Switched on Pop - To Be Young

Episode Date: December 11, 2014

Pop music and youth go together like peanut butter and pickles. The music we hear when we’re young shapes our identities forevermore. In this episode we take three songs that promise an eternal adolescence and put them under microscope to see what makes them tick. Featuring Kesha – Die Young Fun – We Are Young Wiz Khalifa – Young, Wild and Free  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. I don't know about you, Nate, but when I was young, I was just constantly overwhelmed with emotions. Yep. I was kind of a nervous, shy kid, steeped in feelings. And certainly, I had a reckless drive to play rock and roll. Yes. And an angst that both yearned for adulthood, but simultaneously feared the responsibility of growing up, you know, all that heavy stuff. But music was always a central part of growing up, you know, As a teenager, I had a soundtrack for every experience. There was Pink Floyd for the lows and the Beatles for the highs. Every moment had a song.

Music was as much a part of my youthful identity as the experiences themselves in many ways. And these songs became a part of me, lasting into adulthood. I still play the same record as I still yearn for that youthful nostalgia. I don't know what it is, but I still yearn to be. young and have all those mixed emotions. Even years later, when I hear Stairway to Heaven, which you're never supposed to play in a guitar store, by the way, but when it is played, it revives that nervous angst that I felt at the middle school dance in sixth grade when I sat as a wallflower all the way through

all seven painful minutes of the song. Even during the guitar solo at the end, when everyone was up and dancing, I was sitting there all by myself. They played Stairway to Heaven at your middle school dance? At the end of every single dance, they played Stairway to Heaven. That's so cool. I wish I went to your middle school. It's true, though, Charlie, when we hear the songs of youth, whether it's the Who's My Generation

or Keshe's Die Young, it takes us back. It makes us young again. Acts like the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, you two. Now they make their bread and butter off of screaming retirees clinging on to their younger years, sometimes with their converted kin by their side. Right. And for those of us millennials out there, I think we are already hosting 90s revival parties

full of Alanis, Morissette, Backstreet Boys, new kids on the block. We're nostalgic for recent memory for a moment that has just passed, a youth that is already fading. Oof. You know, I love songs about youth because they evoke that experience of being, young. They tackle themes of loss of innocence and invincibility and risk-taking and party culture

that we most obviously experience while we're teenagers. But remember, it wasn't that simple being a teenager. When we were young, we experienced multiple layers of feeling all at the same time. And those really great youth anthems, they'll take those obvious themes, the invincibility, the the party culture. But then layer on top, the more complex, the darker experiences of youth about personal identity, emotional confusion and lost love. And one of these more layered experiences that pop songs will tackle is the very fleeting nature of youth and how it contributes to both the angst that we experience while we're

young and the nostalgia that we feel when we listen to those songs later in life. I'd say that it's this layering of experience that deeply resonates. with our memories of youth. Welcome to Switch to On Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And today we're looking at music that celebrates being young. Each of the songs will hear today,

Keshah's die young, funds, we are young. And Wiz Khalifa's Young, Wild, and Free. They all capture the complex experience of being young, each in different ways. And in this episode, we'll see where the music and lyrics of these youthful anthems start to tell a more subtle story of what it's like to be young. Capturing all those layers. Exactly. And let's start with probably the most quintessential example of a song celebrating youth culture, Die Young by Kesha.

This just directly speaks to some of the most obvious archetypes of youth. It's like a really terrible my generation for the 21st century. It's got raging hormones. As when Keshe memorably says that magic in your pants is making me blush. It's got risk-taking when Kesha sings, I'm looking for some trouble tonight. And it has that invincibility that you were talking about in the title of the song, of course this idea who cares let's die young

and lines like that magic we got that nobody can touch but behind these lyrics celebrating youth recklessness there's musically there's something more going on right Charlie? Yeah absolutely Nate because there's obviously from the start

you have all these lyrics about sexuality all those those tropes of youth that we know so well right but I feel like there is something more going on here yeah the song is really celebrating the invincibility of youth, and it's doing this musically. And it really does that through the harmonic progression, through the chords. The chords have this constant movement, like they're falling over each other, never resolving, creating this ongoing motion.

This harmonic progression, these four chords that continually repeat, some are managed to create the feeling of an eternal present, this night that might never end. And like you were saying, the way she does that is by subverting your expectations because if this song is in the key of E major, and here's an E major chord, the first chord you would maybe expect in this song would be an E major chord. Right. That's like, you know, that's pretty standard. Yeah, it's like home bass.

