Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

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Let’s Kill the Four-Chord Song

A few days ago, Paul McCartney took a shot at today’s pop music. To make his point, he created a song in the current four-chord vamp style—and did it spontaneously during an interview.

It’s easy to say that Paul is crotchety and out of touch. After all, he is 84 years old—so what can he possibly know about commercial music today?

But the reality is that his album was at the top of the Billboard rock chart at the very moment when he gave this interview.

So Sir Paul gets the last laugh. But the issue is bigger than just Macca. The entire world is shifting away from new music, and old songs now triumph in every setting.

You criticize those ancient tunes at great peril. A few days ago, I questioned the inclusion of the song “Stairway to Heaven” in the trailer for the new Narnia film. I said this song was tired and over-played. There was a day when it sounded fresh and provocative, but not anymore.

Well, that didn’t go over well. I got so much grief from fans of this 50-year-old rock anthem, that I deleted my post. It’s not worth fighting over.

The response made me feel like the hardass store clerk in Wayne’s World.

But, ooh, still it makes me wonder….

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I mostly listen to new music nowadays. I like the old songs, but I’m always on the lookout for something fresh and new. When I find a new artist I like, I still get excited—much like I did as a youngster.

My only complaint is that the music business is making it harder and harder to find interesting new music—because it prefers repeating the same old formulas.

The formula is where creativity goes to die, and the charts nowadays are the aesthetic equivalent of hospice care. In the current environment, any musician who dares to try something new and different gets pushback from every direction.

• Radio stations are mostly playing the same kind of songs they showcased twenty years ago—and artists won’t get into rotation if they deviate from the formula.
• Streaming playlists aren’t much better, especially if they are curated by algorithm. The algorithm has been trained on the past; that’s all it knows and wants.
• Record labels are also surprisingly risk-averse. They also prefer tracks that stick to proven recipes—even if this results in anemic sales and bored fans.
• As a result entire genres are stuck in the past. How much has country music changed since 2000? Or pop? Or hiphop? Or even my beloved jazz? Not much.

Things weren’t always like this. There was a time within living memory when genres changed radically every few years. Pop music in 1957 was totally different from 1947—and it changed even more in 1967. Hit radio was a confusing hodgepodge, but in the best possible way.

Consider this list of the biggest hit singles of 1964—all of them in rotation on the same “top forty” radio stations during the same period.

It’s hard to imagine a world like that nowadays—when radio stations could juxtapose the Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, bossa nova, Louis Armstrong, and the Supremes. Today, the formulas are so tightly defined that not only don’t they mix styles, they won’t even let styles evolve.

What makes this so strange is that the audience hates it. For several years now, I have been tracking the shift in the public’s music tastes, away from new songs and toward old songs. This is a shocking development—the last time it happened was the medieval era. But now it’s the new normal.

This has no reached such an extreme state that even “consumers ages 13-24 are increasingly turning away from current music to engage with songs released before they were born,” according to market research outfit Luminate.

There’s still a slight preference for recent songs among youngsters, but its eroding rapidly—new music has lost more than 10% market share in just four years. At this rate, old songs will reach parity with new songs among teens and young adults before the end of the decade.

That’s stunning. Young people have always been the key market for new music—but now they are gradually turning away from current hits and listening to their parents’ favorite artists.

If you’re still skeptical, take a look at Billboard’s chart of the most popular albums today. I repeat today, not twenty or forty years ago. In the top 100 right now you will find:

• Journey’s Greatest Hits
• Michael Jackson’s Thriller
• Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors
• Sade’s The Best of Sade
• Credence Clearwater’s Chronicle: The 20 Greatest Hits
• Queen’s Greatest Hits
• Nirvana’s Nevermind
• Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits

And, of course, there’s Rubber Soul, which is enjoying a huge run this week, more than sixty years after its initial release.

Week after week, month after month, old stars hold on to their preeminence, while today’s stars come and go.

Here are the numbers in aggregate (again from Luminate). This is a sad commentary on the music business in the 21st century—which is mostly a retread from the 20th century. Like a Vegas lounge singer, everybody is living off their old hits.

How do you fix this?

The answer is obvious. The music business needs to return to its original mission of finding artists with inspiring talent and fresh perspectives. It has to abandon the stagnant world of conformity and predictable recipes. It must take some risks.

Maybe the best place to start would be ditching the four-chord song.

Nothing contributes more to the stagnation of current hit radio than the abandonment of song form, and its replacement with repeating four-chord vamps. This approach to composition imposes deadening constraints—making it almost impossible for songwriters to develop material, and provide the surprises and contrasts essential to their craft.

If you look at this trendline (provided by culture analytics guru Chris Dalla Riva) you see that the audience’s turn to old music coincides with the rise of the four-chord song. The decades that are most popular right now are those with the most chords.

It’s hard to escape the obvious conclusion: By killing song form, the music industry destroyed its own future.

But, instead of fixing this problem, the industry has made it worse. I’ve long assumed that the four-chord blight is mostly restricted to pop, electronica, and other highly processed genres of music, but I’m now hearing it in almost every idiom. Even country music—long viewed as the last holdout for song form—is now relying heavily on vamps.

Spend some time with country star Morgan Wallen’s music, for example, and see how deeply this endless vamp approach has impacted the Nashville scene.

Here’s a breakdown of the prevalence of four-chord songs by genre (again courtesy of Chris Dalla Riva).

Don’t get me wrong. Not every four-chord song is boring—as this humorous medley makes clear.

If you’re clever, you can do a lot with just four chords—via dynamics, beats, texture, or (as a last resort) shifting to a different four-chord pattern. Taylor Swift’s work offers many examples of how to achieve this variety in the midst of sameness. She represents today’s four-chord aesthetic at its peak.

But, in the final analysis, there are limits to what producers can do with such a narrow formula. After so many years, it’s only natural that it should reach a point of exhaustion—much like other styles have in earlier days. There’s a reason why audiences abandoned the madrigal, the Viennese waltz, and other once dominant styles. After too much of the same thing, they decide to move on.

“My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later.”

That time has now come for the four-chord song. The only thing preventing the rise of something fresh and new is the inertia and bureaucracy of the music business. But they really don’t have a choice. If they keep on serving up the same formula, the audience will abandon them—as the numbers above make clear, that’s already happening.

Still there’s a good side to this story. A return to more sophisticated song forms could revitalize the commercial music scene. That’s happened before—and will inevitably happen again.

Commercial music became increasingly sophisticated during the 1920s (as the leading songwriters assimilated jazz and blues), and record sales skyrocketed. The same thing happened during the course of the 1960s, when many new styles and sounds were embraced. There’s no reason why we can’t enjoy a renaissance of this same sort in our own time.

My hunch is that a breakout superstar with a genius-level talent for songwriting will force a change, and probably sooner than later. If I worked in the music business, my goal would be to discover that artist. Leading a revolution of this sort has to be a lot more fun—and profitable!—than just putting out more four-chord songs.

And if it doesn’t happen, we will be stuck with “Stairway to Heaven” for another fifty years. Please, anything but that!