The past few months, I’ve been seeing a ton of comments in the vein of “what happened to all the bubblegum pop?” I’ll start off by saying if that’s your favorite type of music, it can suck for that type of music to be absent. But I’ll also say that things evolve. Music isn’t released in a bubble. You may be wondering what on earth happened. Why are all the radio hits subdued, sad, and mellow? What happened to the party tracks of the early 2010s? Where are all the pop girls? The answer is complicated and takes quite a bit of social context, a little art history, and a pinch of music theory to understand.
I’m here to help you understand the rise of moody pop.
I’ll start off by talking about the elephant in every room, Billie Eilish. Her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? is slated to release at midnight (and is out in some areas). I won’t spoil anything, but it’s a bleak record. The singles all trend on dark, depressing, and devoid of any sort of saccharine sounds. Her songs touch on subjects that seem foreign to pop music, such as fears of sleep paralysis, a fictional tale about murder-suicide, and themes of depression, self-loathing, and anxiety throughout her entire discography. It’s a pretty bold record, but if someone were to take a time machine from 2009 and listen to this, they would think “what the fuck happened?”
So what happened?
I touched upon a bit of this in an earlier post about a short-lived genre called chillwave. In 2008, America experienced its biggest financial crisis in over 75 years when the Great Depression plagued the American economy. In 2008, an economic recession took place that had rippling effects on the entire world for years to come, and 11 years later, it still has a profound effect on the global economy. It’s a complicated issue, but basically, banks indulged in subprime lending, giving people mortgages that they definitely would not be able to pay. The housing bubble burst, property value plummeted, and banks needed to be bailed out in order to prevent a worldwide financial crisis.
College grads around this time were thrusted into a world that was economically unsustainable, a world where they were not welcome. Middle class college grads in places like New York moved to areas like Bushwick and Williamsburg where they could afford rent and made music in their bedrooms, embracing DIY culture and washed out, lo-fi sounds, vocal samples, and retro synths. A lot of indie music that came out at this time was drenched in reverb, slow, and featured quite a bit of nostalgia towards the 80s. It become escapism for a generation who oftentimes couldn’t afford the luxuries of their parents.
Another influence and blip in the timeline of moody pop is Lana Del Rey’s debut album, Born To Die. So much has been said about this album, but perhaps the most interesting case for this album being so influential is just how much the album sold after its initial week. Born To Die released at second to a solid 77k in its first week, behind Adele’s 21. However, what’s remarkable is that the album never left the charts. In January 2018, Lana Del Rey became one of three women to have an album have 300 weeks on the Billboard 200.
So, what makes Born To Die so special, so influential, so worthy of such an accolade? In a year filled with the rise of EDM and explosive choruses, Born To Die was a slow, somber, sobering record. Lana Del Rey may not have had chillwave production on her tracks, but her vocals evoked that carefree, sundrenched atmosphere. She eschewed the production of what was in vogue and instead stripped down her sound. Songs like Born To Die and National Anthem had percussion that was muted and while the record didn’t have the summery synths of chillwave, they were different sides of the same coin. Born To Die is as sleepy and hazy as its indie counterparts and became a cult classic because of it. The record still continues to sell today, becoming a staple for the record player craze of the last few years and still faring quite well in the streaming age.
Lorde’s Pure Heroine is another example of a landmark record that has grown a sort of cult following. Following the mega-successful debut single Royals, Lorde followed up with a record that feels reminiscent of Lana’s hazy Born To Die, but this record has a different texture. There’s a ton of reverb, a lot of shoegaze-like synths, and pitch shifted vocals. Lorde may not have directly been influenced by the flurry of chillwave artists and accompanying genres like witch house and vaporwave, but there’s a lot of similarities. Take something like Tennis Court, with a droning synth and prickly percussion - doesn’t it sound quite similar to something like oOoOO’s Burnout Eyes? There’s the warm pads, drum machines, and pitch shifted background vocals, and the more you pay attention to the production, the more Pure Heroine sounds like an evolved version of that hazy bedroom pop that was being created around the late 2000’s/early 2010’s.
