hey, welcome to 12tone! on May 28th, fellow music YouTuber Rick Beato did a livestream
called "Why Today's Music Is So BORING.
The Regression of Musical Innovation."
*inhale, then sigh* alright.
fine.
let's go.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
this video is sponsored by Skillshare!
right off the bat, I want to be really clear about my intentions here, because despite
how this probably looks, I'm not actually trying to start a fight with Rick Beato.
that wouldn't be a productive use of anyone's time.
this is YouTube, so no matter what I say some of y'all are gonna read this as a declaration
of war, but that's not what I'm going for.
I don't have a problem with Rick's work in general.
this particular livestream, though, presents a misguided, myopic, and under-informed view
of modern music, a topic I care very deeply about, and as of this recording it's been
seen by over 750 thousand people, many of whom won't have the necessary background to
recognize just how empty it really is.
a lot of folks are gonna walk away from it with some pretty deep misconceptions about
the state of modern music, and my interest here is in reducing that damage.
to be clear, though, I'm not interested in attacking Rick Beato as a person or as a creator:
I don't know him, and it would be wildly inappropriate to speculate on his motivations.
however, I do think someone needs to address the arguments he's making, because they're
not good, and that's what I intend to do.
or, I'll do my best, because despite the provocative title, the 30-minute stream contains very
little in the way of actual arguments.
he only ever mentions two modern songs by name: Leave Before You Love Me, by Marshmello
and the Jonas Brothers, and Leave The Door Open, by Bruno Mars.
he also references a Justin Bieber song from a previous video, but I'm not sure which one.
and he doesn't really talk much about them, either, besides observing that the melody
from the Jonas Brothers song sounds a lot like Lost In Love by Air Supply which, yeah,
he's not wrong.
beyond that, though, he doesn't really try to prove these songs are bad: he mostly takes
that for granted.
instead, he seems much more interested in proving that old songs are good, playing a
bunch of his favorites on guitar to demonstrate that they use the good chords.
and this is a good segue into my first point, which is that Rick is ignoring a phenomenon
called the sieve of time.
basically, in any historical moment, a lot of things are happening.
this is true in every field, but for our purposes, what matters is that there's always lots of
music being made.
as time passes, though, we as a society forget about most of it.
the farther we get from that moment, the more of its music we leave behind, until we're
left with just the things that we've collectively decided are the most important and most worth
remembering.
like, let's go back 30 years to 1991. this was a huge year in the world of rock music.
it saw the release of the Chili Peppers' Blood Sugar Sex Magik, REM's Out Of Time, U2's Achtung
Baby, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Metallica's Black Album, Pearl Jam's Ten, Smashing Pumpkins'
Gish, Green Day's Kerplunk, and, of course, Nevermind, the Nirvana record. all of those
are considered classics today, and with so many heavy hitters in the same year, the race
for the number one single must've been fierce, right?
so who won?
Smells Like Teen Spirit?
Give It Away?
Alive?
no, the number one single in 1991 was Everything I Do I Do It for You, by Bryan Adams, off
the soundtrack for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
it sounds like this: (bang) and if you're not, personally, Bryan Adams, there's a good
chance this is the first time you've ever heard it.
30 years ago, though, it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 7 straight weeks.
all the evidence indicates that this song was everywhere, but it just didn't have any
real staying power.
now, to be clear, I'm not saying those rock albums weren't popular.
they were.
most of them sold well.
Nevermind in particular sold really well.
my point is that they weren't alone.
it would've been very difficult to predict from sales figures and radio play which ones
would still be relevant three decades later.
that sort of insight is only available in retrospect, and when we're looking at today's
music, we simply haven't had time to go through that process yet.
we don't know which songs are gonna have staying power until we've given them a chance to stay.
as such, comparing the songs that are popular now to the songs you still remember from decades
ago is comparing apples to oranges.
of course, the process by which we determine what's worth remembering is a lot more complicated
than just picking the best songs: there's a reason, for instance, that all 9 of the
bands I mentioned from 1991 are fronted by white men.
but one factor in that calculation is innovation.
we tend to remember when things change.
that's part of why 1991 is such an important year: it was the mainstream arrival of grunge,
a tectonic shift in the rock music landscape.
this means the things we remember are often not all that representative of mainstream
popular music at the time.
if they were, they wouldn't be worth remembering.
seriously, Wikipedia has Billboard's year-end top singles lists going back to 1946.
go read some of those and see how many things you recognize.
but as for Rick's actual argument, it seems to be mostly that modern music uses fewer
and simpler chords, which results in simpler melodies.
his central complaint is that songs these days seem to rely exclusively on just four
chords from the same key, which we never used to do.
(Ain't No Sunshine plays) ok, but that's not fair.
(Any Way You Want It plays) yeah but that's Journey, obviously Journey doesn't count.
(Heart-Shaped Box plays) ah, no, that one's only three chords, that's different.
(Eleanor Rigby plays) and that's two, but ok, fine.
at least we can all agree that a song with only one chord would be really boring, right?
