ITS HER FACTORY
Hello everyone! I started Its Her Factory as a blog in 2009 (remember blogspot?!), and I’m excited to relaunch it as a newsletter. I’ll still use my blog to post the transcript of talks and the like, but for several reasons I have decided this forum is a better way to distribute the bloggy kind of writing I once posted there. For one, the political environment has changed significantly and I am the employee of a state school; this medium gives me more control over who has access to my work. Second, after one or two free editions of this newsletter I’m going to begin charging a fee (there will still be free issues once or twice a year). This is because the money my school has traditionally had to support research travel and guest speakers for classes (in fact, the department’s entire operating budget) has gone away this year and the consensus is it is likely never coming back. So, I need to find another way to support those dimensions of my research and teaching (yay privatization :/). Since I don’t anticipate doing any research travel this school year, I’m going to hopefully generate enough subscription money to pay a guest speaker or two for my spring classes.
I have a new article up at Real Life Magazine
It’s about “solfeggio frequencies” and other trendy pseudoscientific wellness trends. Come for the argument about “individual responsibility,” stay for the link to my blog post where I actually do the math to figure out if the 9 supposed “solfeggio frequencies” fit any of the harmonic systems they are variously attributed to (spoiler: they don’t!).
“Mood” is Chill
24kGoldn’s “Mood” has been a huge hit this summer. A peppy song with slightly depressive (and misogynist) lyrics floating over a guitar loop with a sunshiny timbre, it recalls Blind Melon’s “No Rain” more than anything else. (The videos for both songs also share an affinity for sunflowers.) With its active looped melody and chorus-forward form (C-V-PC-C-V-PC-C), “Mood” is built like the TikTok-driven hit it is widely regarded to be.
But TikTok is not the only reason for the song’s success. Its composition also exhibits a kind of flexibility and adaptability that is related to remixability. As I argued here in my discussion of “Bad Guy” and “Old Town Road”’s fight for the #1 spot on the Hot 100, remixability is a song’s capacity to do, specifically, its capacity to be iteratively reworked in ways that drive clicks and streams--i.e., its chart value. Remixability is a property songs have that make them successful on record charts that operate like financialized markets, i.e., which apprehend value as qualitative capacity rather than (just) quantitative amount.
“Mood” has been so successful because it can do more than your average single without even having to be remixed. The song exhibits multiple, multivalent tendences that avoid developing into discernable commitments; in this way, it can be appealing to a variety of audiences who may themselves have very distinct musical commitments.
First, with its trap beat, clear guitar riff, and sing-songy vocals, it has elements of several genres without firmly planting its feet in any of them. As Josh Glicksman notes in a Billboard roundtable on “Mood,” its “production...doesn’t sound out of place on pop, hip-hop and alt-rock playlists.” This omnivorous yet ambivalent relationship to genre exponentialized its crossover potential: on October 19, 2020 it was the #1 song on Billboard’s Hot 100, Hot Alternative Songs, Hot Rock and Alternative Songs, and Hot Rap Songs. Whereas “Bad Guy” and “Old Town Road” used remixability to leverage their performance on just the Hot 100, “Mood” focuses instead on expanding the song’s capacities across multiple charts.
Notably, in this LA Times profile, both 24kGoldn himself elides “Mood’s” genre-mixing with his own biracial identity: “Who better to bring those two worlds together than somebody whose entire life is a juxtaposition? My dad is Black and Catholic; my mom is white and Jewish.” The Times reports a similar idea from and the current KROQ program director Mike Kaplan, who said “Mood” “embodies the naturally diverse tastes of “millennials and Zoomers who are more multicultural than any previous generation.”” These quotes assume that the capacity to cross racial boundaries--and, as a Jared Sexton inspired read would suggest, avoid being limited only to Blackness, Black identity, and Black music--is both analogous to “Mood”’s polygeneric chart success and feeds back into its potential for chart success. I’ll return to this point below, but here I just want to put a pin it by noting that both “Mood” and 24kGoldn’s capacity for chart success is framed in terms of their ability both gesture towards yet distance themselves from racial Blackness.
