As sales of popular recorded music dwindle, the incentives only increase to write songs around nuggets and generic sentiments that can be repurposed as ad jingles, ring tones and soundtrack backgrounds.
It’s the era of three-minute, twoidea tracks - of the pop song as little more than a sound effect and a sound bite. Consciously or not, pop has been reverting to precedents from past downturns. Depression-era swing and 1970s disco responded to listeners’ yearning for a danceable beat and an uncomplicated, upbeat message to propel them through hard times. Yet we’re not getting a 21st-century Duke Ellington out of this recessionary phase; instead we’re getting warmed-over Giorgio Moroder electronics and voice processing.
Concision, admittedly, is the essence of pop: its discipline, its challenge, its genius. And popular music regularly goes through back-tobasics purges like punk , electro and for that matter rock ‘n’ roll itself.
Minimalism can be a corrective and a clarification. The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica sees that spirit in the approach of Best Coast and kindred stripped-down bands that are due for albums this year, a strategy he has labeled the New Simplicity.
Too often, however, less is merely less.
In a twisted throwback to the 1950s and 1960s pop songwriting has been partly returned to backstage producers (and teams) like Dr. Luke, Max Martin, Stargate, Polow Da Don and David Guetta. But all the songwriting by committee inevitably leads to homogenization, and it’s also constricting pop’s subject matter.
Romance, as always, is the main topic, but the lyrics of radio-ready pop often pretend that the only relevant zone of human interaction outside the bedroom, the only place that matters, is “the club,” and even more claustrophobic, the V.I.P. room, where the main options are drinking brand-name booze, bragging about sexual conquests and enumerating designer accessories.
Even indie-rock is second-guessing itself yet again, busily justifying dumb fun as if it’s unavailable elsewhere. Bands that used to bristle with cacophony - like Deerhunter and No Age - cut back on it last year .
Indie-rock may be lagging, as it typically does, behind the cycles of hip-hop . There are still club boasts and drug-trade chronicles, but largely thanks to Kayne West’s best-selling example, other subjects are re-emerging from the sidelines: complex thoughts on celebrity, stray political observations, personal confessions and psychological complexity .
So with any luck a turnaround is in store for other sectors of pop as well. With so much musical and verbal content stripped away, there’s ample room for restoration without excess .
The pop mainstream hasn’t ruled out craftsmanship entirely. Taylor Swift, 20 years old and now writing her own songs on albums that - rare in the 21st century - sell millions of copies, comes up with natural melodies and moments of elegance. The sweet-voiced Bruno Mars deftly embraces the four-minute, four-chord economies of doo-wop, Motown and reggae songwriting, and he plays the nicest of nice guys, without getting too sappy, in most of the songs on his album, “Doo-Wops & Hooligans.” Tucked near the end of the album in “The Other Side,” he offers a warning: “Truth of the matter is, I’m complicated.”
That’s a promise to live up to.
JON PARELES
ESSAY
