Switched on Pop - Tinashe’s “Nasty” takes on Janet and Beyoncé + Are songs getting simpler?

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

If you've spent any time on the internet this summer, you may have encountered a certain refrain accompanying particularly fierce dance videos—"I've been a nasty girl. Nasty, nasty, nasty." This track, "Nasty" by the R&B singer and songwriter Tinashe, is a jam in its own right. Far from just a piece of viral content, "Nasty" is one of the songs of the summer, a chance for an burgeoning artist to reach a new level of success, and the latest in a long line pop songs from Janet Jackson to Beyoncé and Destiny's Child, taking the term "nasty" and spinning its on its head.  "Nasty" is also a song that, in some ways, is ridiculously simple. And the simplicity of pop music has been in the news after a new scientific study argued that pop hits have become less complex over time. We dig into the study's methodology to see if we agree with its conclusion, or to put it another way, whether its conclusions match our freak. Songs Discussed Tinashe - Nasty, Save Room For Us, 2 On Charli XCX - I might say something stupid Janet Jackson - Nasty Destiny's Child - Nasty Girl Ariana Grande - Nasty Paul Simon - Still Crazy After all These Years More Read more from the New York Times about the study exploring pop's melodic complexity through history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Attention Spotify! Has arrived the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolvent, toffee caramelized and tonka-tostata. A combination that seduce from the first instant and she has a wea. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now, and let you're involver for susentia. If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same.

I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of eater. We've just launched the new is and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City.

And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, I'm not sure how much time you've spent on the internet recently.

You know, Apple tells me my weekly usage. I'm kind of ashamed. Would you describe yourself as chronically online? Not chronically, but unhealthfully, perhaps. Well, I'm curious if you've come across a viral video set to an unforgettable song referred to by the website Know Your Meme.com as simply, quote, nerdy white boy dancing to nasty. I've not seen this one.

Can you describe what we're seeing here? Some very loose hips. Lots of whining. Lots of whining. Yes, the dance-all movement, known for its seductive nature. He's got moves. What can I say?

I feel like this guy weirdly looks like me, and it turns out his name is also Nate, which is kind of wild. Oh, boy. So you've now been. red-pilled into internet conspiracy theories via the nasty white boy dance. Just to be clear. Perhaps.

Okay. I mean, this was originally done to a Soka track and then overdubbed with the song Nasty, which then went viral and wall. This video may be a modern classic. I'm more interested in the music we're hearing. The conspiracy deepens. Tenaches, nasty, so minimal, so seductive. Yes, this track, nasty, you've just identified.

It's by the R&B singer and songwriter, Tenache. It is a jam in its own right. It's not just a piece of viral content. I think it's one of the songs of the summer. Surely. It's a chance for a burgeoning artist to reach a new level of success. It's a commentary on contemporary gender politics. And the latest in a long line of pop songs, taking the term nasty and spinning it on

its head. By the time this episode drops, Tanase will be out with a new album called Quantum Baby, and it might be a new step in this artist's career as well. So today, I want to go deep into the nasty verse. And then when we emerge, I want to step back a little because this is a song that in some ways is ridiculously simple. Yeah. Right?

I've been a nasty girl. Yes, you have made. The simplicity of pop music has been in the news recently because a few weeks ago, a scientific study was published arguing that pop hits have become less complex over time. Scandalous. So at the end of this episode, we'll dig into those findings and see if we agree with their conclusion. But first, Charlie, are you going to match my freak?

I'll get my freak on with you. I've been a nasty, nasty, nasty. Charles, if we're going to learn to appreciate the magic of this song, we have to start by getting to know its performer. Now, Tenaché has some level of fame. According to Spotify right now, she is the 458th biggest artist in the world. Not bad.

Top 500. Yeah. But I feel like this track nasty might catapult her into another level of fame. The song is currently, appropriately, at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100. 34, 35. Wow.

