Switched on Pop - Why Does Every Intro Sound Like It's Underwater? (Live)

Episode Date: June 18, 2019

Ever notice that wobbly, drunken and underwater sound common in so many contemporary pop songs? In an era of pristine recording quality, music producers are referencing old and impure technologies to add character to their recordings. Digital cassette hiss, tape wobble, and vinyl crackle are intentionally added to productions as a facsimile of "authentic" recording technology. Why the sudden nostalgia? Where does this underwater sound come from? What does it mean? How is it made? Find out on a live episode of Switched On Pop, recorded at Recode's annual Code conference with guest host Estelle Caswell, creator of Vox's Earworm video series. Listen to Estelle's Spotify playlist of underwater intros.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm Estelle Caswell, a video producer at Vox, and I make a show called Ear Worm. Okay, so every couple of years in music, things will converge around a sound. And you and I bumped into this sound at the exact same moment. You shared a playlist with me a few weeks ago. Right.

What did you call it? I called it the wobbly underwater intro. And I immediately wrote back with a playlist that I sent to you, which I called the Ambien intro. And there's this thing where all of music seems to be starting with this like wobbly underwater drunken sound. Yeah, everything sounds like it was recorded 15 feet in a swimming pool and it's very low and deep and wobbly and muddy. and it's literally on every pop song right now. So you made this really great mashup of intros. What was your source again?

Every couple of weeks I go to Spotify's like top 50 chart just to like learn all of the songs that are like really popular right now because all I do is listen to old music for my job. Yeah. And this is a moment for me to like kind of refresh and hear what's like going on right now. And I played every song and every song had the same intro. This is like Spotify's top. Yeah.

The global trending. So here's what we were hearing. This is a mashup of the intros of all the songs in Estelle's playlist. You might know that one. Yeah. That's Ariana. That's Halsey, right? Yeah.

I have no idea what that is. I can't remember. This is Kendrick. So we're not crazy, right? Everything seems to converging around this underwater wobbly sound. Yeah, it's a different instrument, but the same effects. essentially. We're obviously not playing what happens after that. Usually in the verse, we're going to get some beats, some more excitement. But usually that sound will sort of persist throughout the rest of the

track in the background. And what I want to do today is figure out what is this thing. And in order to do so, I spent some time recreating this sound. And I wanted to help you all think about what this sound is, because I actually think it's really important to what's happening here at Recode. It's going to tell us about which direction music technology is going in a bit. And then Estelle makes just the best videos on breaking down the history and where things come from. So you're going to cover that half. I get obsessed with origin stories.

Yeah. I'm going to figure out what the sound is. You're going to tell us where it came from. So to begin with, we spoke with Oakfelder, actually. Oakfelder was a code speaker two years ago. He is one of the top music producers. He has done songs with Demi Lovato, Ariana Grande, Lizzo,

folks like this. And we gave him a call to ask him, what is this sound? As far as the wobbly sort of out of pitch thing is concerned, we kind of had a love affair with digital recording and everything being perfect. And then after we got tired of that, we started becoming nostalgic for the sound of like tape and vinyl. And so if you have an old vinyl or you got an old, like if you got like an old messed up tape, a lot of times you'll have like a pitch wobble. And so a lot of plug-in makers, people who make like, who make like a software, have started making. software that emulate this phenomenon. The people who are making software for music creation are emulating the sound of old tape.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. If you want to make music that sounds old, you can pull up your computer, you can grab sample libraries from Splice. Sample library are just downloadable samples that have been cleared for licensed use. A sample library like dusty grooves, vintage soul, dusty hip-hop grooves. Everything is very dirty. Yeah, it's all dusty. It needs to be cleaned up.

If you need some synthesizers, you can get skeuomorphic synthesizers that look like ancient synthesizers that have been around forever that you can put on your computer if you need effects. Effects look like tape machines. They look like amplifiers. They look like big old studio boards. This is all schumorphic design that Apple throughout long ago and the rest of the software industry has sort of moved into more of a flat aesthetic, but music is looking backward. My favorite actually is one from Native Instruments, which is the audio degradation suite,

which looks like a VHS tape, and it has a bunch of knobs on it. I think the crazy thing about this, I don't know if you can see on the screen, but I'll describe it, is it's a VHS player, like a VHS tape with knobs on it, which doesn't make any sense. No. You don't use knobs on the VAT. But it sounds great. And to figure out this sound, I wanted to demo a project, but you have not heard yet.

