Switched on Pop - Where are all the scary songs?

Episode Date: October 29, 2024

It’s the spookiest time of the year; Halloween is right around the corner. But unlike the winter holidays like Christmas and Hanukkah, Halloween seems to lack a defining canon of scary music. There���s, of course, “Monster Mash,” and “Ghostbusters,” but those songs aren’t actually bone-chilling. Is there a way to make music scary? In a live show from The Dalton School in New York City, Nate and Charlie try to unpack that very question, dissecting some of the scariest songs of all time to create their own spine-tingling, hair-raising Halloween anthem. Songs discussed: Bobby “Boris” Pickett – Monster Mash Michael Jackson – Thriller Ray Parker Jr. – Ghostbusters Bernard Hermann – The Murder (From Psycho) John Williams – Main Title (Theme From Jaws) John Carpenter – Halloween, Main Title Cannibal Corpse – Scourge of Iron Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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a month in Shopify. coms. Barra Records. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter,

Charlie Harding. And we are so excited to be here recording live at the Dalton School. Dalton makes some noise. All right, we're here in New York City at the school where I went and my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Sloan, have been teaching here for 40 years. Can we give it up for the Sloan's, please? So I have a deep connection with this place. So I was thrilled when Dalton asked us to do a live episode of our podcast here. Charlie and I have been making this show for 10 years. We've recorded almost 400 episodes. This is what number is 390. This is going to be episode 390 that you're all a part of. And over that time, we've broken down like tons of pop hits and we've interviewed acclaimed musicians, and we believe that pop music matters.

Whether it's serious or silly, our modern soundtrack tells us a lot about the world we live in. So what have you brought me today? Well, today I've been preoccupied because it's almost Halloween. And maybe you've been thinking about this too. Scary movies. Who here likes scary movies? Okay. I'm a little squeamish. If you are more likely to be like under your blanket like me at a scary movie,

Will you just go, shh, okay, thank you. Thank you for supporting me. Okay, so we've got kind of a divided audience here. I think some of you love horror movies.

Some of you are not so into them. We all have an opinion about scary movies, but what about scary music? That's what we're going to talk about today. What makes music scary? And let's start this discussion by listening together to one of the scariest songs of all time.

DJ? He did the match. He did the monster. The monster match. It was a graveyard smash. He did the match. It caught on in a flag. He did the match.

He did the monster match. What have you brought me? They're giggling, probably. They're not scared at all. What's going on here? I think the reality is that a lot of music that's Halloween music isn't that scary. Like, what are some other Halloween classics that you might hear around this time of year? I feel like we're going to hear Ghostbusters.

Let's hear it. They're still not scared. No. All right. One more shot here. What's another Halloween classic? How about Thriller? So I have a problem with some of these sounds.

First of all, I mean, like, Ghostbusters is a soundtrack. Yeah. Thriller is off of a major pop album. The Monster Mash is a novelty song. When you told me that you were interested in the subject, I went to Spotify and I looked at what is like their big Halloween playlist. And it's mostly songs that just like happen to have something like kind of. of scary in their title. Like Lady Gaga's Bloody Mary,

Rick James is super freak. I don't quite understand why that's there. Ava Max's Sweet But Psycho. For some reason, the Backstreet Boys, everybody is on there, which I think it's just like in a minor key, so it's a little spooky.

I don't know. I think they dress up as Halloween characters in the music video. Oh, okay. Yeah. So there might be a dearth of scary music out there. Here's what I propose, Charlie, to rectify this.

Let's write a scary song together. Let's make our own Halloween anthem that will strike fear into the hearts of everyone who hears it. So I think in order to do this, we're going to need to understand better. What are the musical qualities that make something scary? To do that, I feel like we're not going to get it from, you know, Ghostbusters. We're going to have to go to some genuinely scary songs. Let's think about some of those scary movie soundtracks, those movies that have become kind of iconic for how spooky they are. Ghostbusters is not actually scary, so we need to go to properly scary films.

