The Millennial Whoop Makes Me Want to Weep

Millennials - they kind of rule the word these days, don't they? It's not easy to see why. The fact is they make up a very large part of our population right now. It is said that by 2025, Millennials will account for about 75% of the work force. That's staggering when you think about it. There has never been a generation since the baby boomers that due to mass volume alone have the power to influence the world around them and dictate popular culture as much as the Millennials do...

It's just too bad they have such shit taste in music.

Alright, I digress a bit. Not all Millennials have shit taste in music. And honestly, people in positions of power have realized the mass amount of money Millennials have to spend in our economy and have been trying to tap into that income - including those in the music business.

Okay, I can see you giving me the stink eye. 'Penny,' your thinking, 'what does the economy and marketing towards Millennials have to do with music?'

May I present exhibit A - the Millennial Whoop:

Writer Adam Epstein posted a great article on the website Quartz about the Millennial Whoop, a simple musical phrase that is all over popular music today. In the article by Epstein, musician Patrick Metzger described the mechanics behind the phenomena:

"It's a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different song. A singer usually belts these notes with an 'Oh' phoneme, often in a 'wa-oh-wa-oh' pattern."

So, for those of you who can read music, this is what the Millennial Whoop looks like on paper. Take that simple three, 8th note pattern, mix and repeat.

I know, I'm starting to get a bit technical but bear with me. Music is a medium based on patterns and the combination of notes in specific patters make music. Simple, right? Think of Hot Cross Buns - that simple song every grade school kid learned how to play on a recorder in music class. The song is a simple pattern of three different notes, repeated over in different intervals. This creates a piece of music with, albeit simple, but reoccurring patterns that are, when not being blasted through a recorder by an eight year old, pleasant to the ears of the listener.

I've said it over and over again - music is no longer an Industry, but more of a Business and the goal of any business is to make money. 

There is an episode of Mad Men, which one exactly it is escaping me now, where Don Draper's agency is trying to market a product to teenagers and in trying to do so, creates a very whimsical jingle for the client. The client makes mention to Don that the song seems to have elements of nostalgia, which he doesn't believe would work as young people are unable to feel nostalgia. To this, Don laughs and says 'teenagers can be nostalgic - have you listened to their music?'

As much as the 'me first' generation is always on the lookout for the latest and greatest, deep down inside we all tap into the known, the familiar. We look for something that strikes a chord with us, that triggers familiar paths in our brains. Now, the Millennial Whoop is nothing new - this is a musical phrase that has been used for as long as people have been making music. The difference now is that pop music 'Mad Men' have tapped into this sound, this phrasing and are using it as a way to trigger feelings of familiarity and comfort in something new in order to make a profit. It is, in a way, creating a fake sense of nostalgia that those with money to spend on music are lapping up like crazy right now. 

It's simple, really. In business, when you find something that your target demographic is going ape shit over and throwing money hand over fist at, you would be a complete idiot to not make your business successful and tap into that. That is what's happening with new music - creativity is being replaced with a manufacture Whoop that is funneling money into the business again. Music is being created with a sort of manufactured nostalgia that is giving the me-first generation something to grasp a hold of and give them a feeling of depth, of understanding, of shit man, I've LIVED.

In the long run, it is easy to pay someone to write a piece of music that contains the Millennial Whoop than it is to invest time and money into artist development and produce a piece of music that is in reality, a timeless work of art.

I know, I'm being hard on Millennials. Probably much the same way that Generation X's were hard on my peer group growing up. I was at a concert this week put on by the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, in which the closing piece was a number by Vivaldi. There was no Millennial Whoop here, there was nothing manufactured about this piece of music. Yes, it contains elements that make it recognizable and comparable to music created at the same time, but it also contained something more... It had heart and soul. 

I wonder, in 1000 years, if songs like California Gurls by Katy Perry or Live While We're Young by One Direction or Sing it by Rebecca Black will stand the test of time, or be seen for what they are - products manufactured to a specific demographic and produced to make a lot of people a lot of money...

Pass me The Beatles, please...

Love,

Penny 

xoxo

Has the Random Button Killed the Album?

The world was a very different place in 1979...Sony had just released The Walkman, Michael Jackson released his amazing Off The Wall album, Voyage I photos revealed Jupiter's rings for the first time, the Snowboard was invented, I was born and The Buggles released the now classic track, Video Killed The Radio Star.