But that's not the first chord we get. In fact, the first chord we get is like kind of a very surprising C minor. Excuse me, a very surprising C sharp minor. Sounds like that. and from that first C sharp minor, we then go to B major, and then we go to E major, and then we go to E major. And then A major. So in other words, C sharp minor, B major, E major. So that tonic chord, that home bass, doesn't come until the third chord in this progression.

Yeah, it's sort of on a weak beat at a point when we don't really expect it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that cycle keeps repeating. So the tonic home is always buried in that chord progression. To maybe another way to illustrate how inventive this is is to re-harmonize this song starting on E major, where a lesser composer or producer would have started it. So then it goes something like, I feel your heart beat like the beat of a drum.

Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone. And then the song, and then, and then when we were, cycle back to the E major at the end of each of those core progressions, you can feel the whole song starting over, right? Right. I mean, we've moved from E major and then away to E major and then back to E major. But the way that Keshe and her producer is Dr. Luke, Benny Blanco and Circuit, composed the song, you don't feel like it's starting over.

You feel like it's just constantly moving forward and there's no beginning or end. Because, again, that home base is buried in the middle of the. the progression. It's not starting it off. I feel your heart beat like the beat of a drum. Oh, what a shame that you came here with someone. Yeah, it's so interesting because when we hear these songs when we're at the club, as you and I are, you know, tend to go on an average Wednesday night. It's funny.

It really does just take us back to this, this moment of youth when we felt so invincible. This moment when we in many ways didn't even know ourselves and we leaned heavily on social proof and some of us on overt sexuality for attention and for meaning. Totally. It's like these chord changes are trying to find themselves. Right. Just like a teenager. Trying to find home or something. Yeah.

They don't know where or they don't know where to land. Another really interesting thing about this song is I feel like it draws really well from historical catalog of pop music. If you look at some of the original boy bands of pop, they were talking about really similar material. You have the beach boys I get around. They say, none of the guys go steady because it wouldn't be right

to leave their best girl home on a Saturday night. You can look at the Beatles. I saw her standing there. They say, whoa, we dance through the night. And we held each other tight. And of course, you said at the beginning, the unfortunate connection to the who is my generation, where they say, I hope I die before I get old. And, you know, that sounds a whole lot like we'll dance until we die.

Well, Charlie, not to digress even further, but, you know, sometimes I can't help it. Hearing you talk about the historical context of this, of Keshe's die young, I start going even further back. I go to the original moody youths obsessed with death. How far back can you take us? We're going to go way back. I mean, we could go back to the 18th century with Gerta and the Sorrows of Young Verte, which was like the first moody adolescent, or maybe he was in his 20s. But that book, which is an epistolary novel famously ends with young Verte, killing himself.

And then like writing about it as he does. dies because of unrequited love. And then that, the ripple effect of Gerta goes on into the romantic generation, you know, through the 19th century. In music, probably best exemplified by composers like Schubert and Schumann. Schubert, just for one example, has a song called Der Jungling and der Tot, or the youth and death. And Charlie, the text of this song goes,

The Sun is sinking, would that I could depart with it. to flee with its last beams, to end this nameless torture and travel far away into a fairer world. Oh, come death and free me from these bonds. I smile at you, O man of bone. Lead me well into the land of dreams. Oh, come and take me. Wow, I love that because it's it. I know.

I know. Dark, dude. You could just, this is like a goth. This is like the original goth is like Schubert in the 19th century. But again, but it's just like the same classic truce. tropes of youth that we were just examining. It's like once he's invincible, not even afraid of death, he'll come death. Like, take me away.

I don't care. I don't care. Everything sucks. But at the same time, it's like, it's important to remember that even, you know, Schubert, the concept of the teenager wasn't around in Schubert's generation. In fact, the teenager, as we know it, was really born at the same time as popular music. Like with popular music with a capital P, you know, the pop charts. It's the boomer generation following World War II.

Elvis is arriving at this time. Yeah, exactly. Like this is a new demographic. These boomer kids who aren't children and aren't adults and have opinions and pocket change. And what are they going to spend both on pop music? Other teenagers, teenagers, teenagers, it's as if the category of pop music, arises at the same moment as the idea of the teenager and they're recursively creating each other.

Totally, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. The teenager is as much a phenomenon shaped by pop music as it is the other way around. Yeah, and the lyrical content and the themes are defining the identity of this new adolescence. Totally. And the singers themselves are eternally young. I mean, not actually, but as soon as they get too old, they get too old, they get replaced by another one. Right. Yeah, every time someone new makes it on the charts,

they get replaced just a few years later by someone who is the next Disney hero, who's going to be in the next boy band or what have you. Yeah, pop music is a well of youth. It's this fountain that we all get to drink from. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline, a fragrance intense with character Gourman and addicive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, and tonka-tosted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and

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a month in Shopify. orgs. I think it's a really interesting transition to talk about some of the

darker sides of youth in pop music and the sort of idea of eternal youth is perhaps an illusion.

