pop music is awesome it can make you
feel invincible as if just by dancing
you’re channeling the whole planets
positive energy it fuels romances kills
heartbreak and helps us through the
growing pains of every phase of life
there’s also an incredible power to pop
music beyond these everyday influences
and it’s a kind of complicated power pop
music can reach so many people across
the planet so quickly that it both
exemplifies culture and can change it in
an instant to be honest with you
pop music hasn’t been weird enough
lately with great power comes great
responsibility I heard a song on the
radio the other day you might know it
it’s the one that goes whoa whoa you
know that song yeah I guess many of you
know that song but I think some of you
may be thinking of different songs
around 2012 I started noticing a pattern
in popular music these same two notes
the 5th and 3rd notes of a major scale
in this case a C major scale so that’s
doremi Fahmy 5 3 whoa whoa repeated in
song after song that topped the record
charts there it was when Katy Perry and
Snoop Dogg’s saying California Girls and
there when Justin Bieber and Ludacris
sang baby and again in good time by Owl
City and Carly Rae Jepsen I decided it’d
be fun to keep track of wherever I heard
it jump ahead to this past August 2016
I spent a Sunday afternoon and wrote an
article on my blog the patterning
discussing the development of this
phenomenon which I dubbed the Millennial
loop a few of my friends shared the post
and then a few of their friends shared
it cool then I noticed some people were
talking about the idea on message boards
like metafilter and red
it and then quartz made a video about
the idea and that video now has over 21
million views on Facebook alone slate
USA Today The Guardian the BBC news
outlets all over the world we’re talking
about the Millennial whoop it was clear
that the idea immediately resonated with
people enough for it to go viral in a
global way once you hear it you can’t
unhear it it’s the ultimate earworm two
notes that can’t be owned by anyone and
are as easy to sing as dreidel dreidel
dreidel or ring-around-the-rosie using
these two notes in this particular way
this whoa-whoa has just exploded over
pop music especially in the past 10
years with the help of readers all over
the world I’ve cataloged over 50 songs
that use the Millennial whoop pop music
is full of common themes from the Bo
diddly beat of rock music bumped don’t
don’t the dump dump to the Amen break of
drum and bass musicians use these
familiar hooks to bring us back to a
place of comfort where we feel like we
know what’s going on we may even get the
sense that hey I’ve heard this song
before even if we haven’t this happens
with rhythms and it happens with
melodies folk music especially has a
tendency to borrow melodies Kirby
Ferguson pointed this out and his TED
talk embraced the remix where he
discussed how Bob Dylan borrowed from
Woody Guthrie who borrowed from old old
folk tunes that were probably ripping
something else off and how really
everything is a remix but of course this
happens in pop music all the time as
well Keith Hopkin has a great website
called that sounds like calm dedicated
to pointing out the similarities between
melodies especially in pop songs like
Coldplay’s Viva la Vida or the eleven
other songs that use the same melody
chord progressions also get used and
reused from one song to another you can
think about the 12-bar blues or most of
your favorites
if you’re one of the 30 million people
who saw the axis of Awesome’s viral
video for chords then you know just how
many songs use that one five six four
chord progression and if you’re one of
the 13 million people who saw Rob Parham
onehans Pachelbel rant she used
essentially the same idea but five years
earlier you know that viral YouTube
videos also imitate and build off of one
another these familiar patterns are the
reason entire mediums exist like the
mash-up the long traditions of European
classical harmony and counterpoint have
been solidifying these structures for
hundreds of years to the point where now
we can interlock any number of songs and
create an entirely new musical
experience that gives us a sense of
timelessness fans of mediums like the
mash-up see this as a beautiful new way
of bridging sonic world’s across time
and space that were previously
considered to exist only in isolated
genres detractors say more and more
every song you hear sounds exactly the
same
both perspectives are right
in fact the formula for pop music has
gotten so prescribed that producing a
hit song is more akin to manufacturing
medical products than to our classic
idea of a wistful young songwriter with
a guitar gazing dreamily out of the
mountains John Seabrook wrote about this
phenomenon in a book he called the song
machine where he discusses music studios
like the Hit Factory and producers like
dr. Luke examining how they rearranged
song elements into a kind of musical
recipe geared to elicit a specific neuro
chemical response from listeners we’ve
entered an age where the music industry
like so many other businesses is
following the factory model of the
assembly line but Patrick I hear you say
I love these songs you’re yucking my yum
and spoiling my favorite things don’t be
a hater to that I say I love them too I
really could listen to Tove Lowe’s song
habits like every weekend for at least
the rest of my 20s but it does have a
millennial loop in it and it’s important
to remember these songs were engineered
so that we would love them that might
not make them any less awesome but it
does make them incredibly complex
products of a capitalist society
at first glance globalisation seems to
have made a number of utopian visions
into a reality there’s something kind of
beautiful to the idea of people from all
over the world bonding over a shared
love of Gangnam style the fact that many
people in Malaysia can speak to people
in Ghana using English as a common
language from a practical standpoint
that’s pretty incredible but considering
the legacy of dominance and power
struggles and colonization that led to
this situation it’s hard to feel totally
comfortable with this state of affairs
in China for instance the trend toward
Mandarin and away from Cantonese is a
particularly insidious example of state
control minimizing the voices of local
cultures that utopian vision of all
people speaking a common language is
somewhat dampened by the reality of a
centralized government demanding that
local TV stations broadcast only in
Mandarin we have to ask ourselves what
is lost when everything is so
predictable that nothing feels unique or
startling or strange really it comes
down to the basic fact that diverse
systems are more resilient systems
without diversity are more likely to
fail this is a principle that’s been
shown time and again in everything from
the ecological sciences to the world of
finance a good investment portfolio has
diversified assets to minimize risk an
ecosystem has biodiversity or it will
collapse into a desert a good company
organization or community welcomes
people from diverse backgrounds because
they provide new expertise new
perspective they question the status quo
this is why it’s important to have
checks and balances within government
and it’s why whistleblowers and those
who dissent play such a crucial role in
a democracy it’s why farming practices
like permaculture are desperately
working to counteract the disastrous
effects of monocropping corn and soy all
over the world it’s why the internet and
all the most durable communication
systems are built on the model of
networks rather than centralized
information hubs you don’t want a single
point of failure you want a broad
variety of interlocking contributions
that support one another when it comes
to music when we churn everything
through the song machine we lose sight
of virtuosity the wild genius at the
heart of musical innovation we diminish
folk traditions all over the world that
don’t conform to this standard model we
lose the Bhalla phone the banjo the hood
and the saws we lose the very thing that
makes music human computers can now use
machine learning algorithms neural
networks and other rule-based systems to
imitate the great composers improvised
jazz even develop their own sense of
musical style if we’re comfortable with
a predictable pastiche of musical tropes
why not just let the actual machines do
the songwriting music is one of the most
powerfully expressive mediums humans
have it has the potential to be rich
with emotion layered with complex
mathematical and logical structures
worded in such a way as to make us
question the very fabric of reality let
alone the fabric of our societies when
we neutralize and codify and restrict
the possibilities of music we limit our
own possibilities as a species we need
to embrace the weird weird is human
weird is what makes art art there is
strength and diversity there is beauty
in the strange and there is power in the
weird thank you [Applause]