We all know the song. Not only was it popular (the track topped sixteen international music charts, including the official singles chart of the groups home country of the UK, and also peaked into the top 10 in Canada and the Top 40 in the United States), but the songs video has the dubious honor of being the very first music video ever played on MTV, airing the moment the station went live at 12:01 am on August 1, 1981.

Of course it was the obvious choice. The song was a anthem for the ever changing landscape of how people accessed music. Gone were the day of hearing your favorite bands on a radio, being blissfully unaware at times of what they looked like. The transistor radio of the late 1950s made it possible to be mobile with your music and now, with the release of the Walkman, not only could you take your music with you but you had the CHOICE in what you wanted to hear.

Perhaps Diane said it best in Trainspotting: "Your not getting any younger, Mark. The world is changing, music is changing, even drugs are changing."

Nothing is stagnant, especially the music industry. In the eleven years I've been involved in radio, I have seen the way we access and listen to music morph and change in ways I never dreamed. The medium sure is the fucking is the message, Mr. McLuhan. From the age of 16 to now I went from buying tapes and vinyl, to switching to CD, then biting my nails in fear that the FBI would come knocking on my door and arrest me for downloading hundreds upon hundreds of MP3s via Limewire and Napster, to using iTunes to purchase said MP3s (and lose some of the guilt) and finally, as of late, streaming all the music I want via Spotify. The medium has shifted and morphed so much in the past twenty years that we would be completely oblivious to think that it did not affect how we experience music, or even to go a step further, how it is created.

Music, despite what people will tell you, always was and always will be a business and any business has the main goal of making money - full stop. And it would be naive to think that with all these changes in how the consumer interacts with the product, that the way artist make music wouldn't have changed too. It has, climaxing hard with the creation of one simple, little concept...

Random.

Love it or curse it, the random button which first came into play with the rise of digital music forever changed the interaction people have with music. Musicians created singles as something that could stand alone - it could be shuffled into a jutebox or easily picked up and spun on the radio. The single was a huge promotional item that many artist lived or died by. It was often on the strength of these singles that fans would decided if they would or would not spend their money on a full length album.

A full length album was something special. It was a carefully crafted piece of art, designed from start to finish with the sole purpose to take the listener along on some incredible musical journey. Everything from flow and tempo and feel was given every consideration when laying out album tracks. Listen to Abbey Road, Days of Future Past, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds if you think I'm wrong. Albums became complete slices of time that only broke for a slight, well thought out pause before you got up and flipped over the record to continue on the second half of the journey.


The mass digitalization of music forever changed that art form. Now, not only could you just select your favorite tracks from an album, but you could pair them up with whatever you wanted, create your own set list. Worst of all, you could now put on Abbey Road and hit that tiny little 'random' button and listen to that album in a way it was never intended. It now gave the consumer the ability to be the creator.

But just because you have a general idea of how a human heart works, doesn't mean you should preform open heart surgery any time soon.

The random button took away what was so amazing about those classic albums - what gave them the moniker 'classic' to begin with. It took songs out of context, it interrupted flow and the build up to your favorite song was forever scratched away due to impatience and the 'I want it now' mentality that is ingrained in so many of us these days.

Soon artists had to work with this simple fact in mind - that their songs needed to be stand alone, individual pieces of art that would survive within and without the context of a complete album. The single, which was the calling card of so many artist in the 1950s and 1960s soon because the be all end all. If you wanted to succeed, you needed to be able to produce a single. Fuck if the album on a whole was good or not..

Maybe that's why I'm so happy about the resurgence of vinyl again. There simply is no random button. It's a rainy August morning here in Winnipeg and I'm typing this at my desk while John Coltrane's Stardust plays against the pattering of the rain on my windows and the flow is...well, it's nothing short of magnificent. I couldn't have picked the wax and wane of the sounds any better, and the reason behind that is simple.

This is not my art. This is Coltrane's art, listened to as Coltrane intended. I am letting John take me on the journey of his choosing. He is painting pictures, he is in control of his own palette and I am along for the ride.

Side one has finished, and it's stopped the music at the point John intended, not me. Now I will get up, flip over the record, and think while the first crackles of needle to vinyl start, about how he knows his art so much better than me, otherwise I would have created it and not him. I respect his musical choices and I do so by letting the album as a whole move me - not by making piecemeal decisions that not only break the integrity of the art, but remove all meaning from it.

Viva la Vinyl...

Penny xx