The Bland Leading The Bland

Ever wondered why a lot of the songs you hear drifting out of car radios, hairdressers and other peoples headphones sound so similar? It’s not just you going ‘bah, humbug, in my day we had proper tunes’ either. The incessant “Wa-oh-wa-oh” vocals that end almost every verse in most pop songs are not there by accident. There is actually a rather cynical science to this, and it’s something that isn’t going to go away either, as the technology able to manipulate our feeble human brains develops at pace.

It's called the Millennial Whoop, a term coined by Patrick Metzger on his website ‘The Patterning’, a site dedicated to "identifying patterns in music, culture, and the Universe". and its been around and manipulating our tastes for some time now. How he explains the Millennial Whoop is this; “It’s a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes out with an “Oh” phoneme, often in a “Wa-oh-wa-oh” pattern. And it is in so many pop songs, it’s criminal.”  Some of you will understand all that stuff about fifths, eights and thirds, others won’t, but you will definitely recognise the Millennial Whoop everywhere now you have been alerted to its existence.

Now I’m no fan of Katie Perry, but Metzger cites her 2010 hit 'California Gurls' as a prime example of the formulaic use of the Millennial Whoop to turn the track into one of those annoying ear worms you just can’t shake off.  The sequence is simple enough, only two notes repeated over and over in every chorus, but the effect is palpable and is driven by an almost primordial genetic programming that all humans have to favour the familiar. There are very many other examples out there too (just choose your own). The very reason pop music is so successful is because almost every song sounds familiar.  Western scales and rhythms tend to gel with our heartbeats and the biological tempos we have been listening to ever since we were an embryo in the womb.  Baby talk (all that “goo goo, ga ga’ stuff grandparents feel they need to direct at any infant) also shares that same biological tempo. For all of us at a deep level, familiarity equals comfort and safety.  That, and our obvious tendency to remember stuff we experience a lot, is the basis of repetitive brand advertising and even resulted in the McDonalds Happy Meal, which deliberately set out to programme happy memories of free toys and burgers into kids so that in adult life they would habitually return to McDonalds for a safe and comfortingly familiar burger meal eaten whilst sitting in reassuringly unchanging, if somewhat artificial, surroundings.

It also means that the majority of pop hits today can either be auto generated, or created en-masse by ‘hit factory’ producers.  In recent years, a small number of pop composers have been responsible for a vast amount of the biggest hits.  For example, over the past 15-20 years, Swede Max Martin has been personally responsible for churning out more Billboard singles than stars like Michael Jackson and Madonna combined. Writing for acts like The Backstreet Boys, he is one of the most famous, non-famous people on the planet. 

All this has combined with our elephantine memories for tunes to turn mainstream music increasingly bland. The Spanish National Research Council even published a report analysing songs released between 1955 and 2010, which showed that the diversity of note combinations (and bear in mind there are only 12 notes in the western musical scale) had consistently reduced over that period.   That process of homogenisation may seem obvious to those of us who cynically observe these things, but such reductionism isn’t just restricted to the pop spectrum.  Indie fare may not employ the Millennial Whoop, but one Alt Rock, punk, electronic, or Goth track still sounds much the same as another, employing the same tropes and cliches, resulting in both labels and artists taking a machine gun approach to releases, spitting them out at a terrific rate in the hope that some will find their target.  Eastern music is equally formulaic in a different way, so there is no escape there either.  Even anti-music/noise has its tried and tested approaches.  Let’s face it, although there is joy to be had from discovering new sounds, we are all simply hard wired to find comfort in the stuff we know well.

So, if you sometimes feel that by gravitating towards familiar favourites for your listening pleasure you are letting the side down, rest assured, when it comes to music, familiarity is pretty much guaranteed.