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Resilience & Melancholy

Pop Music, Feminism, Neoliberalism

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

Hearing Resilience

Neoliberal ideology thinks everything can and should work like a deregulated market, from parenting (as Foucault discusses in Birth of Biopolitics), to education (charter schools and standardized tests), to environmental protection (cap and trade) and health care (the recent Affordable Care Act in the US). Biopolitics is, in a way, the application of neoliberal market logic to "life." Biopolitics uses the statistical and probabilistic models we see in big data and finance capital to understand, assess, and promote life and health. But how do neoliberal market logics influence how music is made, performed, heard, and consumed? How does resilience discourse, as a value system, shape what people find likeable or pleasurable in music, and how does it, as an epistemology or logic, influence how pop songs work or "make sense"? If music always reflects and shapes broader cultural and political ideologies, how does resilience cache out in terms of aesthetics and songwriting?

The answers to these questions can be found in a specific style of EDM-inspired pop that dominated US and UK pop charts in the early part of the 2010s. This genre uses different musical and expressive conventions than the ones common among most 20th century pop genres, from Tin Pan Alley to jazz to blues and rock. 21st century EDM-pop has its own musical lingua franca: it centers rhythm and timbre rather than harmony, is modular rather than teleological, and instead of bridges, breaks, long melismatic flourishes, key changes, and guitar solos, it uses "the [David] Guetta soar," the "dubstep drop," and stuttered vocals to craft meaningful musical expressions. In this chapter, I'll analyze these features of EDM-pop, break down how they work, and explain how they're different from (and similar to) more conventional pop song structures. The musical techniques I discuss in this chapter perform, in music, the broader social and ideological norms we're compelled to endorse and embody. They're sonically and aesthetically resilient, and that's why people find them intuitively logical and pleasurable.

EDM-pop illustrates just one way that modernist and post-modernist pop music (e.g., swing and hip hop) have been upgraded so that their logic and aesthetics are compatible with neoliberal norms and ideals. They don't replace older norms and practices so much as upgrade them. Often, the techniques I describe below exist together, in the same song, with some version of the older phenomena to which I contrast them.

This chapter is, at a more abstract level, about these upgraded norms: both the impact of broader epistemological and political norms on music, and the rise of compositional conventions and aesthetic values to fit this ideological context. Though I'm talking about "the norm," there are most certainly exceptions to this rule. The trends I'm describing here (both political and musical ones) aren't absolutely universal, they're hegemonic — that is, they're widely legible, "common sense" ideals, values, and practices that saturate but do not exhaust their fields of application. I will discuss counter-hegemonic practices in the next chapter; but before talking about how to resist or subvert these norms, I want to get a clear account of what these norms are and how they work.

The first half of the chapter is about composition and songwriting. To begin, I focus on the two most prominent and structurally significant features of EDM-pop: soars and drops. These are both methods of generating musical energy and crafting spectacular climaxes; soars and drops structure a song's gravitational center. Then, I shift focus to what musicologists call a song's "foreground" and consider how rhythmic stuttering and timbral nuance are used to craft melodic variation and interest. Then, returning to the level of structure and background organization, I show that EDM-pop songs, like Manovichian "new media" or "post-cinematic" film, are not integrated or fragmented wholes, but composites of modular parts. The second section of the chapter explains why these compositional techniques work, and why pop audiences like them. To do that, I show how the features I identified in the first half of the chapter correspond to features of resilience discourse and neoliberal ideology more generally: intensification, deregulation, transmission and profiling, and MRWaSP.

1. Soars, Drops, Stutters: some features of EDM-pop

Every musical work has some organizational principle or strategy that holds it together as a meaningful whole. In order to be recognized as a song, and then as a good song, a work follows and remixes established compositional structures and performance practices. Blues-based pop (R&B, rock, soul, funk, etc.) relies on the same harmonic system of chords and key changes that Mozart and Beethoven used; musicologists call this system "tonal harmony" or "tonality." For much of the 20th century, tonality was the main way of organizing (Western) pop songs. EDM-pop, however, works with a musical palette that pushes beyond and outside tonality, but does not exclude it — it's extra- tonal. Songs will often include some chord progressions or other elements of traditional harmonic language; however, these are generally ornamental and do not constitute the song's compositional backbone. Tonality is an accessory, not a foundation. What, then, is the compositional backbone or foundation of EDM-pop songs? And how do they create melodies on top of that?

One of many genres of extra-tonal pop (hip hop is another), EDM-pop defined by a family resemblance of common features, including: the soar, the drop, stuttering, and the foregrounding, even centering, of timbre. Looking at examples from David Guetta, Calvin Harris, Flo Rida, and Skrillex, I'll discuss what compositional strategies, performance and production techniques, and aesthetic approaches are common among mainstream EDM-pop songs, and how these work to hold a song together and make it sound interesting.

(a) The Soar

Conventionally (which, of course, means there are exceptions), pop songs have some sort of climax, hit, or other apex of sonic and affective energy.

