I am no snob. I happily drink any coffee black, I wear comfortable clothes that fit and I acknowledge that a good $10 screw-top bottle of wine tastes just as good to me as any of the more expensive options. I firmly believe a hearty bowl of lentil stew produced over an open campfire in the backcountry trumps any aged steak from a swanky steak house. Yet I still can't seem to get over my recent pivot to musical snobbery.
Perhaps I just listen to too much music from different ages and genres. Everything I do in life requires a soundtrack. While walking to class, I am partial to effervescent golden oldies like Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" or Motown classics like "I Can't Help Myself" by the Four Tops. While doing homework you can find me on B Level vibing to complex, mesmerizing amalgamations of sounds from artists like Odesza and Chet Faker. When I require a little burst of intensity for something active like exercising, progressive rock is my poison. Artists like Audioslave and Dream Theater really get me going. When I am not doing anything in particular, my musical taste is even more expansive. The only tangible trend I have noticed in my musical wandering is that across all genres, I find myself less and less capable of appreciating the popular music of my own generation.
The more musical genres and ages I dabble in, the more boring and uninspiring the top 100 sounds to me, and until now I had no explanation for why I felt this way. All the most popular new music, regardless of genre, tends to have the same time signature. Without getting too in depth, the vast majority of pop music (rap in particular) uses a 4/4 or 3/4 time signature. All this means is that there are four beats per bar and every new bar begins at a count of the first beat. This is the first time signature you would learn if you studied musical theory. It is also referred to as "common time," because — you guessed it — it is inordinately common. The 4/4 time signature has permeated rap, country, folk, screamo, R&B and almost any other genre you can think of. Its presence in the musical lexicon of the 20th and 21st centuries has been nothing short of imperious, and it’s getting worse. Indeed, we are facing the largest scale homogenization of music in history.
So how exactly did one time signature progressively conquer all of music? It is a very, very easy framework to build a song around. If I asked you to create a simple, arbitrary rhythm with two different-sized drums, chances are tremendously high that you would have composed something with a 4/4 time signature. It is just natural, especially for a generation that grew up hearing it in almost every song on the radio. Ah, there's that word: radio. The radio is the second reason why common time is so ubiquitous. The advent of the radio created a music business. It just so happens that if you have a hot artist on your label, and you want to make enough money to afford that yacht trip to Turks and Caicos, you would also likely be well-acquainted with the fleeting nature of fame and strongly incentivize the artist to speed up that next album in order to have a yacht like yours. It just so happens that 4/4 is one of the easiest and most simple time signatures to compose a song around.
Over the years, people all over the globe have grown accustomed to this time signature. Most people have even come to love it — and for good reason; it is catchy, simple, clean, danceable and similar to all the other music you enjoy. Thus, over the past decade or two, music television channels and radio station focus groups have found an incredible preference for this time signature. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a chapter about this particular preference of music industry focus groups in Blink. So a 4/4 time signature is not only the fastest and simplest musical framework, but it is also the most popular. This seems like a deadly combination of factors that, at least to me, suggests that business will continue to supersede artistry in the music industry.
Time signatures aren't the only aspects of music that have grown increasingly homogenized; the variety of tempo, scales, speed and timbral palette has also diminished over time. Without going into any technical explanations, this essentially means that popular musicians are taking far fewer risks with their instruments. They are playing the cords and hitting the notes that their audience already likes.
Have you ever noticed how older music sounds muted and flat in comparison to modern music? This is because tracks have been playing back louder and louder for the past half century. Base lines have also gotten deeper. Record labels have essentially waged an arms race of amplitude, and the general public's hearing is the collateral damage. When you see "digitally re-mastered" versions of music on iTunes, all the engineers have done usually is increase the amplitude of everything and deepen the baselines. With those small adjustments, even the oldest samples can get the modern breath of life. Parov Stelar, a popular electro-swing disc jockey, is especially adept at this.
There have been periods in the past century when popular music actually eschewed these homogenizing trends, albeit briefly. Pink Floyd and Led Zepplin are two well-known bands that made brilliant use of unconventional time signatures, vast timbral palette and varying tempos, scales and speeds to produce music so fresh and interesting that it inspired a generation of progressive rockers. Unfortunately, this period was all too brief. The next time popular music took a temporary respite from homogenization was during the ‘90s grunge movement. Grunge bands like Nirvana or Soundgarden created music just as complex and mathematically beautiful as their progressive predecessors in the late 1960s. Soundgarden's album Telephantasm has songs with time signatures like 15/8, 7/4 and even 7/16, and it sounds strange. The whole album has a haunting, alien quality to it. It still sounds like music, just like nothing you would usually think to listen to. It is simply sublime.
In summation, I am not a snob. I still listen to all kinds of music, but I am now aware of how similar most of it sounds. It is such a shame for bands like Maroon 5. They have such incredible timbre and technical ability, but they just don't take compositional risks. All I can do is continue to seek out the artists that do take these risks and push the envelope. I will continue to support the artists who produce music for the artistry and passion it invokes within them, the artists who sit down with a pen and actually compose their music. These artists are out there, and they are doing what they love, patiently waiting for you to discover them and appreciate their work, because they know that you won’t ever hear them on the radio.