Yeah, we need to go to something like Bernard Herman's soundtrack for the Alfred Hitchcock movie, Psycho. It's unnerving. All right, so you've heard this before, right? This is like a prototypically scary sound. But what makes it scary? Why does it unnerve us? Let's go over the piano. Come with me. I think that what's going on here, Charles,

is that we're talking, we're dealing with the property of dissonance. Dissinence is when two notes kind of clash together. Like if I play this interval, very nice. Pretty nice, right? nice, right? Yeah, the notes are far enough apart, nice safe distance. Harmonizes beautifully, but what if I play the notes we just heard in that excerpt from Psycho, this dissonant interval? Two notes that are right next to each other. He's too close. They're uncomfortably close. I don't like that. Those notes are too close

together. They clash. Didn't feel good. Sorry. And if you play it again and again and maybe add some more distance, that feeling of terror just grows. and gross. So maybe that's our first musical property that we're going to need in our song. We're going to need some dissonance. All right. So dissonance. Psycho. Psycho dissonance. Let's go to another iconic, scary movie soundtrack. I think we need to listen to John Williams' score for the Steven Spielberg movie, Jaws. Maestro. Whoa. Yeah. You know what's great about this scene? If you haven't seen Jaws,

what we're seeing is sort of an underwater picture sort of floating around, looking up at a boat. It could just be someone like scuba diving. Nothing is happening. But because of these sounds, it just invokes absolute fear that something is going to happen. So if we were going to break this Jaws soundtrack

down into a musical quality that we can use in our own song, what are we going to say? Well, I feel like it's the baseline. It's the baseline. It's the baseline. Duh, dun. So shoot, let me go over to the piano.

Yeah, I won't get, I'm kind of really close to the sign. I didn't like that. I'm sorry. We've got a baseline here. Maybe even lower, right? Yeah, there we go. Also, this baseline doesn't always come when you expect, right? It's like, and then you don't know when the next one's coming.

There's a sense of like, what's going to happen? Sense of dread. They're getting closer. So maybe we need that in our song, too. Let's take that dissonance from Psycho. So we've got that here. And then let's take that dreadful bass from Jaws. We'll add that in.

You don't know when it's coming. Terrifying. I think we're getting somewhere. Okay. So let's get one more scary movie soundtrack in the mix. We've been talking about Halloween. We should probably listen to the soundtrack for the film Halloween directed and composed by John Carpenter. Okay, that's deeply spooky.

This is a lot to listen to it 10 in the morning on a Thursday. What makes this scary? There's so much. I mean, first there's the repeating kick drum. It almost has like a, yeah, but it doesn't sound like a kick drum. It sounds like a door slamming. I think that's really neat. It has these really kind of otherworldly synthesizers that I can't quite place.

And then that high piano line that kind of feels like it's chasing you. Okay, so there's these synthetic textures, this repeating bass, thun, thun, thun, thun. Yeah. Can we put some of that into our song as well? Yeah. Okay, so what's that going to sound like? We've got that deep bass from Jaws. And then let's add some of that, like, ethereal creepy piano.

Something like that? Yeah. Okay. Now we're getting somewhere. So we have taken elements from these different scary movies. Psycho, Jaws, and Halloween. And we put them into our soundtrack. Now I feel like it's time to move out of the world of horror movie soundtracks

and listen to music that can scare you without any images on a screen. Whoa. That was good. Good musical. Here there. Because there's music genres that, you, You don't need to listen to in a theater. You can just listen to them on their own

and they'll kind of frighten you. There's musical styles like horror core if you're a hip-hop fan. How about witchcraft? There's witch house if you like to get scared on the dance floor. But if I'm thinking about like scary music genres, probably the first thing that comes to my mind is metal music.

Heavy metal. And there's a whole even, there's a whole subgenre called, death metal that's just designed to terrify you. And if we were going to listen to like a canonical death metal song, I feel like we have to listen to a song by the band, Cannibal Corpse. Nate, when you were growing up and you were learning to play jazz piano on this stage, I was in high school 500 miles away or 300 miles away. And I did play some Metallica on guitar, but I never went that dark. That stuff is terrifying to me. I feel pretty confident saying

this is the first time Cannibal Corpse has been played in the Dalton School Auditorium. So this is definitely a special moment for us. And there's a lot going on in that short clip we just listened to. There's distorted electric guitars. Tuned way down low, like chugging along. There's like really heavy double bass drum drumming. That kind of thing. And, you know, part of the effect here is that we all know what you're supposed to do when you listen to heavy metal music, right? You're supposed to head bang. Does everyone know how to headbang here?

Yeah? Okay. I'm going to give you a quick demonstration. And then we can all do it together. So you're going to want to stretch a little bit, limber up for this. Make sure your neck is loose. You don't want too much tension. We don't want to injure yourselves.

