If you listen to pop music (and probably even if you don’t) you’ve heard what Daniel Barrow calls “the soar”: that now near-requisite moment of tension-escalating buildup that culminates in the euphoric entrance into the energy-packed chorus.

Barrow doesn’t like it. For him, the soar represents what’s wrong with our money-obsessed, low-attention-span-having people and the culture industry that panders to us. To him, the soar is a “crude, overdetermined excess,” that comes, in part, as a result of “a need to give the listener the pay-off, the sonic money-shot, as soon and as obviously as possible.” Why? Because of changes in the music industry, which is “struggling more than ever to make money off a pop economy made up of YouTube views and Spotify plays rather than singles sales.” And, in general, when things are sucking more than usual (wars, economic and environmental crises, increasing social isolation and misery in the face of growing inequality, and so on) it makes sense that we are “confronted with a need for reassurance, a redoubled demand for pop to fulfill its function of serving our desires, in the crudest and most direct way possible.” In short, the soar provides the immediacy, predictability, and certainty that we like (and aren’t getting much of any place else). It’s also how we know we’re supposed to start dancing, like, really hard.

Whether you’re a fan of the soar or not, Barrow’s exploration of pop music’s relationship to economic and cultural demands is good for our brains, and is the kind of thing we could use more of right about now.

It’s been over a year since Barrow’s piece appeared at The Quietus, and there’s a new trend (fad/noise/thing?) on the block in pop music: a sibilant, machine-like, static white-noise. It’s kind of like the sound of carbonation escaping when you screw off a two-liter’s cap, only sometimes longer. Since these things are supposed have names, let’s call it “the fizz.” On modern synthesizers it’s called a white-noise or a pink-noise. And producers sure are using it a bunch lately. You can find it — most often right after a proud, high-flying soar — in J-Lo’s new song, “Goin’ In,” Pitbull’s “Took My Love,” Rihanna’s “Where Have You Been,” Jason Derulo’s “Breathing,” Madonna’s “Girl Gone Wild,” and so many other songs it’s hard to keep track.

If the soar implies a rising and a slow build-up of pressure, then the fizz signals a hydraulic-sounding lowering, like steam hissing as it escapes from a release-valve. It is plain, flat, unwavering, and fades into the background just as suddenly as it appears. If the soar takes us up to a certain point (like a roller-coaster), the fizz is the scream-like release of air that happens as we’re on our way back down.

So, it seems the soar is here to stay, and the fizz is happy to accompany it (at least for now). But the economic and cultural explanations that Barrow provides for soar’s high-profile presence don’t apply quite as much to the fizz. For one, the fizz is not a structural difference in composition the same way the soar is, but it does seem to fit as the soar’s natural counterpart, a logical outgrowth of the soar that seeks to prolong its effects.

But the fizz is more than the soar’s new appendage — it recognizes and promotes a connection between music and the physical environment (I’ll explain) and is utterly honest about machine-like qualities that drive pop music’s production both literally (there are no real instruments here) and conceptually (where music is seen only as a product to be sold for profit).

When I played some songs featuring the fizz for a friend, he observed, “it makes it sound like you’re in a club.” And he’s right. These songs are made to be danced to, and what’s a good dance floor without hissing fog-machines to cool off your sweaty body and bring the laser beams into focus? In other words, the fizz comes as a response to the physical environments of dance clubs (where the external noises of fog machines, not to mention the roar of the voices of others, are just as much a part of the reality as the music). It attempts to make listeners feel like they’re on the dance floor even when they’re not, which is, you know, most of the time. The social experience of dancing with others on a big dance floor is, however partially, replicated for you while you’re alone at home doing whatever it is you do. It’s kind of like having real “movie theater butter” in a bag of microwave popcorn while you watch TV at home, alone — just one of many attempts by marketers to take the social experience and replicate it, artificially, at the individual level. While it may be disheartening to see social activities being dissected, taken out of context, and re-designed for individual consumption, there’s something cool about art that’s influenced so directly by physical reality.

The fizz also draws attention to pop music’s increasingly artificial nature — where traditional instruments are nowhere to be found and vocals are digitally manipulated and dissected sometimes into shocking obscurity. The fizz is honest about being the product of a machine, and so it draws attention to the entire mechanical nature of pop music, from the way it sounds to the way it’s produced, marketed, and consumed.

When forces outside our influence control so many aspects of our daily lives, it’s nice to think that pop music might be, however unintentionally, sympathizing with us, showing us that it too is aware of the automation and the machinery of the culture industry. Sometimes, it even makes us want to dance, and that can be a lot of fun.

 


 
 
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