I haven't heard this. So I get really excited about YouTube. If people have been radicalized by YouTube, I've been radicalized by music creator YouTube. And it's actually a really wonderful subgenre of YouTube. It's delightful. Yes, it's wonderful. And so I went and checked out a couple creators

about how to make the sound. The first person I went to was a creator named Adam Neely. He's a music theorist and performer. And he sort of pointed to you have to start with some foundational material. We needed some kind of loop. And he said a great place to find a loop is actually on Archive. where a former, I think, employee of Kmart had a whole audio library of the cassettes that they used to play in the Kmart stores in the 80s and 90s. And so I thought it would be fun to mine some of these sounds as suggested by Adam Neely.

So this is the first thing I heard when I pulled this up. Shoppers, Kmart offers an easy layaway plan for your shopping convenience. It's available in every... Not a very hot beat. So I kept searching and I eventually found this little section and I thought maybe we could do something with. Is it a holiday song? I think it's like general musac feel good. Oh, God.

We're not close to pop song yet, right? You hear the tape hiss, though. That's what's important. Exactly, yes. The cassette is already there. So that's like an essential part of the quality. We need the old sound. But we needed to mess with it more.

So I took the song and I slowed it down and I changed some of the chords to make it a little more interesting. It's got a groove. Yeah, right? You can feel that. Ooh. Right? It's getting a little scary. I still felt like it was missing some of the essential qualities of this older feel. Like it has the cassette thing, but as I was going through my sort of YouTube wormhole of music production, I found this production duo, Take a Day Trip. Their sort of big hit was Mobombo last year.

Yeah, that's a viral hit. Yes. So Take a Day Trip had some advice on how to make one of these tracks. This is what they said about making Obama. So on this sound, we used isotope vinyl. Just take some of the bass out and kind of makes it sound a little bit more nostalgic. We just wanted to give it this like old feeling to it. And I really feel like that's a lot of the character of the song right there. Okay, so we need to make it even older and we need some vinyl, right?

Okay, so I- And also tape. You need, yes, it has to be tape and vinyl. So I pulled up my audio program, I pulled up the isotope vinyl, which kind of looks like a vinyl machine. He's got these like knobs and sliders and like it looks actually very similar to my record player at home. So we like, we then, I then took this little loop that I made and I put it through even more old sound through vinyl. This is from Kmart. I would feel like I was in a fever dream at Kmart if I heard this. Yeah, okay. Great. That's exactly what we want. Okay. So back to

take a day trip, they made another video where they talk about like basically everyone is using this essential plugin. Usually we start by putting R.C. retro color on it. We just go through the different presets and turn some knobs until it sounds good. So RC retrocolor. This is a tool that people use. I pulled it up as well. You can insert tape hiss. You can insert tape wobble, all sorts of fluctuations in the sound, make things to sound even older. And so, okay, we started with a cassette recording. We added vinyl, and then this had a preset for VHS. At what point are you like, okay, this is old enough? Well, let me play it for you. You can decide for yourself.

falling apart, right? This is like a VHS preset on a plugin that is supposed to age things. So we've gone from a tape cassette from Kmart to something that emulates a vinyl record, like the crackle and pop of a vinyl record. And then ingested that through a VHS tape, which people watch videos on.

Yes. It has nothing to do with audio. Except that it just makes you feel like you're listening to the 80s. Okay. But I felt like this wasn't complete. I went back to Oak and just asked him, like there was one essential component missing.

I remember a long time ago, I did this record called Through the Door. It's a song about somebody who's listening to someone on the other side of the door, like they're separated. And so in order to affect this idea, a portion of the track was filtered out. And by filtered out, I mean a section of the frequency of the track was turned down so that you're only.

only heard the sort of more basier side of the sound. Sort of to simulate, you know, what it would sound like if you heard something through a door. Okay, so we need to go behind the door. Through a door or under the water. Yes, exactly. It's got a sound muted. I did one last thing. I put this through another extremely skeu-morphic piece of hardware, this analog filter

software thing that is sort of imitating a Moog filter. This is what we finally got as my evolution from Kmart, the Muzak, to imitating these intros with Oaks filter fade. And then we had to add a beat. Oh, yeah. I like that. Yeah. You should tell that. It doesn't help you think about how the sound comes about?

I think it does. And I think what's so fascinating right now is that that would fit in this playlist that I made. Completely. Only because all of the effects that are added on to a very simple instrumental are downgrading it to the point where it has this cozy, warm, vinyl crackle feeling. Like you're listening to it in a living room or something like that.

