What can songwriters learn from a history of pop music?
Here I've distilled notes of potential use to songwriters gleaned from Bob Stanley’s Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé.
For more inspiration, check out this Spotify Playlist with a selection of songs referred to in Stanley’s monumental, rich, and engaging book.
Pop’s Golden Rules
Pop’s Problems
Case Studies
Key concepts: curious combinations, absence of rules, anti-boredom, speed, disposability, anti-cliché, youthfulness, simplicity, relevance, blatantness, urgency, uplifting, attitude.
The interdependence of living musical forms is essential for great pop. (546)
Modern pop thrives on curious combinations. (68)
The first wave of rock’n’roll had absolutely no rules about who sang, how they sang, how they were recorded, or how the record was distributed. It was anarchy, the boulder in the middle of the lake, and nothing was quite the same, or quite as new, or quite as free, ever again. (32)
The [first-wave] rock’n’roll aesthetic was anti-boredom. (1)
[First-wave] rock’nroll was fast-moving, fun, disposable, and defiantly youthful, no time for cliche. (1)
Modern pop is essentially urban. (68)
“I like the blatantness of pop, the speed, the urgency.” – Kit Lambert (153)
From moment to moment, what it is that constitutes pop shifts and changes; it’s always contradictory. (186)
The secret to writing number one hits, according to Marc Bolan, is energy. (239)
Chubby and Cameo Parkway had followed one of pop’s golden rules–make it as simple as possible. (252)
So what made Abba so big? Nobody had ever worked harder, that’s all. […] Bjorn and Benny have confessed that they wrote twelve songs a year, sweated over them, and released them all. (282)
“In the future, art will be the overturning of situations or it will be nothing.” [quoting Guy Debord] (319)
“In pop, plagiarism doesn’t matter: what does is being on the ball.” [Quoting Gary Numan]
“Pop promised the never-ending now … for those three minutes you were lifted up into a higher place of living.” [Quoting Bruce Springsteen] (406)
[Michael Stipe] understood a profound pop truth: “I doubt very few people in the world can tell you all the words to, say, ‘Tumbling Dice’ by the Stones. It probably holds a lot more meaning to make up your own words, and to make up your own meanings about what the words are saying.’” (441)
[KLF’s Bill Drummond] wrote The Manual. It purported to be a guide on how to create a number-one hit. Its rules included using the latest dance beat, a direct title, and universal lyrics. (482)
“Rock’n’roll [is] the projection of attitude, not the deliverance of sound. Attitude! Rap acts have that attitude, that character, that rock bands used to get across to the public. [Quoting Public Enemy’s Chuck D] (497)
The beauty of [first-wave] rock’n’roll [circa 1955] was not just its newness but its gleeful awareness of its newness. (1)
Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper and “MacArthur Park” should have been instruction manuals for the early seventies, but largely the lessons were junked. (187)
1975: pop’s most fallow year. (379)
Indie’s mid-eighties myopia–its self-regard, its inability to absorb any influence beyond the few flavours endlessly rewritten in almost identical fanzines–was a catastrophe. (439)
[By 1985] the British Public had lost its appetite for invention and change. (443)
Intelligent drum and bass […] shoehorned in jazz moves and, as jazz moves are won’t to do, sucked all the fun out of [drum and bass]. (491)
[By 2000, rock] had become as fossilized and ancient as Dixieland jazz was in 1952. It had run its course. […] it had no sense of progress. Simon Reynolds compared [rock] to a blank sheet of paper that had been gradually coloured in since the fifties until, by the early nineties, there were virtually no white spaces left. (550)
Key concepts: adrenaline rush, drawing on the best, energy, joy, passion, naiveté, sensuality, exuberance, improving on reality, focus, emotional landmines, beauty, sex, redemption, rescue, emotional heft, melancholy, soundbytes, hooks, restlessness.
There are few intros in the pop canon that can give you an adrenaline shot within a second–literally–of them starting up, intros that are guaranteed to cause a sharp intake of breath and a dash to the dance floor. (7) Some examples: “A Hard Day’s Night” (Beatles), “Metal Guru” (T. Rex), “Da Do Ron Ron” (the Crystals), “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Cindi Lauper), and “Rock Around the Clock (Bill Haley).