I'm sorry. I know this is a family-friendly show, but I mean, it just writes itself. And it's her first solo song to crack the Hot 100. And she's been at this for over a decade. So this is like a big accomplishment for Tenachay. Who is she? She's Tanasey Jorgensen, Kachingway.

She grew up in Pasadena. Got a shout to Pasadena. That's where I live. The Land of Nasty Freaks. And cul-de-sacs. She's got a really interesting story. She was a child actor, including a run, as the girlfriend of the kid on two and a half men.

Hello. Hi, I'm Charlie Harper. This is Jake. We live next door, right, Jake? I'm Jake. Hi, I'm Celeste. I'm Jake. She had a brief turn in the girl group, The Stunners,

which also included in its membership Haley Kiyoko, another artist who's gone on to have a pretty successful solo career. After leaving that group, she taught herself how to produce beats, how to record and engineer her vocals. And shortly after she debuted a new sound, dark, moody, sensual R&B. A sound exemplified by her first song to really permeate the cultural consciousness

To On, featuring Schoolboy Q, which went to number 24 on the Hot 100 in 2014. Cool, yeah, sort of crossover, hip-hop beats, It's really simple, very sensual lyric and vocal styling. Nice sound. And there's a little bit of an edge, which I feel like you can hear a decade later in Nasty as well. Oh, yeah. After the success of Two On, Tenache went on to become a reliable source of introspective R&B over the course of six studio albums and four mixtapes.

And in her live performances, she became known for incredibly athletic, impeccable choreography, something I experienced firsthand a few years ago when I saw her at the music festival, This Ain't No Picnic in Pasadena, California. And I was like blown away by her breath control, performing one of her songs, save room for us. She was basically doing Olympic level breakdancing while also nailing every single note. And just to be clear, you mean like gold medalist Olympic. Not Australian break dancing, yes. Important caveat. Because I'm, oh, man.

That's an interesting song to really move to because the vocal is quite quiet and breathy. and to be able to sing actually quietly while also exerting yourself is very challenging. But I guess as she says in Nasty, she's got stamina. She's an athlete. I guess stamina. They say I'm an athlete. Yes, she is a tireless artist in a recent profile in The Cut. Our friend, the journalist Kat Zhang, called her, quote, infuriatingly competent,

which I thought was a really great description. I also learned in that profile that she has a black belt in Taekwondo. This is cool. Okay, so she's an athlete and she's super competent. I think we hear that lyrically as well in Nasty. You know, there's this line where she says, Pillow talking got my throat raspy, which is a really great detail. You know, when you talk way too low like this, it's actually really bad for your voice.

And eventually you got to lose your voice. And so perhaps that breathy quality that we hear in her performance is being summoned through these lyrics. Oh, yeah. Being that central and sexy takes a lot of work. But it's competent writing. It's really, it's very detail-oriented, sense-engaging writing in a song that seems relatively simple. And I think her moment to break through has been simmering for a while. And I think it's really interesting that it's this song that has sort of, of crested into another strata of success and recognition because this song, Nasty, taps into a deeper vein of music history from Janet Jackson to Destiny's Child and beyond music into the world of politics. Okay, so this is when we enter the Nastyverse?

Yes, and we need to begin by getting deeper into this track, written by Tenachay and the producer Ricky Reed. a guest friend of the pod i know you you say friend of the pod a lot i feel like that's uh he was on the pot rickie reed is good friends with my former next door neighbor in los angeles so i i think by the transit of property we're good friends okay okay we'll count it we'll count it acquaintance of the pod how about that okay yeah neighbor of the pod super accomplished producer who made this track with zach see coff in an interview with variety tanishe said that she actually came up with lyrical concept as she was driving to the studio to meet up with Ricky. Her nickname, she said, is nasty nashay. So she was like kind of using that as, uh, as inspiration and she was in her car

