Rick
Beato: The Internet’s College Freshman Music Major Dorm Room Buddy
And here we are again.
A few years ago, I mangled an
article that used big, scientific words like “processing fluency” to try and
explain the repetition baked into pop music.
What I took away from the article was a light sense of dismissiveness,
an implication that lyrical repetition was some kind of golf score to determine
the value of pop music (and let me tell you: pop music nowadays seems to be
racking up quite a few bogeys). The
author’s pretentious tone was rather subtle, only popping out in key splashes
of vocabulary on the page (see the italics, which are mine):
“…researchers
at the University of Southern California have discovered that a song’s popularity
is tied to the simplicity of the
lyrics and how often they are repeated, exposing the brain’s weakness for plainness.”
“The
researchers did not find a number in which repetition was deemed annoying.”
“Even
the Beatles couldn’t resist: In George
Harrison’s 1987 solo hit “Got My Mind Set on You,” he repeats the words “set on you” 20 times…”
(Article: “Why do you keep hearing ‘Shut Up and Dance’
everywhere you go? Here’s the scientific
answer.”)
A scientific reduction of pop
music is a dangerous approach, one that demonstrates a complete lack of
understanding for the musical elements that should be used to value pop
music. And despite my brazen crusade to engage
with the author (I sent the author a nastygram, only to get a curt email back essentially
saying: what’s your deal bro?), here I am attempting to dismantle another
faulty analysis of pop music. This time,
though, I am taking on someone who has a pretty solid idea of what they are
talking about: a professional musician.
(Video: “The Pop
Music/Junk Food Connection” by Rick Beato)
I am spending way too much of my
free time writing a response to this video for two main reasons. One, Rick Beato is quite an influencer on
YouTube. At the time of this writing he
has 810k subscribers. I was directed towards
his content from another popular YouTuber: Adam Neely. I always find Neely’s perspectives on music
researched, insightful, reflective, just a slight tilt or tinge away from my
own. It makes it that much more
disappointing to me that other Neely fans are being funneled towards Beato’s
content, which I find to be breeding a brand that is taste driven and elitist
(especially towards modern pop music). Two,
Beato’s ability to do musical analysis is very acute. If you watch the video up until the 7:54
mark, it is a wonderful ode to why a pop song can actually be a well crafted
little crystal, sanded and molded with hidden complexities and nuanced choices
by a large, collaborative team of music producers. But then, at the last second Beato locks into
a nosedive and explains away his entire musical analysis with a thin, alarmist
analogy equating catchy music to junk food.
What a missed opportunity!
*
Let’s start with
Beato’s musical analysis, which again I think is rich and nuanced. He begins by pointing out Mabel’s suspensions
in her melody, noting the way the dissonances create a lovely sense of
tension. He will later go on to dismiss
this as just another catchy melody, but why not sit in this idea of suspensions
for a while? Perhaps extrapolate
outwards and make some far flung connections to what these suspensions add to
the meaning of the song? Of course we
can’t ever assume an abstraction like a musical suspension is tied to a
specific emotional meaning (this is the ambiguity that adds to music’s
sublimity), but why not be like every other over eager music critic and go for
it anyway? Mabel is doing this for a
conscious reason and we should try and take a swing at why, but Beato seems
intent on talking about it only to expose it later as a manipulative trick
instead of a genuine musical element.
Later on at 3:18
in the video, he lasers in on that interval of a D-G# tritone. I really love this. If he wouldn’t have pointed it out my ear
might have only passively picked that up, but now I am just as obsessed with it
as Beato is! And isn’t that what great
theoretical analysis should do? Reveal
these invisible complexities that we hear but don’t quite have the vocabulary
to pinpoint?
Beato goes on to
note “the sophistication is in the arrangement and the melodic hooks,” as well
as noting the sophistication of “when things are removed and things are
added.” This is all great! It is recognition of the criteria for what
makes pop music tick, outlining a value system that can be utilized to explain
how a pop song plays with these musical elements to subvert our expectations.
