2026 Mix 21: Melodies of varying strength, several pop songs of the year with or without the “six seven” meme, and requisite check-ins on Ibibio Sound Machine, Zuchu, and Uncle Waffles
Don't know if I have a ton of book-length ideas about melody, but I do want to follow a lead from Mark S about shift from bop to modal jazz as a historical precursor
"APT." has a second melodic part (1:43) that to my ears is way stronger than the It's-Only-Love bit, is a repetitive wail where Rosé does her very effective anonymous emoting bit, would be the climax of another song but here acts as break and contrast from that nagging, pounding ah-pəh-tah-pəh-tit, almost like we've stepped into another song as a relief from the pounding of this one; this strong melody then goes right back into the it's-only-love melody without having anything to do with it, which again leads into ah-pəh-tah-pəh-tit in its somewhat-sung variant – it all works very well, better I think than if it hadn't thrown in that second irrelevant but semi-beautiful melody.
I do love "It's Only Love," btw, Lennon-in-pain but this time almost as a throwaway to start the good, burnt-bruising side of the American Rubber Soul.
The melody I finally placed after writing the post and sitting at the piano for a minute was “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” which approaches the second anchor point (the tritone interval) from below instead of from above. Reminds me that Elton John is probably worth more effort to understand at a formal level…
It does feel like they warped the Rosé middle 8 from a tween comedy soundtrack from 2006 (all of it is 2006 coded in different places, but at the time you probably wouldn't have "Summertime Guys" in the same song with "Girlfriend")
I'm going to have to return to this post to see how much of it I can master (I don't really have the chops to do so, but I should try). Seems to me – as I said, I don't have the chops to know if this is right – that K-pop starting 2015 or so, Oh My Girl in particular, began caring much less if the parts of a song matched the other parts either in mood or melody*, so you'd have parts added to parts, this is the chorus, no, *this* is the chorus, and now we're elsewhere, but we just topped and canceled the previous part emotionally, etc.
Blackpink has maybe three or four songs I've cared about in their entire career, and Rosé matched that on one album.
*Obv there were early experiments in discontinuity like that Dsign-SM Girls' Generation "I Got A Boy," but Oh My Girl don't seem like a continuation of that. Nor are Oh My Girl like the Xenomania stuff in Britain (what Xenomania do is throw change-ups that *don't* seem discontinuous, and honestly I listened to Girls Aloud so nonanalytically that I didn't know they were fucking with form until I *read* about it, and only then did I notice the change-ups).
My guess would be as good as yours with K-pop, think the scene is probably too big to reduce to any singe trend but I do wonder if by 2015 K-pop has more of a sense of its own power and starts getting more into topping itself with “events.” I hear lots of plainer song craft at the B- or C-tier level, which is what usually ends up in the newsletter.
I’ve never liked Girls Aloud much,always thought there was something academic about their approach to pop, but it would make sense for something studied to nest together in a way you don’t notice at first. I just shared (and will lead a mix) with a a Strong Melodic Pop song that is like an instruction manual in its simplicity but doesn’t sound like someone is interested in instruction manuals (which is the vibe I get with GA) — that’s Debbii Dawson’s “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?”
The other possibility is that K-pop follows the trends I was thinking about in my category of the “pop mirage,” where the norms in songwriting really splinter into totally separate melody writing processes for different parts of the song. New Jeans was exciting because there was something more unified about what they were doing — similar to the 20s move back to small singer songwriter teams with Chappell Roan/Olivia Rodrigo/Sabrina Carpenter (or a sui generis genius team like Billie/Finneas)
Back to Rosé, her alb was all over the place, and I don't get her – "anonymous emotional" is what I said above [Wait! It turns out I'm copying you! I see when you reviewed Rosie you referred to the phrase "anonymous confessional" that you'd coined regarding the Veronicas (though Michelle Branch would be the crucial anonymous confessional progenitor in teenpop, I think); I'm also copying Katherine St. Asaph (Jukebox review of "Toxic Till The End"), "Rosé makes .500 pop goddammit. Salt of the earth, punch the clock, even win/loss ratio pop music. She whiffs a couple, guess what? She’ll slay a couple, too. But don’t get too excited or let it go to your head."] – "Too Bad For Us" and "Stay A Little Longer" seem crucial; I could imagine either of them as a balladic-sentimental-emotional change-of-pace on what's otherwise a rock album (say Green Day) or an r&b album or a neo-disco album or who knows what, versatile with no particular character except that those two songs are very good pieces of music, and have nothing to do with K-pop. I tried to place their sound in my own listening history – Seventies? – Ronstadt? – Are they in any of your categories (which I've yet to master)? Obv if I were serious I'd note the songwriters and search their oeuvres; Sarah Aarons is credited on a six-songwriter confabulation that also has "stay" in the title, a boring Zedd- Alessia Cara hit that's racked up half a billion views on YouTube.
One reason I wrote about the Rosé album was because I couldn’t place it in a broader context — like Taylor Swift, Rosé can do weak or strong melody with the same muscularity, which is something I also associate with 70s soft rock but don’t know if I’d pin to a specific style or artist. It’s also very true of Stevie Nicks, who is kind of the force behind one of my categories, and seems to approach melody in a similar way to Taylor Swift, in samey rhythmic clumps. But neither artist sounds much like Stevie Nicks and the people on the charts who sound like Stevie have more watery and tentative songs
Thanks for the heads-up on new ISM (um, Ibibio Sound Machine)! Might you have a book marinating?