coming up with these lines. I've been a nasty girl. Is somebody going to match my freak? And then she got to the studio and she told Ricky, I want like a weird beat. I want something a little Utre and off the wall and this is what they came up with together Yeah, super simple The construction of this song is actually mostly just sign waves The 808 kick drum that we hear is actually a sine wave just pitched

to create a little thump sound and we hear that 808 baseline moving around jumping between octaves Then we have a very simple keyboard pad sound, which is also created from really basic sine waves. And so the core of this track is the most fundamental sound that can be made. So it's very kind of elemental, maybe even a little bit primal in a way. It's the building blocks of sound. And talk about building blocks, that chorus line, I've been a nasty girl, I've been a nasty girl, nasty. It also feels very elemental because they

chop her saying nasty and then tie it back in at the end of the phrase. So it's like not only you hearing this chorus line over and over again, you're hearing the exact same intonation of that word, nasty. There's no variation. So it becomes almost this like this mantra or this invocation. This is like the nasty doxology here or something. I counted it up. There are 33 nasties in this song. That's a lot. Yeah, her being chopped up saying nasty over and over again makes her almost more like part of the rhythm section. I love that.

She's being sampled, not necessarily performing that moment each time. And it creates a nice contrast to when we do start to hear more of her spoken, raspy, breathy voice. Another kind of weird unsettling element are the harmonies in this chorus, which move from a B, minor chord to a G minor chord. Charlie a few weeks ago you played me a track from Charlie X-C-X's album Brat called I Might Say Something Stupid. And you're talking about how part of the power of that track was this kind of weird chromatic chord progression. Well, this core progression in Nasty uses exactly the same movement. And I couldn't resist making a little kind of jazzy version of this progression for you I mean that is such a

weird funky progression and yeah it seems so fitting for this song it's like a nasty chord progression honestly is what it is it's a nasty progression I think it's more than just a nasty crunchy I think it's also saying this is a dance song because it points to a style of harmony which really develops in dance music when back in the day writing a dance track, you likely had a monophonic synthesizer, a synthesizer that could only play one note at a time.

But it had what you would call three oscillators, and you could tune them around, and you could actually tune a chord, but if you move that chord across the keyboard, it would be the same exact chord. Like you couldn't make it major on one note and then minor on another without retuning it. And so you hear this sort of plainal harmony of the same chord being played over and over

throughout all kinds of house tracks because you were limited by the simplicity of your synthesizer. And actually that's exactly what we're hearing on Tenasha's Nasty. It's actually a tuned chord playing on one note and they're moving that note around, shifting that chord around in space, meaning we're always in that sort of B minor-feel. So whether we're aware of it or not, hearing that progression kind of taps us into this deeper well of dance music history. Yeah, it's like, get your freak on, we're going to dance. And this song is instantly quotable, right? Is somebody going to match my freak?

Like, that's part of the lexicon now. People are going to be saying that in like UN Security Council meetings in 10 years. I mean, if Kamala is brat, then the UN can be. And the song is sexual, clearly. I mean, that probably needs no elucidation. And yet, I also feel, despite all this sparseness, this harshness, this nastiness, there's also a certain tenderness in the song. And that really comes through in the sung chorus.

Yeah, it's such a reprieve from the repetitiveness of our little nasty monies. She feels like she's really breaking out that the vocal almost steps forward. It's very intimate. The production changes. It's a little more lush. The harmony changes. Yeah. It's a little more like plaintive and yearning almost.

Uh-huh. Right? She sings about, if you keep this up, I'm going to get attached. There's like the emotional side of being a nasty girl here that we get to see. It's a little vulnerable. Yeah. This is like hookup culture isn't so simple. feels can be had.

And then just when the feelings get too much, the track contracts. The chords in the bass, I'll strip away, and we're back to this sparse nastiness. So with all these brilliant lyrical production, harmonic choices, I think we can understand

why this song is having such a moment right now. But I think it's also the fact that it's leaning into this deeper tradition of artists, especially black, female R&B artists reclaiming the word nasty. Where does that word even come from? Well, Charlie, I thought you might ask this. So I did a little etymological dive.