Beato also briefly
touches on the song’s excellent mix, a magical property that allows a song to
simultaneously sound good on tinny iPhone speakers and booming car
speakers. My reverence for the skilled
producers that have a talent for creating this kind of crisp, clear mix is very
high; I myself have tried for years to crack this skill and I still cannot
point to one mix of my electronic musical compositions that I would deem
satisfying. Beato further acknowledges
that even the average listener will subconsciously notice these details. The self diagnosed “tone deaf” people in the
world who dismiss their knowledge of music just because they never took a piano
lesson in their life know much more than they think they know, and here Beato
is making the case for them by pointing out simple (but subtle) things in the
music anyone can notice. This is empowering!
*
But then, Beato
turns. He explains there are so many
producers needed for a pop song nowadays “because it takes a team of scientists
to come up with the right formula to addict the masses.” I have to applaud him for using
conspiratorial logic to effectively convince us of some insidious agenda for
popular music, but I don’t find this to be true in any way. More producers
confirm the fact that music making is and always has been its most successful
when it is a collaborative art. Any
statement otherwise encourages the myth of the solitary genius, an idea that
still holds on with all of its might through the still celebrated canon of male
classical composers. As for the
addiction concept, I will handle that later.
Then he starts
slamming the technology. He points out
that Mabel’s voice is auto tuned even though she is a good singer. Beato is falling into a common trap: that
auto tune is a crutch for pitch-averse singers instead of being a tool to help
shape an aesthetic choice. How many
times do I have to share that damn video of T-Pain absolutely crushing it on
that acoustic NPR Tiny Desk Concert performance for people to realize this (if
you haven’t seen this, look it up now)?
Can’t Mabel auto tune her voice as an aesthetic choice if her and her
producers want to? And if you think it
is overused and don’t like it, can’t you just find some other music to listen
to? Beato also points out that all of
the instruments are synthetic, paired with a written caption that says “which I
have no problem with.” I don’t buy his
caveat given that a dismissiveness of electronic instruments is in line with
the rest of his message.
And then he
attacks the quantized grid, a topic he bashed in an earlier video (“How
Computers Ruined Rock Music”) where he picked some truly bottom of the barrel
examples of pop music (Nickelback being one) to make his point. He refers to Mabel’s music as being “assembled”
on a quantized grid, with the word “assembled” obviously taking on a
problematic, negative tone instead of a word like “arranged” that would confer
more skill on the part of the producers.
In reality, he is again illustrating one of the great things we should
value in pop music: the arrangement of layers and textures, a point he himself
made earlier (“When things are removed and things are added”).
There is plenty
of great music I listen to that is “assembled” on a quantized grid, but I have
the choice to listen to something with a live, organic groove if I want to (or…if
you want the best of both worlds…there is always J Dilla…). Auto tuned and quantized music is an
aesthetic taste thing, not a thing that is inherently laced with the qualifiers
of “good music” and “bad music.” Once we set aside these qualifiers, that’s
when the real conversation can begin. Are
Mabel’s producers more effective than Ariana Grande’s producers in the way they
shift layers around on the quantized grid?
Is Cher’s musical use of auto tune better than Kanye’s? Let’s have those discussions, or if this
music isn’t your aesthetic taste just admit it and move on.
*
This is where
Beato moves in for the kill. He flexes
his pop music/junk food analogy by asserting “in order to keep people’s attention
you have to have rapid fire hooks, register changes, repetitive rhythms, [and]
explicit language.” What is funny is
that you could take this string of descriptors, send them back in time, and have
them fit neatly with what the critics would have been whining about with [insert
music genre that high brow culture initially hated here].