[Elvis Presley] invented himself, a true modernist, drawing on the best of everything that surrounded him and making it new. (9)
[With Little Richard] there were virtually no tunes […] it was all energy. (23)
[Chuck Berry’s] singles are among the most joyous in all pop. (24)
Doo-wop is passionate and joyous, naive too, and has a sensuality missing from other rock’n’roll subgenres (almost all aggressively sexual), which would have a lasting influence on pop. (43-44)
Few records make you feel more alive than “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” (45)
[Phil] Spector condensed pop to romance and sex, crushes and breakups, love and pride. For many people who bought his records, he gave the subject matter the backdrop it deserved: this was the stuff of life itself. The sound was all-consuming, left no room for anything else in your head, and tore at your heart with tympani and an exuberant rush of noise; it was labeled the Wall of Sound. (61-62)
[Joe] Meek and [Phil] Spector weren’t trying to deal with reality, they were trying to improve on it. (64)
You would die happy if, just once, someone sang “Hello Stranger” (Barbara Lewis) directly to you. (108)
[Baritone Marvin Junior of the Dells singing on “Love is Blue”] sounded like he’d been asked to encapsulate the sum of human suffering inside thirty seconds. (111)
[”Where Did Our Love Go” pared] the Motown sound down to its axles, nuts, and bolts. It was so minimal that the tune barely existed, just a mantra of misery. (135)
Holland/Dozier/Holland laced their more simplistic lyrics with emotional landmines, lines that could make you catch your breath and twist your heart. The Four Tops hit, “Baby I Need Your Loving” is littered with them […] the catch is that each verse has an unexpected extra line, a ninth bar that sneaks in just as your expecting the chorus. (136)
In a way [the Four Tops’ “Reach Out and I’ll Be There” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”] are the ultimate number ones. Both records condense so much, deftly mixing so many genres and new sounds inside three minutes, that you can only marvel at how it must have felt to hear them on the radio for the first time. (142)
[“Good Vibrations” was] modern pop’s first multi-movement single, the first suggestion that it was bursting out of its skin and its ideas and ambitions couldn’t be contained on a seven-inch single. (143)
[“Good Vibrations” is] the pinnacle of sixties pop. (143)
The Beach Boys’ music [is] the most emotionally satisfying in the whole modern pop canon. (161)
It is impossible to exaggerate how beautiful this song is. (”God Only Knows”, Beach Boys) (162)
“Deep soul often seems to me to be one of life’s true blessings, a tonic for the heart, so powerful and honest that it can redeem and rescue.” – Dave Godin (191)
Dorothy Moore’s extraordinarily moving, subtly devastating “Misty Blue” […] has some of the best phrasing of any pop single: “Listen to me, sweet baby,” she implores, and you’re caught up in her story, you can’t do anything else. (193)
Deep soul […] provided a fistful of 45s, which are the first you should reach for to solve arguments with classical or jazz buffs about the emotional heft of pop music. A list of these songs is provided on page 193.]
Buoyed by valley-bottom handclaps and a razor-sharp, dissonant guitar hook, [Fresh Air’s “Running Wild”] […] has a proto-punk snottiness that much of the year [1969] sorely missed. (198)
“Sugar, Sugar” is one of pop’s most beautifully constructed singles. (209)
Philadelphia soul is the fulcrum of modern pop. (250)
[Philadelphia soul was] hooked on melancholy. (251)
The most beautiful line in the whole of the pop canon: “I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time” [Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”] (289)
Why didn’t [acid folk records] sell? Because these records embarrassed the paying customers with too many personal failures, rambunctious emotions, lost moments, and memories that were far too vivid. The trauma of the rich and famous [e.g., Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters] are so much more interesting than our own. (297)
The simplest, fiercest guitar solo of the decade, cleanly volcanic…. [Del Shannon’s “Running Wild”] (298)
[Folk-pop band] America kept everything clean and sunny and effortless and, for this most pop of reasons, they racked up six top 10 hits by 1975. (301)
You can actually hear a tear in the space-time continuum. [on Velvet Underground’s “I Heard Her Call My Name”] (310)
Northern soul was all about obscurity, one-upmanship, the subtle, the impenetrable. (313)
[Dr. Feelgood’s] brief burst of success in ‘75 and ‘76 suggested people really, really wanted to hear something a little more energetic than Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, something more immediate, a little more violent. (315)
“Anarchy in the UK” had some of the best lyrics in pop–almost every line’s a soundbite (”Your future dream is a shopping scheme” being the most insightful). (322)
Some days I think “Public Image” [by Public Image Ltd.] is the most powerful record ever made. (324)
[The Bee Gees] wrote a dozen of the finest songs of the twentieth century. (355)
[Joy Division] were modern pop viewed through night-vision goggles–grainy and murky. (359)
[Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures] had been monochrome, restless, investigating new spaces. By contrast, Closer was as black and dense as oil. (360-1)
[Joy Division] made you want to form a group, or write something, but not necessarily something that read or sounded like Joy Division. (365)
Kraftwerk were the biggest rupture in pop since 1955. In 1975, “Autobahn” delicately made everything else look try-hard or plain dull. (378)
[Sylvia Robinson’s “Love is Strange” is] one of rock’n’roll’s sexiest records. (387)
[Human League’s Dare was an album] with hooks like steel traps. (394)
The Smiths’ touchstones were the Velvet Underground, the Shangri-Las, and British kitchen-sink cinema–they wore their bedsit bookishness on their sleeves. […] Morrissey was the best lyricist British pop had ever produced. (437)
The confusion [Raze’s “Jack the Groove”] caused among the rockets media was fabulous–where was the ideology? Call this a revolution? It’s just ear candy. It was, instead, raw electricity. (463)
Techno was developed in bedrooms by loners, whereas house was inspired directly be reactions on the dance floor. (464)
[Dee-Lite’s “Groove Is In the Heart” has] probably the catchiest bass line in history. (478)
“Rock’n’roll [is] the projection of attitude, not the deliverance of sound. Attitude! Rap acts have that attitude, that character, that rock bands used to get across to the public. [Quoting Public Enemy’s Chuck D] (497)
[In the future] it will be much harder to create a brand-new form of music. All that a musician needs to do is to rearrange the constituent parts of the modern pop era in a new way that no one has done before…. (551)