I think it's really well articulated in funds We Are Young, which is just this absolutely amazing youth anthem that in a lot of ways feels like what we heard in Keshe. You have your obvious references to sexuality and youth culture, partying and drinking. And of course, that idea of invincibility. They sing, tonight, we are young, we'll burn brighter than the sun.

It's all these same archetypes. But the song adds this additional layer of youthful experience, some of these darker sides. It's written to be a youthful anthem all sung together. But this anthem, the chorus that we listen to and we all sing together, it kind of feels like a coping mechanism for some of the real emotional confusion and heartbreak that every teenager is going through. So let's take a listen to the opening verse. And I challenge our listeners out there to really hone in on the opening, which feels so distinctly different and it's slightly darker than the chorus that we'll hear later. Give me a second eye. I need to get my story straight.

My friends are in the bathroom, getting higher than the Empire State. My lover, she's waiting for me. Just across the bar, my seat's been taken by some sunglasses, asking about a scar, and I know I gave it to you months ago. I know you're trying to forget. But between the drinks and subtle things, the holes in my apologies, you know,

I'm trying hard to take it back. So if by the time the bar closes and you feel like falling down, I'll carry you home. It's confusing. Yeah. I don't like it. It's unsettling. I don't know what it is, but it's unsettling.

This first verse is really non-traditional. It doesn't fit a normal pop song structure. And when you sort of ask yourself, what's going on here? in some ways you can't say with total clarity. I think the lyrics are, they're confusing. Just confusing and confused as a teenager. There's a story of lost, stolen love, and there's potentially some very serious themes here happening here

with even an allusion to some sort of relational abuse. He says, the scar I gave you months ago. Musically, it's really dark and unsettling. You just have this really sparse drums and piano playing together. It's a weird introduction. This part of the song, there's something emotionally dark going on. And the chorus that is this giant anthem that we're all singing along to, it does feel like a coping mechanism to avoid these early conflicted emotions. Yeah, this is like the choruses of this song are straight out of Kesha's Dai Yan.

The verses have a darkness that acknowledges the layers of teenage experience. I think what's so great about their songwriting, here is they're referencing songs like Kesha and trying to create an anthem that we all understand, and then they layer on these additional parts. But what are some of those, Nate, what are some of those things that you hear in common that make this clearly a song about youth? It's got chord progressions made up of simple one, six, four, five chords. Yeah, what is, what does that mean? Well, like, so in Kesha we saw the chord progression goes six.

five, one, four. Great. And in fun, the chord progression, Tonight, we are young. That's one six. And then it goes, So we'll set the world on fire. That's the four chord.

And then we can go brighter than the song. That's the five chord. So one, six, four, five. Right. And this is one of the most common chord progression in all of music throughout classical, but especially in pop music. It's something that really harkens back to that early popular music of the 50s.

It feels like things that we've heard before in, I know, songs like Stand By Me and. Oh, there's so many. There's, I will always love you by Whitney Houston. Oh, yeah. Heart and Soul. The Monster Mash.

I have a whole list of this, a list of these. in a drawer. Okay. So we have this timeless chord progression that we've heard over and over again. And this timelessness has even emphasized in the music video where they're all wearing

old style suits. They're in an old theater. But I feel like there's more going on. Yeah. And I think like you said, what problemizes that narrative and creates nuance are the other parts of the song that aren't so straightforwardly brash

and celebratory that partying and celebrating may be in part, a mechanism for dealing with the harder parts of growing up. Yeah, and I feel like musically, the song even acknowledges these growing pains. You listen to the drum beat, and it's just marching along, like our youth is passing by. The piano is honky-talk and out of tune. The bass is all fuzzed out and distorted. And in the video, everything's exploding.

It's like youth is fading. So if by the time the bar closes and you feel. like falling down, I'll carry you home tonight. Yeah, totally. I mean, to me, I hear shades of Schubert in this. Oh, no, you don't. Totally. They had a word for it, man.