Anyways, he
continues by noting “pop music today is junk food because of the incredibly
simple, diatonic (meaning it doesn’t change key) chord progression [and the] really
simplistic melody.” This is the exact
moment where he conflates two different value systems, slipping out of his very
keen ability to analyze pop music (where the importance is placed on things
like timbre and layers/texture) and reverting to a privileged notion of how we
value music based on criteria found in the Western canon (harmony, melodic
complexity, formal structure). Beato’s mindset
is one of a precocious college freshman music major. He embodies a pretentious logic that feels
satisfying to use as a bashing stick, but incorrectly critiques one kind of
music through a value system meant for another.
I remember being
this scrappy person: surrounded in a cocoon of futons, mini fridges, and $10
Tarantino posters, attempting to explain to my friends why smooth jazz was
inferior to all other forms of jazz music.
What was lacking for me then, and what I think is lacking for me in
Beato’s video, is a lack of context for the function of Mabel’s music. At 2:20, Beato executes one valid way we
should enjoy Mabel’s music that he doesn’t actively bring attention to: he
dances to it (even old white dudes can’t resist the reggaeton). But of course, music history has always had a
severe problem reconciling the intellectual worth of music you can shake your
booty to. Music can’t just be good for
dancing! Bah! The blasphemy!
As if this
wasn’t enough, at the 8:18 mark Beato sinks to what I think is his absolute low
point in the video. This is where he really
cements his college music major-iness with the king of all references: that Snarky
Puppy Cory Henry solo! This video was a
hair past my college years, but I can imagine the number of times a college
party full of music majors was probably brought to a halt with “hey guys, sit
down for 10 minutes and watch this!” The
use of this video clip is pretentious, a way for Beato to impose his aesthetic
taste on the viewer under the disguise of objective criteria. Is Snarky Puppy better than Mabel because
they use more chords? Again, the fatal
error here is that Mabel’s music functions differently than Snarky Puppy’s
music and shouldn’t be judged on the same value systems. If a DJ dropped that far out Cory Henry keyboard
solo in a club, the dance floor would scatter.
*
Ironically, I
think Beato and I have the same objective here: we both want people to have
balanced listening habits and develop a more omnivorous appreciation for
music. But why should we care if people are
listening to pop music? To me, it simply
isn’t harmful. Moreover, people who listen
to pop music are music lovers too. Why
are we pegging their tastes as the enemy?
Music that is
challenging, complex, thorny, and dense often requires a guide. It is certainly possible for a diverse
musical pallet to flourish through self guidance, but it was certainly not my
experience. My own expansive musical
diet was nurtured in the four walls of a classroom, the result of amazing
teachers facilitating phenomenal musical experiences for me. If we want to fix people’s lopsided listening
tastes, one answer I have is to teach them.
Give them descriptors for the things they hear in the music that they
already love with the hope that this will ignite a hunger that will carry them
off to other musical territories.
Beato comes
close to achieving this, but then pulls out at the last second and swaps one
value system for another in order to bash an entire genre of music. It is upsetting to think about the damage
done here. Casual listeners of pop music
will certainly feel alienated by a pretentious, elitist professional musician
trying to say what is good for them, but let’s also not forget about the choir
Beato is preaching to. The cadre of fans
who will certainly rally around Beato’s message (look at the comments) are also
denying themselves a meaningful musical experience. Their refusal to tangle with good pop music
makes their musical identity incomplete, and I am sad for that loss. We as professional musicians should continually
work to understand the profound mechanics of why music moves us, and in the
process we should hope to expand the boundaries for the casual listener by
showing them how new musical territories can shock us, transform us, inhabit us
in ways never thought possible.
A final
thought. Beato’s bashing of pop music establishes
an argument that is one sided, but I do not see this as a binary choice between
music that is great to dance to and music with a thicket of chords. Here is a David Byrne quote that I have
repeated too many times to count:
“Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of
music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And
that's fine. I like Rihanna's "Umbrella" and Christina Aguilera's
"Ain't No Other Man." Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you
want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often
seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won't be forced to choose.”
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