Don't know if I have a ton of book-length ideas about melody, but I do want to follow a lead from Mark S about shift from bop to modal jazz as a historical precursor
"APT." has a second melodic part (1:43) that to my ears is way stronger than the It's-Only-Love bit, is a repetitive wail where Rosé does her very effective anonymous emoting bit, would be the climax of another song but here acts as break and contrast from that nagging, pounding ah-pəh-tah-pəh-tit, almost like we've stepped into another song as a relief from the pounding of this one; this strong melody then goes right back into the it's-only-love melody without having anything to do with it, which again leads into ah-pəh-tah-pəh-tit in its somewhat-sung variant – it all works very well, better I think than if it hadn't thrown in that second irrelevant but semi-beautiful melody.
I do love "It's Only Love," btw, Lennon-in-pain but this time almost as a throwaway to start the good, burnt-bruising side of the American Rubber Soul.
The melody I finally placed after writing the post and sitting at the piano for a minute was “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” which approaches the second anchor point (the tritone interval) from below instead of from above. Reminds me that Elton John is probably worth more effort to understand at a formal level…
It does feel like they warped the Rosé middle 8 from a tween comedy soundtrack from 2006 (all of it is 2006 coded in different places, but at the time you probably wouldn't have "Summertime Guys" in the same song with "Girlfriend")
I'm going to have to return to this post to see how much of it I can master (I don't really have the chops to do so, but I should try). Seems to me – as I said, I don't have the chops to know if this is right – that K-pop starting 2015 or so, Oh My Girl in particular, began caring much less if the parts of a song matched the other parts either in mood or melody*, so you'd have parts added to parts, this is the chorus, no, *this* is the chorus, and now we're elsewhere, but we just topped and canceled the previous part emotionally, etc.
Blackpink has maybe three or four songs I've cared about in their entire career, and Rosé matched that on one album.
*Obv there were early experiments in discontinuity like that Dsign-SM Girls' Generation "I Got A Boy," but Oh My Girl don't seem like a continuation of that. Nor are Oh My Girl like the Xenomania stuff in Britain (what Xenomania do is throw change-ups that *don't* seem discontinuous, and honestly I listened to Girls Aloud so nonanalytically that I didn't know they were fucking with form until I *read* about it, and only then did I notice the change-ups).
My guess would be as good as yours with K-pop, think the scene is probably too big to reduce to any singe trend but I do wonder if by 2015 K-pop has more of a sense of its own power and starts getting more into topping itself with “events.” I hear lots of plainer song craft at the B- or C-tier level, which is what usually ends up in the newsletter.
I’ve never liked Girls Aloud much,always thought there was something academic about their approach to pop, but it would make sense for something studied to nest together in a way you don’t notice at first. I just shared (and will lead a mix) with a a Strong Melodic Pop song that is like an instruction manual in its simplicity but doesn’t sound like someone is interested in instruction manuals (which is the vibe I get with GA) — that’s Debbii Dawson’s “Where Have All the Good Men Gone?”
The other possibility is that K-pop follows the trends I was thinking about in my category of the “pop mirage,” where the norms in songwriting really splinter into totally separate melody writing processes for different parts of the song. New Jeans was exciting because there was something more unified about what they were doing — similar to the 20s move back to small singer songwriter teams with Chappell Roan/Olivia Rodrigo/Sabrina Carpenter (or a sui generis genius team like Billie/Finneas)
Back to Rosé, her alb was all over the place, and I don't get her – "anonymous emotional" is what I said above [Wait! It turns out I'm copying you! I see when you reviewed Rosie you referred to the phrase "anonymous confessional" that you'd coined regarding the Veronicas (though Michelle Branch would be the crucial anonymous confessional progenitor in teenpop, I think); I'm also copying Katherine St. Asaph (Jukebox review of "Toxic Till The End"), "Rosé makes .500 pop goddammit. Salt of the earth, punch the clock, even win/loss ratio pop music. She whiffs a couple, guess what? She’ll slay a couple, too. But don’t get too excited or let it go to your head."] – "Too Bad For Us" and "Stay A Little Longer" seem crucial; I could imagine either of them as a balladic-sentimental-emotional change-of-pace on what's otherwise a rock album (say Green Day) or an r&b album or a neo-disco album or who knows what, versatile with no particular character except that those two songs are very good pieces of music, and have nothing to do with K-pop. I tried to place their sound in my own listening history – Seventies? – Ronstadt? – Are they in any of your categories (which I've yet to master)? Obv if I were serious I'd note the songwriters and search their oeuvres; Sarah Aarons is credited on a six-songwriter confabulation that also has "stay" in the title, a boring Zedd- Alessia Cara hit that's racked up half a billion views on YouTube.
One reason I wrote about the Rosé album was because I couldn’t place it in a broader context — like Taylor Swift, Rosé can do weak or strong melody with the same muscularity, which is something I also associate with 70s soft rock but don’t know if I’d pin to a specific style or artist. It’s also very true of Stevie Nicks, who is kind of the force behind one of my categories, and seems to approach melody in a similar way to Taylor Swift, in samey rhythmic clumps. But neither artist sounds much like Stevie Nicks and the people on the charts who sound like Stevie have more watery and tentative songs