You're going to want to throw one hand in the air. make some devil horns and then with your head you're gonna go like this okay so let's hear that clip one more time and I want to see everyone head-banging okay there's a full-body music listening experience here we go oh awesome extra points for the long hair this this this student right here is a head-banks genius. That was awesome. All right. In addition to distorted guitars, double bass drumming, head banging, we also have these vocals, right? I think that's the most terrifying thing to me. Partially because you can't understand a word that they're saying. Yeah. You don't want to hear

what they're saying. It's all about lashing flesh and ripping skin. It's gory. That's gross. But even more than what they're saying is the sound of that voice, right? It's low. It's like rough and growly. In fact, this style of singing is called the death growl. Now, you've all had a little trial headbanging. I'm going to ask you to do one more thing with us. We want you to try a death growl. Loosen your vocal cords, open up your throat, find the bottom of your vocal range, and then go like this. All right, on the count of three, we're all right. On the count of three, we're all going to growl together. One, two, three. Not bad. I thought you were supposed to be teenagers. You're full of angst and rage. Come on. Put that

into the death growl, okay? Let's hear it one more time. One, two, three. All right, now we're getting somewhere. How does that make you feel? Well, Charlie, I'm glad you asked. Even though when you're listening to this song, it's really intense and dark and frightening. I think especially like this is not my music. And my feeling is like I need to run away from it as fast as I can. Maybe that's how you feel if you're not a fan of this music. But if you're like a big metal head,

I think you actually have a very different reaction when you listen to these distorted guitars, these violent lyrics, this death growl. For fans of metal music, it's actually a very cathartic experience to listen to this music. It's like you, You take all of your darkest emotions and your fears and anxieties and you put it into this sound, into these distorted guitars and this growling vocal.

How do you know this? Because I read a study in the journal Psychology and Popular Culture in 2018. He is a doctor of musicology overall. Believe it or not, listening to this presentation. I do have a doctorate. Charlie's a NYU professor. And we do occasionally read scientific articles about music, including this. one that interviewed listeners of heavy metal. And you might expect when they listened to metal

that they would feel feelings of rage and anger, but it's the opposite. When heavy metal fans listen to this music, they feel a sense of joy and wonder and peace. So why is that? Maybe it's because like the same reason we're drawn to scary movies, for those of you who raised your hands earlier. Because when you watch a scary movie or when you listen to metal music, it's actually a way to process your emotions in a safe way to take the things that scare you and upset you and put them out there on the screen or in your speakers. And they're somewhere else where you don't have to deal with them inside of you. They're out there in the world. You can sort of let them go. I'm still not going to listen to this music. I'm going to listen to Ghostbusters.

That's fair. But have I convinced you of the emotional power of this genre. Okay. Okay. So I feel like now we have one more element to add into our scary song, our Halloween anthem. We've got a death growl. Okay. So I'm going to just keep that in mind. Keep that in your back pocket. Everyone. We're going to need that later. 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, 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.

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So we've done horror movie soundtracks. Yeah. We've done this metal music and the death growl. So we have all the elements I think we need for our song. We don't have any words. We need some lyrics. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So where are we going to get lyrics for this song? Can we go back to the Monster Mash? Let's go back to the Monster Mash. Spin it, DJ. He did the monster mash It was a graveyard's Man

It caught on in a fly He did the match He did the monster mash Okay Monster Mash Let me read you the lyrics To the verse of this song Okay

I was working in the lab Late one night When my eyes beheld An eerie sight For my monster From his slab began to rise and suddenly, to

my surprise, he did the... So it's the Frankenstein story. Yeah, but it's not just the Frankenstein story. He says that so dismissively. No, no. It's every monster is going to appear. We're going to see mummies and zombies and vampires and werewolves.

So I feel like our lyrics need to have all of these familiar, scary characters that you would encounter on Halloween. Just like the monster. mash. Okay. Here's where we're going to need your help. Because I've got some lyrics that I jotted down, but I haven't been able to fill them all out. For the title of this song, here's what I'm thinking. We're here at a high school. Let's call it the haunted high school.

Ooh, right? Seems appropriate. We got a little, ooh, that's good. Thank you, Charles. What are the kind of things we study at the haunted high school? First period is, is blank studies. Can I get a suggestion for what you might study in first period at the Haunted High School? Physics. Chemistry. I have a chemistry.

They said physics, Charlie. Well, I feel like, how about, what about metaphysics? Too close again? The dissonance is powerful. Sorry, this needs to be a scary song, okay? Neck. Oh, now we're getting some good suggestions. I heard necromancy.

Let's do, I like necromancy for first period. That's summoning the dead? That sounds right, yeah. Okay, necromancy from the balcony. Love that. And I don't know, maybe you are scared of physics. I shouldn't, I shouldn't prejudge. I was terrible if it was, it was so scary.