Once built to a crisis point, tension is then released in a big "hit" on the downbeat of a new formal section or module (usually some version of the hook or chorus). This "hit" could take the form of a break (e.g., James Brown's oeuvre), or a key change (the best example of this is Whitney Houston's "And I Will Always Love You"). EDM-pop songs score hits by soaring to climaxes or dropping to nadirs. Soars and drops are different tactical approaches to the same underlying strategy of building and exacerbating sonic and affective tension. Here, I'll talk about the Soar; in the next section, I'll turn to the drop.

Dan Barrow popularized the term "Soar" as a description of the sweeping, upward/forward-moving intensificatory gesture that is common in EDM-inspired Top-40 pop. Barrow defines it as

that surge from a dynamically static mid-tempo 4/4 verse to a ramped-up major-key chorus, topped, in the case of female singers, with fountaining melisma; the moment the producer deploys the riff, the synth-gush, the shouted vocal-hook for which the whole of the rest of the song is a mere appendage, a prologue and epilogue that only the chorus validates.

Barrow's conception of the soar is quite broad; songs can produce the soar affect in any number of ways, combining synth gushes with key changes, cadences, and melismas. Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" soars, Jay-Z and Alicia Keys's "Empire State of Mind" soars, and The Black Eyed Peas's "I Got A Feeling" soars, but each soar varies the same underlying formula. This underlying formula is, in its most bare-bones form, a combination of timbral modification and rhythmic intensification that builds tension up to a crisis point.

Take, for example, "Empire," which on the surface seems like a combination of rather traditional hip hop and R&B. It soars, albeit in a very muted way. Keys' sung choruses are precipitated by mini-soars in the last measure of each of Jay-Z's rapped verses. In this last measure, Keys' piano drops out and is replaced by a repeatedly strummed guitar chord. On top of this, Keys repeats "c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon," and after the last "c'mon," there's a percussive stutter that acts as a pickup or lead-in to the downbeat of the chorus. (In the video, this happens first between 0:50 and 1:00). "Empire's" biggest soar happens when break leads back into the chorus (4:00-:05 in the video). Here, the minisoars are amplified by vocal melismas, both to build tension (the 2 "yeah-eh-eh-ehay-ay"s leading up to the hit) and to release it (the non-verbal melismas in the backing vocals at 4:05-:09).

"Empire" was released in 2009. Three or four years later, its soar sounds more anemic than anthemic. More recent EDM-pop has gravitated away from major-key chorus and fountaining melisma toward a distilled soar focused narrowly on rhythmic and timbral intensification. In many songs, we hear these intensificatory soars as "gushes" of activity from the synths and drum machines. This synth-gush is one of contemporary EDM-pop's most common, indeed, formulaic, compositional strategies; it is also, as I will show later, one that is most clearly connected to neoliberalism. But first, let's look more closely at how it works.

This distilled soar is most clearly exemplified in the work of European DJs David Guetta and Calvin Harris, who, in their collaborations with African-American vocalists and rappers (Ludacris, Flo Rida, Rihanna, NeYo, Usher, just to name a few), have scored numerous US Top-40 hits. Guetta and Harris have each developed their own distinctive brands of soars, which seem to function like the Coke and Pepsi of EDM-pop. They dominate the market, inspire many knock-offs, and are generally identical to the untrained ear, though a more discerning palette can easily identify differences.

First, let's look at Guetta's soars. He uses them to build climaxes of differing intensities to mark a song's beginning, middle, and end. In this respect, "Rest of My Life," a late-2012 Ludacris song featuring Usher, is a typical Guetta track. There are three types of soars in this piece: mini-soars that lead from verses into choruses, primary soars in each of the choruses, and a fake-out non-soar at the end (it starts like the other soars, but dissipates rather than intensifies). The mini-soar first appears at the end of Luda's first verse. Here, swooshing synth sounds that mimic blowing wind are added on top of the verse's instrumentals, building timbral intensity and musical energy. Because they often coincide with a rise in pitch, these swooshes impart a sense of upward motion or lift — the Soar's soar, so to speak. This "swoosh" is a typical component of many soars, and isn't unique to Guetta.

The song's main soars happen in the choruses, when Usher sings the titular line "for the rest of my life." Combining rhythmic and timbral intensification, these soars layer increas- ingly diverse kinds of sounds or voices (i.e., timbres) with increasingly dense rhythmic patterns, building up to an apex of sonic intensity. Let's break them down to see exactly how they do it (all times refer to the official video on Ludacris's VEVO account on YouTube):

First Soar:

1:10-1:18 This is the baseline, the nadir from which Guetta soars up to the apex. No percussion, little bass, mainly treble and mid-range vocals and instrumentals create floating effect.

1:18-1:25 Initial statement of the rhythmic pattern: sixteenth-eighth-sixteenth (s/e/s) pattern in the drum machine (snare) repeated 8 times; first time Guetta appears in the video.

