Songs became shorter, melodies became less melodic and Latin music exploded. Here's why.
This is an interesting long read. The Calvin-related part shows up immediately:
1) The anti-chorus The decade had its fair share of memorable hooks, from Pharrell's Happy to Sia's Chandelier - but choruses suffered an identity crisis during the decade.
Take, for example, Katy Perry's Dark Horse. The bridge builds and builds in anticipation of a climax (Perry even sings "are you ready for a perfect storm?") but when you get to the bit where the chorus should be, the song disappears down a black hole and you're left with a spooky synth riff over a pounding bass drum.
"This was one of the most surprising insights we found when researching the podcast and writing the book," says Sloan. "Since the 1960s, it's been a tenet of popular music that all songs follow the verse-chorus format, but the last decade has seen a real shift away from the dominance of the chorus."
In their book, Sloan and Harding trace this phenomenon back to Rihanna and Calvin Harris's We Found Love. Released in 2011, the song initially behaves like any other pop song, with a verse-chorus structure that culminates in Rihanna singing the hook, "we found love in a hopeless place," four times.
But then Harris does something unexpected: Instead of circling back to the second verse, the tension ratchets up like a rollercoaster climbing to its apex.
As a synth rises in pitch and snare drums clatter, the excitement builds until, at 1'08", there's an almighty crash and the song's elements unite around a single, fist-pumping groove. And it's this section, more than Rihanna's hook, that represents the energetic peak of the song.
This technique - the build and drop - was borrowed from dance music but compressed to fit the pop format, prompting Sloan and Harding to christen it "pop drop".
"What's fascinating about the pop drop is it helped introduce people's ears to a new song form," says Harding. "It made listeners more comfortable with hearing things that don't fit into the dominant structure of the past 75 years."
And so we end up with songs like Dark Horse, or Ariana Grande's Problem, or the Chainsmokers' Closer, where the chorus is no longer the focal-point of the song.
"To me, that's the most exciting development of the last 10 years - the disintegration of the chorus and the slate of possibilities that will open up for artists in the future," says Sloan.
"It's very hard to do something like that," chips in Harding. "Think about drama, for example - it's difficult to have a play that doesn't have three acts, because form is often the thing that gives us comfort.
"So even though the pop drop itself might be more of a mid-2010s phenomenon, it's very important in terms of how it disrupted the standards."
