If your ears are telling you that pop music aint what it used to be, you’re not crazy – but despite the current trend of hypersexuality, evolutionary change in artistic expression is a good thing. A new analysis of over 17,000 chart-topping songs from 1960 to 2010 have shown that hip hop had a much more dramatic impact on pop music than any other associated genre.
Let that sink in for a moment, considering the breathless retelling of how The Beatles changed everything amidst the British Invasion in the mid-1960s.
The exhaustive study focused on trends in various songs’ harmonic and timbral properties, as well as other factors. Researchers then built an audio-based classification system of the various musical styles, and explored the diversity of the songs during various phases in pop’s evolution, as well as the pattern of change over the years. The results were three different character “revolutions” in which the change was dramatic and relatively sudden: The the years centered around 1964 (the era of British bands), 1983 (the rock era) and 1991 (the era of mainstream hip hop).
“The third revolution is the biggest,” Dr Matthias Mauch, from Queen Mary University of London, told BBC News. “This is so prominent in our analysis, because we looked at harmony — and rap and hip hop don’t use a lot of harmony. The emphasis is on speech sounds and rhythm… This was a real revolution: suddenly it was possible that you had a pop song without harmony.”
However, as documented in the journal Royal Society Open Science, there have been notably diminished use of more advanced formula bridges between pop and jazz. The decline in use of dominant seventh chords, which are commonly used in jazz and blues, was roughly 75 percent between 1960 and 2009. Back then, there wasn’t much of a leap in structure to go from a George Gershwin to a Benny Goodman. Today, pop and jazz are on opposite sides of the musical Tower of Babel.
The arena rock revolution of the 80s streamlined a lot of variety to a tightly packaged formula and style, stifling the evolutionary progress of popular music. Then, in 1991, rap and hip hop went mainstream, bringing the pendulum swinging hard back to center.
“This is so prominent in our analysis, because we looked at harmony – and rap and hip-hop don’t use a lot of harmony. The emphasis is on speech sounds and rhythm,” explained Dr. Mauch. “This was a real revolution: suddenly it was possible that you had a pop song without harmony. The minor seventh chords were introduced through funk, soul and disco in the 1970s. That didn’t cause a revolution, but these chords were not present before – and they haven’t gone away since. New songs still heavily use these chords.”
So is pop music really getting worse as time goes on? Mauch doesn’t think so. “Many people claim music is getting worse and worse, and we didn’t really find anything like that,” he said. “There is not an overall trend for the composition, the musical ingredients of the charts, to become less diverse.”