And there's not consensus on where the word nasty came from. One suggestion is that it emerged from the old French nostril, which means malicious and spiteful. Okay. But I did think you'd appreciate this description from 1872 by a European traveler in the United States discussing its use in the country. Quote, nasty in England, frequently meaning ill-tempered or cross-gained, and in this sense admitted into good society, denotes in America something disgusting in point of smell, taste, or even moral character, and is not considered. a proper word to be used in the presence of ladies. So in England, you could say nasty, and it wouldn't make anyone clutch their pearls.

But he's saying, in America, it has this other connotation. It's like a dirty word. You don't say it in the presence of ladies. I wonder if that's because it became sexualized. It became a taboo word somehow. Well, he says it has to do with moral character. So maybe there was a layer of that involved. But the Puritans.

But that unladylike context of the word might be important when we fast forward like a century later, and we find Janet Jackson recording her album Control in 1986 with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. And she wanted to turn this word nasty on its head because she'd been having some experiences. She'd been stalked and threatened by men on the street. And here's what she said, Charlie.

Quote, Instead of running to Jimmy or Terry for protection, I took a stand. I backed them down. That's how songs like Nasty were born out of a sense of self-defense. I'm totally hearing how Tanishe is in the lineage of Janet's Nasty because the beat, the production, the harmonies, the counter melody, they are all so nasty. Yeah. Like, they are the onomatopoeia of the title.

They just are uncomfortable, a little dirty, a little stanky. It's got this propulsive new jack swing beat, and as you said, it hits hard. Every Janet Jackson vocal and every snare drum hit feels like a punch to the chest. Some moments of the song almost sound like industrial, like the outro. I feel like you could head bang to this. And there's that great moment at the end, though, that she's showing this sort of contrast of the expectations between what it means to be nasty

and what it means to be ladylike, because she shifts from these very sort of spoken and almost screamed, like, vocal into, hey, ladies, this beautiful sort of like R&B backup girl group singing style. Yeah, there's some continuum here with Tanashi. but at the same time, there's a different approach to nastiness. It's kind of a negative thing, except for maybe one moment in the bridge, which might be one

of the most iconic moments in the song. Because privacy is my first name ain't baby. It's Janet. Miss Jackson if you're nasty. Because privacy is my middle name. My last name is control. No, my first name ain't baby. It's Janet, Miss Jackson, if you're not. nasty. Which shows that there are multiple usages of the word nasty here. There are the nasty boys or the nasty girls, but then there's also, well, maybe you like to get nasty. Yeah, I'm on the fence over how to read this. Is it like only call me if you're a nasty boy, then you don't get to call me Janet. You have to call me Miss Jackson. Or is it like a kind of an invitation to get nasty with me

and call me Miss Jackson? Like I don't know exactly how to, it's a little. It's a little. little opaque. It is. Perhaps intentionally. Leave us guessing. So Janet Jackson's nasty is a landmark track in the nasty verse. And when we get to 2001, we find another song that uses this nasty term. But instead of in an empowering way, it kind of uses it to shame and take aim at other women. I'm talking about Destiny's Child's Nasty Girl.

You nasty girl. you trashy, you classless girl, you sleazy, you're freaky, put some clothes on girl. Whoa. Okay, this is getting a little bit shamy here. Yes, I was surprised given how we perceive Beyonce as this avatar of sexual freedom to hear her in 2001 being like, put some clothes on. You're dressing like a skank. Basically, you're nasty. It's kind of like the scrubs hang out with the nasty girls to take us back.

to that era. And to be clear, she's doing it with her customary virtuosity. Like the run she does on the line, I never met a girl that does the things that you do. Yeah, she's not pulling back any punches right now. It's not shine theory. It's not like, let me lift up all the women. In fact, in the music video, they have a scene where there's a line of girls who go through a machine called the nasty zapper, which transforms them into women with better clothes.

and then they get to join Destiny's Child in the dance party. Yeah, yeah. I feel like it could be heard that we are now entering into the world of, like, morality-pleasing within lyrics. And I just want to say, I think, what is great about this word nasty is its broad potential usage. Like, we've all known nasty people, good and bad. I mean, Nate Nasty Sloan, you take those glasses off. Nasty Nate. Yeah.