“Mood” likewise refuses to commit to any specific message. Now, don’t get me wrong, pop songs often prioritize sound over lyrical content (“Baby Shark” did just become the most-viewed video on YouTube). But “Mood” takes this to a whole new level. As Glicksman puts it in the same Billboard feature, “The chorus of “Mood” possesses the type of assonance that lets a listener gleefully mumble along while only sort of knowing the words -- “Why you always in a mood? / Something something something brand new, something something tell you what to do!” Because of that, “Mood” sounds instantly familiar, as if you just need one cursory listen to anticipate its biggest movements”.” The lyrics are written and performed in a way that maximizes their fuzziness and minimizes the appearance of any determinate, inflexible or non-substitutable elements. As Glicksman’s string of “somethings” illustrates, that makes it easy for listeners to engage the song before they really know it, thus making it easier to spread virally both on and offline. Here, the song’s lyrical indeterminacy amplifies its capacity for virulent spread.
“Mood”’s approach to genre and to lyrics maximizes flexibility and adaptability by minimizing determinate commitments to any one thing or other. “Mood” thus fits Alana Massey’s definition of “chill,” which she elaborates thusly: chill people “have discernible tastes and beliefs but they are unlikely to materialize as passionate.” For Massey, in contemporary culture “chill” means having likings or tendencies but no deep commitments to anything specific--i.e., maintaining an attitude that is maximally flexible and adaptable. Massey examines how chill functions as a gendered demand that women just accept mistreatment and misogyny from men. I would suggest that this sense of chill is feminized, but in the way that human capital is feminine and feminized. Here, chill indicates the same sort capacity for market success that #GirlBosses have. Qualities traditionally devalued as feminine--such as indecision, dilettantism, and superficiality--now function as neoliberal ideals that maximize capacity, and thus success in markets where value takes the form of capacity.
“Mood” embodies this type of chill in a few different ways, and that’s why it has been so spectacularly successful on the charts this year. It will be interesting to see how new strategies like remixability and this form of chill emerge to help pop songs perform better as pop charts adopt neoliberal market logics that frame value as a matter of qualitative capacity not (just) quantitative amount.
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From my WOXY book research: 2000, not 1991, is the year modern rock’s relationship to pop changed
The title of Dave Whitaker’s 2012 PopMatters article “Music In the 90s: When Alternative Became Mainstream” rehearses the common view that modern rock songs broke into the Top 40 in the early 1990s. However, when I compared the year-end “Best Of” lists from modern rock radio station WOXY to Billboard’s year end lists from 1984-1995, a different story emerged. In this period, relatively high level of crossover between WOXY’s list and the Billboard’s year-end Top 100 from 1991-95 mirrors the level of crossover happening a decade earlier.
In 1984, there were 9 songs in common between WOXY and Billboard:
Cindy Lauper, Girls Just wanna Have Fun and She Bop
Duran Duran, The Reflex and The Union of the Snake
Prince, Let’s Go Crazy
Eurythmics, Here Comes The Rain Again
Bananarama, Cruel Summer
Wang Chung, Dance Hall Days
Thompson Twins, Hold Me Now
And in 1985, there were 12 common songs:
A-Ha, Take On Me
Simple Minds, Don’t You Forget About Me
Tears for Fears, Shout
Duran Duran, A View To A Kill
Eurythmics, Would I Lie To You?
Murray Head, One Night In Bangkok
Til Tuesday, Voices Carry,
ABC, Be Near Me
Katrina and the Waves, Walking on Sunshine
Sting, Fortress Around Your Heart
Howard Jones, Things Can Only Get Better
Dire Straits, Money for Nothing
In 1986 the 97 Best Of begins listing albums instead of songs, but the fact that there are no artists from 85 who have multiple songs from the same album appearing on both lists makes it a meaningful point of comparison for future years, when we can compare the 97 Best Of to the Billboard year end albums list.