(Chain Of Fools plays) alright, seriously, whoever keeps playing these while I'm trying
to talk needs to calm down.
you are not helping.
ok, so..
I have two major problems with this argument.
the first is that it's a bait-and-switch: he's conflating musical complexity with harmonic
and melodic complexity.
that is, he's saying how innovative a song is can be measured by looking at its notes
and chords. this is a fairly common mistake among people who went to music school, and
I think the way we teach music theory encourages it, but it's still wrong.
there's all sorts of ways to do interesting stuff with music.
you can experiment with rhythms, orchestration, layering, song form… modern popular music
especially likes experimenting with production and sound design, because we have all sorts
of tools for that now that literally didn't exist when most of the songs Rick mentions
were made.
if you want to know more about that, I'd recommend the blog Top 40 Theory, run by music theorist
Dr. Asaf Peres, where he outlines a lot of the interesting theory going on in modern
pop music.
like, consider this: (Montero plays) or this: (Pay Your Way In Pain plays) or this: (NDA
plays) those were all released in 2021 by Grammy-winning artists, they all got radio
play, and I'd argue that all of them are doing something interesting.
and that's not even getting into all the fascinating things musicians like dodie and Andrew Huang
are doing with the medium of YouTube.
now, am I cherry-picking examples?
yeah, absolutely, but so was Rick. the point is, there's still plenty of cool stuff out
there, if you actually bother to look for it.
and the thing that's frustrating about this is that Western music has been experimenting
primarily with harmony for literally centuries.
the entire Romantic period was basically just one long, increasingly complicated chord progression,
and once they were done, jazz picked up the football and ran even further with it.
harmonically speaking, most of the old songs Rick mentioned are dead simple compared to
what artists like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were doing decades earlier.
like, sure, it's cool that Black Hole Sun uses sus chords, but have you seen Giant Steps?
that thing's in three keys at the same time.
but innovation isn't just about pushing the same boundary over and over.
it's also about finding new boundaries, new frontiers that haven't already been mined
for all they're worth.
are there still clever things left to do with chords? of course, and modern music is doing
some of them: as I've already argued in multiple videos, the evolving language of chord loops
is a perfect example of harmonic innovation in a modern popular context.
but even if a song isn't doing anything complicated with its chords, that doesn't mean it isn't
doing anything complicated at all.
the deeper issue, though, is the implication that more complicated music is better in the
first place.
now, this isn't entirely wrong: if I were to, say, play quarter note Cs on a piano for
four minutes, that wouldn't make a very good song… ok, I'll stop.
but it goes the other way, too: if complexity always made things better, we'd all be listening
to Ferneyhough, and if you didn't get that reference, here's a taste.
(bang) that's what pure musical innovation sounds like, and I'm not saying it's bad,
but it's pretty impenetrable.
making music that other people can relate to is a balancing act between complexity and
familiarity. in order for your audience to care that you broke their expectations, you've
gotta give them something to expect.
different genres, cultures, movements, and scenes have approached this balance differently.
some of them are more complex overall, while others invest their complexity in just a few
areas.
this is one of the reasons melodies have gotten simpler: to stay out of the production's way.
and here's the thing: I'm pretty sure Rick knows all this.
I wanted more context for the argument he was making, and since the stream was a follow-up
to his previous video, where he reacted to the top ten songs on iTunes, I went and watched
that.
given the level of negativity in his stream, I assumed he was gonna hate all these songs,
but… he didn't. of the 10 tracks he listened to, he was overwhelmingly positive about 8
of them, and still had plenty of nice things to say about the other 2.
throughout the video, he praised the songs' productions, their rhythms, their performances,
and on more than one occasion, their melodies.
in fact, I'd like to play you a clip from that video, and when I do, I want you to remember
that literally his only argument for why modern music is boring is that it uses simple chord
progressions. with that in mind, here's what he had to say about Cover Me In Sunshine,
by P!nk and Willow Sage Hart: (RICK: I hate to say it, I just love those kind of chord
progressions.
I know that they've been played a million times, right? but I'm just a sucker every
time I hear those.
they're just so amazing.
[plays chords] it's just so satisfying, even though it's in a billion other songs, but
that's a good song.)
and to be clear, I'm not cherry picking here.
I didn't dig through dozens of Rick's videos to find this quote.
it's in literally the last thing he published before the livestream.
it had to have been fresh on his mind.
now, I said I wasn't gonna question his motives, and I'm not.
I don't think he's trying to trick you, or lie about his beliefs, but I do think it's
important to recognize that, once you strip away the context of an improvised rant about
how modern music sucks and simple progressions are boring, he doesn't actually seem to mind
them.
he has a theoretical preference for complexity, but apparently not an aesthetic one. and that's
the danger of applying music theory carelessly: it's easy to convince yourself that things
you like are bad, not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they don't play
by the rules we made up.
but ok, let's say modern music is getting less innovative, and while we're at it, let's
say that's a bad thing.
how did it happen?