You're a totally different person. Wow. That's wild to hear you say. that because there was a period in time after the movie half-baked came out. I don't know if you recall that one with Dave Chappelle, which had a character called Nasty Nate in it, and a lot of people started to call me that afterwards. It did not stick, you know, thankfully, but maybe it's time I reclaim that. It's come back around if you ask me, yeah, yeah. Well, I hear what you're saying, Charlie, and I feel like this term nasty has had so many different meanings, and it had a big shift

in 2016 during the third presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He famously called her a nasty woman. And that line, those two words, became a rallying cry. They were chanted in protests across the country. They were used in fundraisers. There were whole like t-shirt lines devoted to promoting the phrase nasty woman. There was the sense that that we can retake this word and re-inscribe it so that it can't be used against us. And I feel like some of the music that emerges out of that has a new approach to nasty, like Ariana Grande's 2020 song of the same name. Nasty now is empowerment.

It's sensual. It's got agency. And I think that brings us back to Tenache. She's taking ownership. It's the final form of nasty, perhaps. It's no longer lewd to use in the presence of women, women like Tanase are claiming that term as their own. Exactly.

And they're doing so in a way that is kind of plain as day. There's not a lot of subtext. As we said, this song is very simple in some ways. Is it too simple, Charlie? Is it simplicity a sign of something bigger that's happening within the world of pop music. A new study argues, yes, but are we going to match its freak?

Find out after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. 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? 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 Wednesday. 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 criminal 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.

All right, Charles, a few weeks ago, I got a flurry of texts from friends and family. And they all had a link to this new study that was written up in the New York Times, reported on in NPR, and a number of other outlets, all with some variation of the same headline, is pop music getting simpler, question mark? These stories were based on a scientific study published in scientific reports in July 2024, which used mathematical models and algorithms to argue that melodies and pop music have become more simple, less complex. Okay. Particularly in the domains of rhythm and pitch. I'm skeptical here. You're raising an eyebrow. Yeah.

Let me tell you a little bit more about this study. Yeah. The corpus it used for analysis was the top five billboard songs every year from 1950 to 2023. That's a weird data set. It's a small one. It's only five songs every year. And sometimes the top five are so all over the place and disconnected and unrelated.

I don't know. Okay. Okay. Some more skepticism. I'm not a statistician. I don't know what the proper end value is here. Sure. Sure.

Yeah. The study used 8. melodic metrics, four related to rhythm and four related to pitch for each melody from the Billboard song. So reducing the song just to a single line, essentially. That is to say, removing all the other elements of the song, harmony, timbre, vocal approach, lyrics, etc. Just looking at the melody itself. The do-do-de-do-do, if you would. That's a little bit more 18th century than 20th century, but okay.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. How about that? Lovely. Some of the parameters they used were the number of notes per bar and the average melodic interval between different pitches. Okay. Another way they measured complexity and simplicity was with a statistical model that detected how predictable a melody was. So essentially, they developed this algorithm that would guess which note should occur in a melody based on the previous notes in the melody, and then measuring how unexpected the next note was.

Okay. If it's more unexpected, it has a higher level of complexity. I'm still raising my eyebrows, just to be clear. I think this is a very difficult thing to pull off, to say we can objectively measure melodic complexity. Yeah, I even prefer perhaps the word complexity to simplicity. Like, simplicity infers melodies have gotten dumb. I think we need to be really careful with the words that we choose

that can imply any kind of subjectivity to music is better or worse. So back this up more. Do we have examples? I thought we could take a song from one of the more complex periods in the study. Paul Simon's still crazy after all these years from 1975. I met my own. She seems so glad to see me. I just smile.