>>Thanks to Doug Balogh for lending me some archival materials while I do research in quarantine.<<
Long story short, the number of common albums averages around 5-8 through the rest of the 80s, dips to a nadir of 3 in 1990, and then climbs back into the teens throughout the first half of the 90s. More specifically, leading up to 1990 the common albums tend to prioritize guitar-driven music, whether it be from Living Colour, The Cult, or Indigo Girls. In 1990 only Depeche Mode, Sinead O’Connor, and Midnight Oil appear on both the 97 Best Of and the Billboard year end album chart. The number of shared albums doubles in 1991 (R.E.M., Jesus Jones, Enigma, INXS, Sting, EMF), and then nearly doubles again in 1992 (Nirvana, U2, Pearl Jam, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Enya, The Cure, Temple of the Dog, Annie Lennox, Beastie Boys, R.E.M., Singles OST) and stays in the low teens through 1995. For the rest of the 90s there are usually just under 10 common albums each year, and the big rock acts associated with the first wave of “alternative” like Green Day and Soundgarden appear regularly in Billboard’s list but never make the 97 Best Of. Taking over from acts like Foreigner or Van Halen, these sorts of acts represented mainstream rock on Billboard’s year-end album chart. For the last half of the 1990s, white dudes with guitars constitute the majority of overlapping entires, with women and non-rock genres making tokenistic appearances most years.
1991 and the explosive popularity of grunge wasn’t modern rock’s debut in the Top 40, but its return. From 88-91 the dwindling then rising number of shared entries on the 97 Best Ofs and the Billboard year end charts shows that there was a pendulum swing in Top 40 tastes. But for the rest of the 90s that pendulum would swing even further back in the direction from which it had originally started.
But in 2000 the rising popularity of hip hop and a Britney and boy-band fueled pop renaissance would send that pendulum back again in the other direction. For most of the 2000s there are 2 to 4 common albums, with the exception of 2003 when the Indie Rock boom brings the number of common entries back to double digits. Perhaps fittingly, the last 97 Best Of in 2009 shared no entries with the Billboard year end album chart.
At least when it comes to WOXY, the evidence reveals that throughout the 1980s and 1990s, there was a fairly consistent ~10% overlap in what the general listening public and modern rock radio listeners thought was the best new music in any given year. The thing that changed in 1991 is not the relative number of shared entries, but the proportion of non-men artists and non-rock genres among those entries, which nosedives significantly from their original levels. Takes like Whitaker’s mishear an increase in the presence of men as an increase in the presence of modern rock. Or perhaps more accurately: such a view arises from the mistaken (and sexist and racist) view that artists played on modern rock radio in the 80s like Cindy Lauper, Prince, and Bananarama don’t count as modern rock, so it wasn’t till the 90s that “real” modern rock crossed over to the mainstream.
The year that modern rock’s popularity with mainstream listeners radically changed isn’t 1991, but 2000. Over the first decade of the new millennium, the overlap between 97 Best Ofs and the Billboard year end album chart would gradually trickle down to zero. As pop’s driving force shifted even further away from rock and toward hip hop and EDM in the 2010s, indie rock was less a “modern” avant-garde upon which pop could draw and more of a niche genre. When you did hear modern rock on the pop charts, it was often as a classic song reworked into new material: Rihanna’s 2008 “Shut Up and Drive” builds on the main hook in New Order’s “Blue Monday” and Pitbull’s 2017 “Freedom” takes the main hook from The Soup Dragon’s “I’m Free,” and though there’s no direct referencing of a specific song, Lady Gaga’s 2020 “Stupid Love” bears an uncanny resemblance to songs like KMFDM’s “Salvation” or KMFDM/Thrill Kill Kult supergroup Excessive Force’s “Violent Peace (Bitchmix).”
I’d also appreciate it if you’d take a second to let your friends know about Its Her Factory :)
Pedagogy: My Google Doc discussion template
In my upper-level undergrad and MA level classes I’ve moved asynchronous discussion from Canvas to a shared Google Doc. It’s easier for students to access on phones and tablets, and just easier to navigate in general. Also, it’s easy for students to make their own copies of the document if they’d like to save a conversation for their notes or for working on their final papers. In this fall’s seminar I’ve been having students use this template, and it’s been working very well. Students regularly generate over 20 pages of discussion, and they say it is both helpful for them and easy to work into their schedules. I thought it might be of interest to those of you who teach discussion-based courses as many of us head into yet another term of primarily online instruction.
