Lot's Wife Edition 4 2016

CULTURE
Kids these days:
is pop music losing
its intelligence?
By Matthew Edwards
Illustration by Elizabeth Bridges
Engaging with music is a time-tested human tradition,
that crosses all cultures and backgrounds. Thanks to the
internet, we now have access to broader samples of musical
genres, and it's now easier than ever to listen to what you like.
Yet there is still one genre of music that is ubiquitous in the
disdain it inspires: pop music. While travelling in the car, bus,
or taxi, you might have listened to the radio, and you may have
said to yourself, "Is this what's popular these days?" Or, perhaps,
"This song is pure garbage!" You may have then plugged in
the AUX cord or put on your headphones and listened to your
own tunes. But not all is lost – there has been something of a
resurgence in pop music in the last two years. Some pop songs
are becoming more lyrically complex and thematically sophisticated,
and most have been gaining traction on the charts.
I think it’s worth taking a look at some of them, to see what
works and what doesn’t.
It's no secret that pop music can sometimes be pure garbage.
In 2014, data blog SeatSmart conducted an analysis of lyrical
intelligence, or the graded reading level of a song’s lyrics, over
ten years of music. No musical genre or artist was safe: the
study showed that lyrical intelligence in popular music has been
on a downward trend since 2005. Artists like Maroon 5 and
T-Pain scored particularly low on the scale, with lyrics rating
lower than a second-grade reading level. Let's look at a sample
from T-Pain's entry, the 6th lowest song on the list, Buy U A
Drank (Shawty Snappin') from 2010:
I'mma buy you a drank
I'mma take you home with me
I got money in the bank
Shawty what you think 'bout that?
Find me in the grey Cadillac
We in the bed like ooh, ooh, ooh
We in the bed like ooh, ooh, ooh
It reads less like a song, and more like a message from a
horny 40-something man on OkCupid desperate to impress a
member of the desired sex. He’s just going to buy her a drink
and take her home in his nice car to have casual, non-committed
sexual intercourse, which according to Mr. Pain, will sound
like “ooh, ooh, ooh” …? Not a lot of room for interpretation
there.
But I think it’s important to make some distinctions. A “low”
song does not necessarily equate to a bad song. Many songs
that scored low on the SeatSmart list – Hey Ya by Outkast and
Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry just to name a couple – are songs
that have some lyrical complexity to them. Hey Ya is about a
relationship being dysfunctional, despite things looking fine on
the surface. This superficiality is reflected in the upbeat mood
of the track, and something the song actually acknowledges in
the lyrics. Take the last part of the second verse:
… If what they say is “Nothing is forever”
Then what makes (then what makes)
Love the exception?
So why, oh why
Are we so in denial
When we know we’re not happy here?
(Y’all don’t want to hear me, you just want to dance)
That last line is drowned out by the hook (the “hey ya”
part) coming back in, and it marks a shift in tone for the rest
of the song. Singer Andre 3000 goes into “denial” too, and
famously tells us to let go of our emotions and “shake it like a
Polaroid picture”. This entire song exemplifies the deeper lyrical
complexity hidden within pop music that I think a few other
popular songs share at the moment.
Mike Posner is no stranger to criticising popularity. His
2010 track Cooler Than Me was a massive hit, and describes a
girl Posner was supposedly interested in and rejected by, who
he describes as rich and stuck-up. According to him, she “needs
everyone’s eyes just to feel seen” and acts like a wannabe celebrity.
Since then, Posner has remained in the strange shadow
of the formerly famous. He disappeared from radio while he
fought the depression that came with his sudden notoriety.
That’s where I Took a Pill in Ibiza comes in.
Ibiza was recorded in 2015 as an acoustic track, before it
got picked up and remixed by Norwegian EDM duo SeeB a year
later. It deals with Posner’s complicated feelings towards his
own fame, and the new lifestyle that it brought him. The song
is straight-forward and blunt in its message, describing the
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