And we talked about some old times and we drank ourselves some beers still crazy after all crazy The thing is it's not the melody that stands out to me, it's the chord progression. This is one of the most beautiful chord progressions of all time. It uses secondary dominance. It uses chromatic passing chords. It uses all kinds of diminished chords and borrowed chords from the minor key. it's very harmonically sophisticated. Well, that's exactly why I wanted to use this song

because I agree. I play it on piano and these harmonies are so chromatic and unexpected. But the melody is just a penitonic line. It's only using five notes. Oh. And I would say if you remove it from the harmony,

it actually sounds very expected, very repetitious. But this all gets complicated when we get to the bridge of the song. Have we gone into another key now? We've modulated to a new key and then we modulate to another key and that key is a half step below the key

that we started in. It's really hard to sing. It's really unexpected. I imagine this would make the scientists' melody meter just start like going, beeping off the charts. Just, eh, right, right.

And to be clear, one of the things that harmony allows us to do is it can take us into sort of new colors of sound. If we're so happily in one key, if you make the right kind of pivot chord, you can end up in an entirely different, unexpected key, where now your melodies might be transposed up just a half step in a way that would have been entirely unpredictable by these statistical models, but make a lot of sense within the context of the chords. So there's a few things happening in this example. I think one is the difficulty of measuring melodic complexity. Yeah. Because even within a single song, you might have sections that are incredibly simple, then become incredibly complex and then goes back. And it's like, well, how do you assign like a value to that?

But on the other hand, I do step back and I say, hmm, I haven't encountered a lot of pop songs. since we started doing the show a decade ago, that have a modulation to a key, a half step away. No, it's unusual. And again, I think, one, Paul Simon is a little bit of an outlier, but also that songwriting styles and expectations were different in that era, where long-evolving chord progressions were expected.

They were a part of the musical grammar, and as more production became influenced by hip-hop and moved more towards computers, sophisticated loop-based production that might privilege unique soundscapes and timbers became the norm, while chords became perhaps a little bit simpler, or at least would maybe loop throughout the entire song,

thus leading the melody to sort of stay within the same range throughout the entire song. And this is what I want to talk about next, because the study has these findings that there are three melodic revolutions that occur where there's a dramatic drop in musical complexity. And they occur in 1975, 1996, and 2000. And in a way, I would almost put those two second ones together,

just call it like late 90s or something. Sure. But if we think about those eras, I do think they correspond to exactly what you were just describing. 1975, that's kind of a moment where dance music takes over the chart. right disco becomes probably the most popular genre in the United States which is all about these these more long-form repetitive structures that give you ample room for bodily expression and are less about these convoluted meandering harmonically complex melodies i would rather dance the sheik than

paul simon sorry paul and then if we're looking at 2000 as another benchmark well that's that digital revolution that you were just to And also the moment that hip hop becomes the dominant pop form and every genre starts looking towards hip hop. Hip hop often being sample based or made with samplers and computers would often create beats that are structured around some sort of foundational loop. And that is the style of songwriting now really across almost every single genre. You can hear it in pop R&B country. It's everywhere. raises another question that I couldn't really find addressed in the study. What do we do with

melodies that don't have pitches? What do we do with a wrapped spoken melody? Right. Certainly, it could have an incredible amount of tambral variance and rhythmic complexity. Does that make it into the study? I'm not sure based on what I read. Or even, you know, the study looked at how simple the rhythms of these melodies are, right? Yes. If you look at some of the best rappers in the business, oftentimes they will intentionally keep their rhythmic cadence exactly the same in what is interesting become the moments that are stressed, the unique approaches to rhyme, where we shift from N rhymes to interior rhymes, multisyllabic rhymes, while maintaining the exact same rhythm is an incredibly sophisticated and complex way of writing lyric. It's very satisfying to the ear because