They had weltzschmerz or the pain of the world. I mean, we don't have a good translation, but it's just like the pain of the world, you know? Yeah, and when we're young, we really, we do the whole pain of the world in our hearts. Yeah. So speaking of faded. youth. Right. Young, wild, and free. Whiz Khalifa featuring Bruno Mars and Snoop. So we get drunk. So while we smoke meat. We're just having fun. We don't care who see. We go out. Yeah. Snoop Dog is not so young anymore, is he? No. And this, and it's funny because

Young, Wild and Free is itself kind of like a throwback to hip hop of the past. You know, it's musically and in the sung chorus, it seems to be referencing Warren G and Nate Dogg and Mace. Yeah, so it's funny because we hear this chorus about being young, wild, and free, but musically, we're referencing a whole other era. It's not about youth. It's actually much more nostalgic feeling of the youth which has passed. Yeah. And of course, there's also all the obvious elements like we heard in the Kesha. It's a song about partying.

Right. It's a celebration song that we all sing together. It's a club song. But there really is more going on underneath here. Yeah. And I think Snoop Dogg even acknowledges it. In his lyrics, he says, it's like I'm 17, peach fuzz on my face. But time keeps slipping away.

And I think that sentiment is mirrored in the chord progression of this song. Like Kesha and fun, this. uses a limited palette of chords. Here we've got one, we've got four, we've got minor six. And incidentally, I should mention that when trying and I are tossing out these numbers, these chord numbers, what they're referring to are chords built on the scale degree of the key that we're in. Yeah, so why don't you play that out for us? Totally.

So if you're in the key of D major, the D major scale is built of seven notes. And the, and if you start on D, here's the, here's the, first note one two three four five six seven and then you get back to one so chord built on the first note D sounds like this a chord built on the second note E sounds like this F sharp the third note like that fourth note G major right there excuse me five sounds like that minor six sounds like that diminish seven sounds like that and then we get back to it. Sometimes we talk about these chords with the letter name, so we could say D major, or one. And talking in numbers as a way of just sort of abstracting those

different chords so that you can transpose them into lots of different keys. Yeah, exactly. Okay, music theory, crash course. Complete. Now returning to Young, Wild and Free, I would say the vast majority of hip-hop songs are in minor keys. Right. this one is in major so already we're we're playing it's playing with our expectations i think playing into the the nostalgia that you're talking about um but then then there's this that minor chord that minor six is like a really heavy moment right right because we go from the major four to the major one and then we go from the major four to the minor six Nate, you're absolutely right.

Thank you. This chord progression is emphasizing some of the darker sides of youth that layer all about the fleeting nature of being young. The other thing I think this song does really well is it uses a particular timbre. The sound of this drunken anthem is not entirely upbeat. What we're hearing in that final chorus, it's not just celebration. Ro one, smoke one, and we all just having fun. Yeah, like this is a drunken ending chorus built for a sing-along, but unlike what you'd expect, it's not ebullient. It's kind of sullen.

The voices sound like the party is over. Maybe the lights have come on. They're worn out. They're out of key. Yeah, it's like it's kind of 4 a.m. And maybe half the people have already gone home. Right. It sounds like the party's over.

People are coughing in the background. They can't hold their weed. They're too drunk. It doesn't sound like young people partying. It sounds like older folks. Like people like us. It sounds like people like us pretending that they are still teenagers. And isn't it sad that youth just like a three-minute pop song is over before you know it?

Or is it? Well, I recently stumbled upon this really interesting piece of writing on music and memory In Slate, it was written in August by Mark Joseph Stern, a piece called Musical Nostalgia in which he argues that the music of our youth is embedded in the structures of our brain. It stays with us throughout our lives. Nate, why don't you read a passage from this piece? Quote, brain imaging studies show that our favorite songs stimulate the brain's pleasure circuit, which releases an influx of dopamine serapamine, serratory. tonin, oxytocin, and other neurochemicals that make us feel good.

Music lights these sparks of neural activity in everybody, but in young people, the spark turns into a firework show. Between the ages of 12 and 22, our brains undergo rapid neurological development, and the music we love during that decade seems to get wired into our lobes for good. When we make neural connections to a song, we also create a strong memory-trial. trace that becomes laden with heightened emotion, thanks partly to a surfeit of pubertal growth hormones. These hormones tell our brains that everything is incredibly important, especially the songs that form the soundtrack to our teenage dreams and embarrassments. Our adult tastes aren't really weaker, they're just more mature,

allowing us to appreciate complex aesthetic beauty on an intellectual level. No matter how adult we may become, however, music remains an escape hatch from our adult brains back into the raw unalloyed passion of our youths. I love this. The music of our youth continues into adulthood, as Katie Perry would say, we can dance until we die to our favorite pop hits. And of all the music, which is embedded in our brain, there is none more potent than Christmas music. music. And we'll be back in a few weeks with all of your favorite hits that you'll be listening to ubiquitously for the next 30 days until everyone working retail is bleeding from the ears. This has been Switched on Pop. I'm Charlie Harding. And I'm Nate Sloan. Thanks for listening.