I'll let Rick explain: (RICK: nobody ever wants to take a chance.
writers don't want to take a chance.
and this started happening in the early 2000s when A&R people that sign bands, when money
started to go down in the music industry, they started hiring producers to go in and
write with artists, 'cause they didn't feel like the artists were good enough writers.)
and that's all true.
or, rather, this isn't something I've researched all that deeply, but it sounds reasonable,
and it's an area Rick has a lot of personal experience with, so I'm more than willing
to take his word for it.
but also, while Rick is probably right that major labels don't like taking risks anymore,
major labels just don't matter as much as they used to.
the last few decades have seen incredible advances in the quality and affordability
of music technology, for both production and distribution.
it's easier than it's ever been to make a studio-quality album by yourself in your bedroom
and release it to the entire world, for free, on platforms like YouTube, Spotify, and Bandcamp.
that's how Lil Nas X made Old Town Road: he's signed with Columbia now, but originally he
just published the song himself on Tiktok, and it became the number one single of 2019.
new, innovative artists don't need a major label contract to get their work out there
anymore, so many of them are just bypassing that system entirely.
acts like St. Vincent, clipping., 100 Gecs, mxmtoon, and Amanda Palmer either self-publish
or work with smaller, independent labels that give them more freedom and creative control,
and they've managed to leverage that distribution technology to build massive fanbases anyway.
heck, Bad Bunny has more monthly listeners on Spotify right now than Taylor Swift does,
and his record label doesn't even have a wikipedia page. and sure, the majors still dominate
the tops of the charts, for the most part, and yes, independent labels have been a thing
for a long time, but with the rise of the internet, the music market has grown increasingly
segmented.
that's part of why the money dried up for major labels in the first place.
we live in a golden age of music accessibility, but if all you're doing is looking at top
10 lists, you're missing out on all sorts of interesting stuff going on just beneath
the surface.
but even if we do restrict ourselves to just the majors, there's still innovation.
like, consider the 2016 album Lemonade.
it's a sprawling concept album with songs from all sorts of genres, recorded in 11 different
studios, with dozens of collaborators.
it had a budget of well over a million dollars, very little promotion prior to its release,
and they even made an hour-long film to go along with it.
by any reasonable estimation, it was a huge risk, but Columbia was still willing to take
it, because, well, it's Beyonce.
they knew they could count on her to sell records, so they let her do whatever she wanted,
and the end result was probably one of the greatest albums of all time.
seriously, if you haven't listened to Lemonade, do yourself a favor and check it out. and
this has pretty much always been a thing: if you go back to early Beatles records like
Please Please Me, they're not that different from the rock and roll that was already popular
in the early 60s. by the time they were working on the White Album, though, they knew they
could make literally anything and people would buy it, so they did, and they did. and it
doesn't just work for established artists, either: people like Billie Eilish and Lil
Nas X, who have a huge breakout performance with a clear artistic voice, put themselves
in a strong position to continue doing their thing.
so yes, major labels do pressure artists to conform to currently popular norms.
they always have, and yeah, that sucks.
but that doesn't mean exciting new artists can't break through and make their voices
heard.
so why do I care?
why make this video when I know it's just gonna get me in trouble and start a fight
I really, really don't want?
well, over the years, music theory YouTubers, myself included, have made lots of videos
criticizing traditional music academia. and that's a good thing: these are conversations
we need to be having, and the public deserves to be a part of them.
but if we're gonna throw stones, we need to get our own house in order.
if we want scholarly respect, we need to hold ourselves to standards of scholarly rigor.
if we present ourselves as experts, we have to do the necessary work to actually be experts,
and when we fail to do that, we have to hold each other accountable.
that's what scholars do.
so I'm not saying Rick Beato is a bad or lazy person, but I am saying this was a bad and
lazy video that went viral by reinforcing some of his audience's worst biases. you may
not like the Jonas Brothers, but to imply that's all modern music has to offer betrays
a deep lack of familiarity with the actual landscape of modern music.
I mentioned that modern music loves experimenting with production, but production is… hard.
it can be really hard to figure out where to get started, but fortunately, that's the
sort of thing that Skillshare is great at.
they've got all sorts of awesome classes about music production and related skills like mixing
and mastering.
one of my favorites is called Inside The Studio, where Grammy-winning producer Focus… takes
you through his process of developing tracks and collaborating with artists to make great
music.
it's like a guided tour of how a producer thinks about their work, and it lays out all
the things you need to consider in order to do that work yourself.
and that's just one of thousands of classes on Skillshare, covering things like songwriting,
instrument skills, and non-musical stuff like cooking. and right now, there's no risk to
trying it: the first 1000 12tone viewers to click the link in the description will get
a free month of Skillshare Premium, so you can check out all those classes for free.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making these videos possible,
and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons, Susan Jones and Jill Sundgaard.
if you want to help out, and help us pick the next song we analyze too, there's a link
to our Patreon on screen now.
oh, and don't forget to like, share, comment, subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.