AP physics? Oh my gosh, it's hard. Okay, let's go to fourth period. I said, fourth period is blank with buddies. So we need a scary activity here. What's this scary activity doing fourth period? Cannibalism. All right, we got necromancy and cannibalism.

Okay, every day it's blank for lunch. So what's some terrifying thing you would eat for lunch? Brains. Classic. Got to go with brains on this one. Every day it's brains for lunch. And after school, we drink blank punch. Blood punch.

Okay, so we've got, Necromancy studies, cannibalism with buddies, and then brains for lunch and blood punch. Okay. You can remember that? I'm going to, possibly. Okay. Necromancy, cannibalism, brains, blood. Necromancy cannibalism, brains, blood.

Necromancy cannibalism, brains, blood. Okay. Now let's review our musical elements. Okay. Luckily, I've got a world-class songwriter and producer here to help me out. So we had dissonance from Psycho, right? Okay, that's working. And then can we add like some scary bass stuff from Jaws?

Okay. That's nice and spooky. And then we need some like eerie, high pitched melody from Halloween. Yeah, this is good. Is that working for you? I'm like in this. And then when I cue you, we're going to have a death growl, okay? Collective death growl.

But wait, not yet. Okay, these elements are working. We've got our lyrics. Necromancy, cannibalism, brains, blood. Okay, I think it's time to debut our scary Halloween anthem. The Haunted High School. The Haunted High School. This is the debut performance, okay, before it's heard everywhere around the world.

You ready? Take it away. At the Haunted High School every day is a scream. The students are demons and the teachers plot and scheme. The curriculum is frightening. The field trips to a crypt. The grades are written in blood on your academic transcript. First period is necromancy studies.

Fourth period is cannibalism with buddies. Every day, it's brains for lunch. And after school, we drink blood punch. The haunted high school, they were stalking the halls. The haunted high school making werewolf calls. the Haunted High School, you'll get a D for death. The Haunted High School. Take your last dying breath.

Death growl. Yes. Wow. Great work, everyone. Almost 400 episodes, and that's probably the most absurd thing we've ever done on this podcast. I thought that was cute. Oh, I'm glad. I mean, but here's the thing.

Like the Monster Mash, it wasn't really. scary. I'm sorry. Well, that's okay. Here's a, here's a, here's an educational takeaway for you since, you know, we are at a school. Yeah. So we talked about some of the reasons we're drawn to scary things, right? They can help us project our fears elsewhere, not internalize them. Way to process. I'm still not going to watch horror films. They scare me too much. I'm sorry. Sense of catharsis. Even if you don't end up loving scary music or watching scary movies after this. I feel like maybe you'll have an appreciation for why people do. And again, it's not just because they like to be frightened, though maybe that's part of it. But I feel like scary music,

scary movies, horror actually has an important place in our culture. And part of the reason so popular, part of the reason people love Halloween and going to haunted houses and all these things is it's a way of dealing with fear and dealing with terror and dealing with anxiety. And maybe that's why our song doesn't have to be that scary at the end of the day Because even as much as important as it is to have those emotions It's also important to be able to laugh and to be able to put those fears somewhere where they're safe and pretend and fictional Well, that's the other side of Halloween that was like you get to play dress up and have fun which I feel like that's what we did today It's like we you know we put on a little bit of psycho put a little Halloween a little bit of jaws

A little monster mash So here's what you can take away from this even if this song does not become the worldwide Halloween smash that we hope it will which would be very unlikely but it's just possible even if that's the case I feel like the next time you go to a scary movie and you hear a soundtrack

and it's got this dissonance and it's got these spooky bass lines and these ethereal synthesized melodies you'll be able to say oh this is this is what's happening these are the reasons that I'm feeling this sense of dread and terror. You'll be able to analyze that. That will help me because instead of having to experience a fear,

I'll just like, oh, that's a really interesting interval. Even though I'm terrified in my wits, I'm thinking about the dissonance of this harmonic progression. And maybe that's something that you can think about because you're going to be inundated with Halloween imagery for the next week. This is something that you can, a little science that you can bring to this season,

the science behind why we get scared when we listen to scary music. Well, I feel like this has been such a treat for us to spend some time with you. Thank you for having us, Dalton. Thank you. Switched on Pop is produced by Raina Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris Gottwe. Remember the Vox Media Podcast Network of Production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod.

We would love to hear what scary songs are in your ears. Find us on social media at Switched on Pop, where we are now posting lots of little videos of the making of this podcast. We'll be back again next Tuesday with another story about another death in pop music. Until then, thanks for listening.