1:25-1:27 S/e/s pattern intensified: Rhythmic events are more dense, and more percussion timbres are introduced. Sixteenths in snare added in penultimate repetition, topped off with a [rest]sixteenth/sixteenth/sixteenth (r/s/s/s) in the kick drum on the last beat of the last repetition.

1:27-1:55 Peak of the soar: Song coasts on the momentum just generated. Video shows people living life to the fullest: running, surfing, dancing, etc. Right at 1:27, at the very crest of the soar, the camera focuses on Guetta's face, his hair blowing in the wind.

Second Soar:

2:26-2:33 Baseline prime: This soar begins at a level of higher timbral intensity than the first soar. Floaty vocals augmented by interlocking rhythmic patterns in two mid-pitched synths: a higher-pitched one that ping pongs around an octave before doing a full arpeggio of the major chord, and a lower-pitched one that, like a typical alto line, articulates rhythmic patters while staying on the same pitch.

2:34-2:38 Rhythmic pattern prime: Interlocking rhythmic synth patterns continue as s/e/s rhythmic pattern enters; handclaps added 2:37ish.

2:38-2:40 S/e/s pattern uber-intensified: r/s/s/s in kick drums replaced with dropping mid-pitched synth (descends in pitch, but is also timbrally effected/distorted as pitch descends), topped off with kick drum triplet in last beat of last repetition. The "downward" soar actually builds musical tension, like how free falling accelerates to terminal velocity.

2:40 Peak prime: Intensifying the density and frequency of timbral and rhythmic events, these soars create the effect of barreling toward a peak of sensory saturation (even if this point is never actually reached). This peak of sensory saturation, or the feeling that one is living one's life to the fullest, is the apex toward which we are soaring.

These two soars are examples of the standard Guetta soar, which ascends to a peak of rhythmic and timbral intensity, stays at this plateau for a while, and then drops off so the song can build again. This formula of increasingly intense percussive repetitions, combined with timbral intensifications (swoops, swooshes, drops, etc.) appears in his two singles with Sia, in "Just One Last Time" with Taped Rai, and in The Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling" (which he produced). It's a basic blueprint that appears, in varied ways, in many other artists' work: it's behind the soar in Flo Rida's "I Cry," will.i.am & Britney Spears's "Scream & Shout," and even Psy's "Gangnam Style."

If Guetta's soar builds up to and maintains a plateau optimized sensory saturation, British DJ/producer Calvin Harris takes Guetta's basic soar formula and pushes rhythmic and timbral intensity past the point of sensory saturation. Harris soars past the plateau and off the cliff. Example's "We'll Be Coming Back" is a particularly clear, um, example of the Harrisstyle soar. There are two soars, an earlier, basic one, and a later, more intense one. Both are composed of two 2-measure phrases (assuming 4/4 meter). The first soar occurs at the end of the first chorus. From vocals to snares to increasingly high-pitched synths, the timbre becomes more intense as the soar unfolds. It breaks down like this:

First phrase (2 measures): 8 quarter-note repetitions of "back" (one "back" per beat) in the vocals, with eighth-note snare hits. Mid-pitched synth also sounds on quarter notes.

Second phrase (2 measures):

First measure: Double-times first phrase — 8 eighth-note repetitions of "back" (two "backs" per beat) in the vocals, and the mid-pitched synth also intensifies to eighth notes. The snare plays sixteenth notes, or four times per beat.

Second measure: The rhythmic intensification is passed off to drums and synths, which continue the sixteenth-note pattern. In the first two beats, the snare is the most prominent rhythmic voice; the mid-pitched synth stays on eighth notes. In the last two beats, the snare & mid-pitched synth drop out; this implies that we would not be able to perceive faster repetitions as distinct events, in the same way that we perceive still images projected at 24 frames per second as continuous motion. Attention focused instead on treble synth, which ascends in pitch to a very high note, which is the climax of the soar.

As rhythmic intensity gets exponentially faster, and timbral intensity is exponentially higher, voices (the vocals, the snare) drop out, implying that they have intensified past a point perceptible by human ears. The second soar — which happens during the second repetition of the chorus — actualizes what the first soar only implies. It follows the same basic formula as the first soar, but varies it slightly, cutting the vocals and, more importantly, audibly crossing rhythmic and timbral thresholds. Here's how it unfolds: First phrase (2 measures): This is mostly the same as first soar: snare on eighth-note pattern, mid-pitched synth on quarter notes, but no vocals.

Second phrase: In the first measure, there are sixteenth-notes in snare and, new this time, in the treble synth; the mid-pitched synth remains on eighth-note repetitions. In the second measure, the snare goes to thirty-second note roll, which is perceived not as individual notes but one continuous "gush" of uncountably fast drum hits. The treble synths arch in a pitch/timbre flare.

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Excerpted from Resilience & Melancholy by Robin James. Copyright © 2014 Robin James. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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