D.O.C. (Death of the Chorus) with Emily Warren

Switched on Pop

Vox Media Podcast Network

Music Interviews, Music History, Music, Music Commentary

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Listen to Top 40 pop over the last decade and you’ll notice something weird is happening. The chorus—the emotional apotheosis of a pop song, its dizzying high, its cathartic sing-along center—is disappearing. In its place, artists from Bad Bunny to Taylor Swift are toying with new, chorus-lite song forms that introduce a new musical grammar to the sound of contemporary pop. We may not think much about pop structure when listening to our favorite songs, but this is a big deal—the last time pop experienced such a seismic shift was when the chorus first came into fashion, back in the 1960s. What does this mean for modern musicians and listeners? Emily Warren, songwriter for new-guard stars like Dua Lipa and Khalid, joins to break down why the sea change in pop form represents a new horizon of creative possibility. Songs Discussed Bad Bunny - Si Veo a Tu Mamá Future & Drake - Life Is Good Billie Holiday - Blue Moon Beyonce - Formation Travis Scott - Sicko Mode Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody Aretha Franklin - (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman Drake - Laugh Now Cry Later (ft. Lil Durk) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the dawn of the moving image, MGM Studios has turned dreams into an escape.
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0:16.0	The New World is here, but brothers, watch on TV or stream your favorite Hollywood blockbuster movies like Top Gun Man, Rock and No Time to Die.
0:24.0	W7 reporting for duty. Watch now on MGM Plus. This is entertainment.
0:36.0	Which dawn pop?
0:42.0	Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm Slangwriter Charlie Harding.
0:45.0	And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.
0:47.0	It would be an understatement to say that we are in a moment of significant change in so many ways.
0:53.0	But obviously with Switched On Pop, we need to get into what's changing in popular music in 2021.
1:00.0	And we are at a 75 year tectonic shift.
1:04.0	The blueprint of the pop song is being rewritten. We're talking about song form.
1:10.0	This is the thing we've talked about a bit on the show last year, right?
1:13.0	Sorry. You said song form and I just immediately fell asleep.
1:20.0	Why is that so boring and why should I care about it?
1:24.0	Song form is perhaps the most important thing that we don't pay much attention to.
1:30.0	It's the underlying structure that supports all of our listening.
1:33.0	It's sort of like all of our core assumptions about it.
1:35.0	Oh, come on.
1:37.0	Oh, sorry. No, I just got a little narcoleptic.
1:39.0	I genuinely am interested in song form.
	...

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