Of course, Pure Heroine also has deep ties to hip hop. The crashing drums of Team and pitched down vocal loop sound more like they’re from a DJ Screw track than a pop song. Lorde’s production on this record borrows more from the hip hop wheelhouse than the pop one, especially when it comes to drums. These crisp, digital drums matched with the chill synths and cloud production were foreign to pop music at the time, but were a massive staple in a hip hop subgenre called cloud rap. Clams Casino has widely been credited for popularizing the sound, but its roots date farther back from that. Take Lorde’s Ribs, which starts with this droning, omnipresent synth and a chopped vocal sample that moves in stereo for nearly a minute before Lorde enters the track. Now, listen to Clams Casino’s I’m God a dreamy track from his 2011 Instrumentals tape. Notice the similarities?
There’s a lot of other artists who have made their own marks on the pop realm in the early 2010s before we got to the current state of pop with artists like Billie Eilish and Khalid.
Banks’ 2013 EP Fall Over was a release that saw a lot of love in the indie community with its deep, blaring synths and alluring, mysterious vocals. She then continued her career wading into these waters with dark, brooding pop tracks that felt equally moody and bombastic on songs like Gemini Feed and tracks that felt sultry and retro on songs like Beggin For Thread.
Broods’ 2013 self-titled EP shared a lot of the same production quirks. The opening track Pretty Thing felt like it was Gold Panda-inspired with all the vocal chops and whispery vocals. Coattails features a pulsating, deep bass and squeaky synths which add to the retro appeal.
Sky Ferreira 2012 single Everything Is Embarrassing, which /u/_Jak covered in great detail feels like a stopgap between Blood Orange’s 2011 chillwave record Coastal Grooves and his 2013 record Cupid Deluxe. Punchy percussion, dreamy synths, and sorrow-filled keys are evident here, and it feels like the ultimate downtempo sad pop track.
Mr Little Jeans’ 2011 cover of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs was a cover that was far ahead of its time - there’s the dark synths that would become integral to Banks’ and many other artists’ sounds, the hazy, whispery vocals, and the vocal chopping. This is mostly a forgotten compared to a lot of later tracks but it’s a stellar cover that helped shape the sound of the era.
However, one of the most important artists to come out of this time was Purity Ring. Their 2012 debut, Shrines, became a cult classic overnight, incorporating some EDM elements into their sound that gave the record a punch to it. Their bold synths and witch house-inspired sounds influenced a lot of dance and electronic music. Ironically enough, the same week TNGHT’s self-titled EP was released, another landmark record that would become the blueprint for artists in the years to come.
There’s so much more that’s come out around this time, but it’s easy to start tracing a thread and timeline to how we got towards the current trend of moody pop being so pervasive on the charts.
Over the last few years, there’s been a ton of articles about why pop music has been trending this way. It’s been reported that “Pop music become more moody in the last 50 years.” It’s obvious that these minor key hits are here to stay. It’s unclear what exactly pop will sound like in the next decade, but right now, we’re in the midst of the moody pop renaissance. Artists like Billie Eilish and Khalid are growing up in a tumultuous world that, like it was with millennials, doesn’t welcome them.
I don’t have to remind you of the struggles of the world. From my own American perspective, there’s been so much alarming behavior coming from Gen Z generation - skyrocketing loneliness, anxiety, and depression affects them on a large scale. Maybe it’s stressful testing, maybe it’s substance abuse, or maybe it’s a fear of rising campus violence, but all I know is they have it harder than their parents did. And, as a result, the music has seemed to become more bleak, more downtempo, more moody, either as a result of younger artists dealing with these subjects or as a way to appeal to the younger demographic. Shawn Mendes and Khalid’s Youth was a downtempo, somber but uplifting track that dealt with the rise of school shootings. There’s a song on Billie Eilish’s new record about drug abuse and overdose. Even something as innocent as Lauv and Troye Sivan’s “i’m so tired…” is apathetic in its name and sound, a simple proclamation of being “tired of love songs” and wanting to go home.
There’s so much more to discuss but I would love to hear what you all think. Is moody pop here to stay? Do you hate this type of music? What do you think is next?
Submitted March 29, 2019 at 03:00AM by ThatParanoidPenguin https://ift.tt/2CD7nrp
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