I think what's fascinating to me is how much that feels like such an of-the-moment sound. Like it started six months ago and it's going to be out the door in three months. That's what I assumed as well. I feel like when the trend happens, then it's a fad and eventually something else comes and takes its place, right? Yeah, I listen to the playlist. I listened to all the songs. I was like, great.

These are, you know, I'm going to forget all these songs in a couple of months. And I'm kind of angry that the trend is so obvious. I think that that's what happens to me is whenever I spot trends. I immediately like, why can't somebody come up with an original idea? I'm like the old, the music scrooge. And then I start thinking about it and I start researching it. And I realize how long trends like this have been seeping. under the surface and have been building to this moment. And in the case of this trend,

I think it's almost a decade. Like I could even argue longer than that. But for me, it's like 10 years of three styles of music converging, playing off of each other, and ultimately landing in 2017, 2018, 2019 with almost pure saturation of pop music, of R&B, of hip-hop. And it It's all of the hits that we remember from each of these years. 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. 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

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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. And so what I want to start with, the first, so there's three trends that I've kind of pinpointed here.

The first is starting in like the mid-2000s with artists like Kendrick Lamar and Jay Cole, Mac Miller, Frank Ocean, all sort of coming to the fore and bringing jazz back into the world of hip-hop and R&B. So with Kendrick, you have, I guess, his first breakout album, Good Kid, Mad City in 2012. and he has the song which you might remember. This is like kind of, you kind of hear that trend a little bit, but from jazz. Yeah, it's a jazz guitar progression. It's actually a sample from a Swedish R&B group from around the same year. So it's not a throwback jazz sample.

It's just sort of a current day jazz sample that he's added vinyl crackle to. And at the end of that sample, you might hear this sort of like plugged-in synthesizer that goes, whoo-like that. That was beautiful. Thank you. You can sample that if you want. It'll cost $10,000. And so Kendrick is coming at hip-hop from a jazz perspective.

He's bringing jazz instrumentation, like the Rhodes piano, the electric piano, jazz guitar, and sampling music and making it feel warm and cozy and slow and sort of, a little drunk. And so you also have artists like Jay Cole doing the same thing. And I want you to pay attention to this. This is a sample from, I believe, a sole record from 1979. Okay. That's a great loop. So what do you hear there? A lot of vinyl crackle. A lot of vinyl crackle. And mind you, in 2012, you can sample a vinyl record and cut all of that out. And likely you'll find a record that sounds super clean and it won't even have that. So my assumption here, is that they added a lot of it back in to get that warmth and that coziness.

Or certainly, at least in the mixing stage, they didn't choose to remove it. Yeah, they definitely didn't choose to remove. This is a dusty hip-hop groove like that sample back. Yeah, this is very dusty. This is 2012-2013, so this is, you know, safely six, seven years ago. The sounds that you're hearing are, they're slower, they're a bit more introspective. And at this point, hip-hop is kind of shifting from these anthems. party,

edium trap sounds to things that are a bit more introverted that are a bit more emotional. And actually last year, in 2018, the biggest genre that, you know, propelled its way to the most sort of like

stream genre of music was emo rap, which is rap music that sort of is inspired by, you know, maybe an emo rock band from the mid-2000s. More introverted lyrics, things like, that. And also production that sounds like a little drugged out, the ambient intro, as you will.

And so jazz obviously was a huge thing in the 90s hip-hop, but is now sort of coming back through artists like Kendrick Lamar. Even Frank Goshen, J. Cole, et cetera. The other trend that is sort of coming to the fore at this point is trap music, like I mentioned, changing from the anthemic party to the more introverted, slowed down, drugged out artists like, for instance, Future, has claim to fame, songs like Mask Off, which, you know, reference, you know, Percocet and things like that, also reflect that feeling in the production. But I want to kind of do a little palette cleanser here, and let's listen to a mid-2000s trap song that has none of this.

Not drunken, not slow, like, Anna. It's energy. It's maximalist. Everything is clean. There's bells. Everything is in the high frequency range, including the voice. And so what has happened from this moment on, that was Rick Ross. What's happening at this point in time is trap music is changing from this to something that

is slowed down and a bit more introspective. I think the influence there is this sort of niche genre of music that came out of Houston called Chopped and Screwed. basically a DJ DJ screw in the mid-90s, decided to take any hip-hop song and slow it down to the point where you get this like sort of woozy feeling. So I'm going to play his remix of a notorious BIG song, Juicy. Yeah. Huh.