there is on one level really complex rhyme schemes and metaphor, set against this very persistent, almost like military drumline like rhythm. Right. Can we accurately gauge the complexity of the melody without referencing its lyrics? Or is that inherently doing a disservice to the melody to begin with? These are questions that will keep us up at night, I think. I feel like if you want to answer this question, I would like to see something like the harmony is held constant so that songs compared from the 1960s today would have to have the same amount of harmonic complexity and then examine are the melodies more complex within simple harmonically based songs or do they vary. I think you might also have to pull out songs that are primarily rap based, which are going to skew the data. So I'm just, I think that it's very clear that tastes change, that the way that we write changes, that where complexity happens, shifts from one musical function to another, like from melody to harmony or to rhythm, etc., to timbre, arrangement, etc., etc., like disco arrangements are incredibly lush and complex, even though the beat is very simple, right?

hip-hop drum quantization is a specialty that you can study a PhD in and write a book about how J. Dilla swings the beat. Right. Right. There is complexity. So my understanding is that the authors of the study didn't try to say that music has gotten simpler, but rather that some of the headlines about this study have inferred this because it's a bit salacious and, you know, it's exciting to say pop music is dumber today than it was when you like pop music. Right. And I feel like every year there's a new one of these studies. Yeah. A headline that says, songs have stupider lyrics.

Songs are sadder. Songs are shorter. Yeah. And they all may have sound methodology and be based in concrete observation, but there is the sense that we're trying to prove something about pop music. The hypothesis is always that pop music is worse than it used to be, frankly. Right, right, right. And everyone who is conducting these studies have gotten a PhD, which means they're at least in their

late 20s, and we know that musical taste hardens, right? Before then, that, like, our peak tastes are between age 14 and, like, 24, 25. By age 30, we stopped listening to new music unless we did listen to podcasts, like Switch on Pop to Continue our musical journeys. Good plug. It's very common that we just stop listening to new things, and we want to remember why our favorite thing was the best. I don't mean to throw anyone under the bus, but recently I got a text from one of our colleagues that was, like, Charlie, music from the 90s was definitively better, right? And I'm like, colleague, I love you and I love your tastes, but we can't say that. It is tempting to make those kind of judgments, but it's hard to make them hold up under scrutiny.

And I agree with what you were saying, Charlie. I would love to see a study that's like, how can we measure the ways that pop music has become more complex and rich? How can we do a tambral analysis, like a rhythmic lyrical analysis like you're describing And those studies would be very illuminating. I want to be the contrarian voice here and say that we all know that there is more music being released every day than any other point in history, which means that music is probably more complex and more rich than it has been at any other point in human history. It might just not be properly captured in the top five songs of Billboard in a statistical study that looks at one element of music. Music is complex. It is rich and it represents people in so many different ways, especially like when they want to get nasty.

than a nasty nasty Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz edited by Art Chung engineered by Brandon McFarlane Bill, illustrations by Alice Gottlieb. Nishat Kroa is our executive producer or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture in New York Magazine. You can subscribe to New York Magazine

at NYMag.com slash pod. Find us on social media at Switched on Pop and tell us what is the nastiest part of nasty that you're getting nasty to and what are the nastiest nasty pop hits in history that you love to get nasty to? nasty, nasty, nasty. What else?

We have a new episode coming out next week, next Tuesday. Brand new nastiness for you on the pod. It's going to be about one of the biggest pop stars of the moment. Will it be nasty? I don't know. We'll see. All right. Until then.

Thanks for listening. Conviette your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of the best. The best conversion of the world. system of pay go to Shopify facilitates on your site

web, in the reds social, and in in any other place. That is music for your ears. No, you'll be more waltas. Your business will be a super-exit to Shopify. Empecia to period of a month in Shopify.com.