Stuff I’m reading:
Briana Younger on the whiteness of pop as a category or discourse: “In the past decade, pop has taken most of its cues from electronic and dance via the powerful influence of EDM (and wasn't that really just the final financial frontier of the decades-long theft of dance music?), along with hip-hop (namely trap), and, as always, R&B (especially that of the 80s). But despite the racial roots of such a mixture, today’s pop doesn’t align with Black expression in the popular imagination; its bubbly neon production, escapist tendencies, and chaste, unburdened attitude are at odds with the hypersexual and aggressive stereotypes that tend to inform the white gaze when it comes to Black music.” (To which Tamara Roberts’s JPMS article on Michael Jackson’s redefinition of pop as a multiracial genre is a great companion.)
Frank Pasquale’s critique of affective computing, which I’m excited to think about in the context of my project arguing that phenomenological horizons or what Sara Ahmed calls “orientations” are to finance capitalism what normal curves are to earlier forms of neoliberalism.
Aubrey Clayton’s “How Eugenics Shaped Statistics”—this digs into some of the matters I glossed over in The Sonic Episteme about normalization and the politics of Gaussian normal curves.
Stuff I’m listening to:
Sadly the livestream has now shuttered, but Pepsi’s take on lofi hiphop study beats was hil-arious, with lyrics like “Pepsi makes you productive because it has caffeine!”
This mix from Proteus. Heavy dirty techno in teh 130ish bpm range.
Eagerly awaiting this Soft Crash EP. Retro EBMy techno.
(No I haven’t listened to the new Ariana Grande yet.)
Reader Question
I put out a call for questions over twitter. You can find the Google Form here; it’s still open and I’m still taking questions. I’m trying to include one answer per newsletter.
K.W. writes: “Noticing a lot of disco-influenced pop (Dua Lipa, Doja Cat) in the pop charts...thoughts on why or how it fits into the "chill" framework? Also, you mentioning pop music having to do more "work" - work for a dance routine, tiktok background, viral video etc. - has that changed or shifted after the uprising this summer and if so how?”
Great questions! I’ll address them in order.
First, I think there are a lot of reasons we’re seeing more dance-influenced pop do well on the charts this year. For one, though there’s still a lot of chill tracks out there (like “Cardigan,” which is Taylor Swift’s version of lofi beats to study/relax to), there’s been a surge in overtly fun music happening for at least a year (think Lizzo’s success last year). Chill is primarily the purview of streaming services, but people listen to music in all sorts of contexts and not just as background music for working. So there’s a market for fun music. TikTok is also a factor here: it encourages dancing-as-listening. Second, I think the partial pendulum swing back to influenced pop is the trickling-up to the mainstream of a few trends in dance music. With respect to disco-pop specifically, I think The Blessed Madonna’s rising popularity is evidence of a more broad and fundamental disco-turn in some dance music circles. TBM has subbed for Pete Tong on the BBC’s flagship dance music show, so her very disco-oriented style of dance music has risen to the mainstream of dance music circles; the next place for it to go is pop. Some of this year’s EDM-influenced pop is also the trickling-up of “business techno” to the Top 40. For example, you can hear the family resemblance among Gaga’s “Stupid Love,” big-room techno producer Anna feat. Miss Kittin’s “Forever Ravers,” and Berghain resident Phase Fatale’s “Operate Within" (listen for those distorted bass synths). And there’s possibly an argument to be made that The Weeknd’s synthpop-heavy album is at least in part a trickling-up and watering down of synthwave-y aesthetics. Which is all to say I think some of the rising popularity of dance-influenced pop is due to underground trends rising to the Top 40.
Second—I mean I think the Dua Lipa remix album is a good example of how remixability was leveraged to make an album do more in lieu of taking it on tour…but that’s more to do with the pandemic than with the summer protests. I’m not sure the uprisings impacted the underlying neoliberal rationality that frames value as qualitative capacity rather than quantitative amount, so I don’t really think they would have caused any change or shift in how that logic manifests in pop charts.
Its Her Factory, the newsletter
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