This album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I never amount to know. You got the lowest voice in the world, he made even lower. Yeah. Yeah, slowed down. So from 120 beats per minute, you're basically changing a song to 60 beats per minute, and everything is pitched down. So DJ Screw passed away in 2000. And a lot of artists, like, Two Chains and Juicy Jay were, like, paying respects to him

in terms of, like, their own production, but also, like, chopped and screwing their own albums and things like that. So in the mid-2000s, you started getting, like, a chopped and screwed version of a Rihanna album and it would just be like the slowed down version of a Rihanna song, a slowed down version of a two-chain song, things like that. Okay, so we've got like, we've got the jazz thing, we've got the chop and screwed thing. Yes. So I'm going to just play really quickly two-chain song that sort of emulates this chopped and screwed idea without necessarily doing it. Everything slowed down and kind of like, yeah. Yeah, it kind of reflects the idea that like

you're listening to a song after you've taken a lot of drugs. Right, right. Just like every, the world is slowing down. And I think this has happened and a lot of hip-hop. So the thing that's sort of like kind of coming through at the same time is the fact that Drake, an artist that everybody knows, is sort of coming into his own. So from 2009 to 2019, the last 10 years, Drake has not only climbed the charts,

but has introduced a world of music to people that they've now sort of come to adopt. I want to play a 2009 song from Drake called Lust for Life. His producer, Noah Shabeeb, basically has this quote, and I'm going to read it, because it's very interesting. He says, I wanted something that would be very dark, quiet, and muddy, and with vocals cutting through like a razor. So essentially, his production philosophy from 2009 till now is to cut everything out of the frequency

spectrum that Drake's voice would be. So, like, submerging everything underwater except for Drake's voice. And what you get in 2009 is a song that sounds like, basically, is the intros to songs today. You can hear, like, the distortion and the noise, but you can also hear things sort of like just kind of trickling down and feeling like they're submerged underwater. Today as the past, it's funny when you come in there first. And then of course, big breakout hit started from the bottom. So this is right around the same time.

And of course, his whole production style for the last 10 years has been cutting out every frequency that would compete with Drake's voice. And not only that, incorporating all of these elements. So like on Drake's first big mixtape so far gone, he pays huge respects to DJ's crew. He has a song that sort of re-imagines one of his big hits. And now, you know, he's incorporating R&B and jazz. He's using Rhodes Pianos and jazz guitars

to create beats. But not only that, you know, a dance hall song might still have this kind of crazy, wobbly intro. It would also, you know, tap into the world of Atlanta trap. And so, Drake is sort of this person that's sort of come through this moment, grabbed all of these influences and used them to his advantage very functionally. He wants his voice to be, you know, center stage and all of the production to be slowed down

and reflective and moody and emotional. As much as I don't want to say this, we have Drake to thank for this great production. Oh, I think we should say. It's great. I've become a Drake fan in the last three weeks because I actually, really enjoy this effect, and I've sort of realized how much it makes my ears sort of tune into certain frequencies in music. My question is, why is it so pervasive right now? Yeah, I mean, I think maybe it's like a closing thought. The reason why I think this sound continues to work is that so much contemporary popular music is loop-based. Whether it's a sample

or it's just a core progression, usually you get two for maybe eight bar loops, and a loop gets boring. And one thing that happens when you start putting in wobble and underwaterness is that those are sort of natural inconsistencies that happen in that loop. And so your ear wants to keep listening because you don't know how it might change in just the subtlest ways. And so I think that even though it sort of seems like music technology is looking backward, it might actually just be speaking to what the human ear wants to hear.

more of, not just because it has that cool tapis, but those little inconsistencies feel more human. I think that's a good wrap-up. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for joining us for Switchdown Pop. Great. Thank you, Estelle. This episode of Switched on Pop was recorded live at the annual Code Conference. Thank you to the whole Recode team. I want to say a special thanks to Estelle Caswell, Michelle Berg, and to Oakfelder. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Harding and Estelle Caswell.

Our mixing and engineering is done by Brandon McFarland. We're a production of Vox Media Podcast Network, executive production by Nishakirwa and Allison Rocky. You can hit us up on social media at Switched on Pop on Instagram and on Twitter. We love getting your recommendations.

We'll be back in another week with another episode. We'll see you next Tuesday. Thanks for listening.