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Has pop music got less melodic? I’ve immersed myself in 70 years of hits – this is what I’ve found | Tom Breihan
A new study claims that songs have become less complex. But the magic of these short, sharp tunes can’t be so easily distilled, says author Tom Breihan
For the past six years, I’ve been engaged in a ridiculous exercise – writing a column for the website Stereogum in which I review every No 1 hit in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 – the same US pop chart that the Queen Mary University researchers used to build their database. The earliest days of the Hot 100 coincided with the rise of rock’n’roll, when the new breed of stars competed with and sometimes sought to emulate an older generation of big-band crooners, and those guys prized a certain sophistication in vocal phrasing. Another has been the ongoing conversation between country music and hip-hop, as Beyoncé, Shaboozey, and the duo of Post Malone and Morgan Wallen have landed huge hits that fall somewhere in the Venn diagram of two genres that play vastly different roles in US life.
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