reach back into your memory of the memory of the machine. the last time you had a walkman. I'm thinking 1995. Remember the sound of fast forwarding or the terrifying sound

when the works got gumbed up and everything started to slow down? Well, the beat didn't just drag. It also pitched down. So now hold that sonic memory in place and imagine your cassette player was being used to create delays on I can't feel my face.

When you speed up the tape to make the delays come faster, the weekend would have started to sound more and more like Alvin and the Chipmunks as the pitch of his voice sped up in kind. As an example, here's some audio from an interview with The Weekend put through this process. Pieces of the album feel like one long track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track, track,

all the things that might have rooted us in this record are thrown off for a brief moment. moment, and we're speeding out of control in a cocaine-infused delay loop. It's not only an interesting sonic signature and an exciting moment in the production, but also great parody between the sonic and lyrical landscape of the song. Well, that's it for me, and this edition of Mixed-on-pop, think of me as being to Switched-on-Pop as Jonah Lerer is to Radio Lab. Hopefully you've had as much fun listening to this as I had making it. For now, I'm Jake Birch, signing off.

so much. So Nate, the other day you told me you have some slightly sad news about Switched on Pop. Due to my many obligations as a performer and musicologist, I have to somewhat diminish my role in the podcast for the next month as I essay to actually finish my dissertation, something every graduate student has to actually confront at a certain point. Right. So I won't be quite as active in the show for a little while and then I'll be back in full force. Until then, Charlie has sort of talked me in to the idea that people might actually want

to hear a little bit about my dissertation, something which completely perplexes me. Yeah, I always think that you do a really great job with your classical master segments. You always keep me super engaged and you're talking about a pretty interesting and controversial subject, aren't you? Yes, I write about clubs in

Harlem between the war. that catered to white clientele and featured black performers, and actually many of them had segregated door policies. So even though these clubs were located deep in the heart of Harlem like the Cotton Club, local African Americans couldn't even step through the doors to hear the music of someone like Duke Ellington or Cab Callaway. So this was a very racially fraught moment, even as it was producing some of the most indelible jazz.

ever to be created. See, this is why I think there's some good stories there. It's controversial. It's important. It's poignant. Yeah. And there's some great cameos from everyone from Josephine Baker to the Prince of Jordan to Irish mobsters to, of course, all the great musicians from that era.

Beautiful. All right. So we'll check in each week. See how you're doing. I hope you finish up quickly so that we can get you back to full-time hosting duties. Yes. Well, there's no greater spur to have. actually get this done then to reward myself listening to Justin Bieber and Carly Raib

Jepson on repeat. So I don't disagree. So I shan't Dally. Um, so Nate, with you reporting from the field, we're going to be bringing in some guest hosts and contributors. So if you're a musician or a journalist or writer, music academic, music therapist, if you're into music and you like to write or you like to do radio, we'd love to hear your voice. You can write to be personally. You can write to be personally at Charlie at switchedonpop.com. This episode was produced a little bit by me, Nate Sloan, but let's be honest, mainly by... Me, Charlie Harding.

Yes. You inspired me, Nate. Our logo was designed by Luke Harris, and thank you to Rob Mitchum, and a big thank you to Jake Birch for contributing this week. Jake, we love you. You can listen to back episodes of Switched On Pop at our website, Switchedonpop.com.

Yes. Or anywhere that you find your podcasts. And check out Billboard's Pop Shop podcast to hear more from Charlie talking about trends from the 2015 pop scene. We'll see you all in two weeks. I'm awesome tough. Thanks for listening.