The New Yorker takes a brief trip through pop songs with soaring choral back-ups, mainly just writing about Sam Smith

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/listening-booth/sam-smiths-sugary-loneliness-and-the-choir-effect

Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of American gospel music, introduced ecstasy to old religious arrangements in escalating, yearning choruses. His creation, the gospel choir, and its essential juxtaposition of eros and propriety, arguably prefigured the invention of pop. The sound of a choir—whether American gospel, classical, or children’s—has a transformative effect on a pop song, imparting solemnity, tumult, flamboyance, or even eeriness to an otherwise basic arrangement. The British particularly like the embellishment—think of Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is,” The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” George Michael’s “Father Figure,” or David Bowie’s “Young Americans.”

The amplification of a singular voice with many robust black-sounding ones began as an American tradition, but for decades has been incorporated into pop songs to convey over-the-top epicness. Madonna solicited a gospel choir, led by Andraé Crouch, for the chorus and riffs on “Like a Prayer.” In the song, the group picks up for more than a minute once Madonna has finished her last run, owning the song’s rapture as a solo singer never could. The inclusion of a booming gospel chorus is by now a pop-music cliché, and yet its subliminal provocation endures; the visual of a white act surrounded by hardworking black singers is enough to make one reach for Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro.” Adele performs in the same formation constantly, but one of my favorite instances is from a video of Nick Jonas, gregariously singing a “gospel version” of “Jealous” at Westfield’s shopping center in London.
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Of a variety of things that seemed underwhelming about Spectre the most resoundingly annoying one for me was the Sam Smith song. Sure, it seemed like the actresses assigned Bond girl duty could be in better films but you can't expect everyone to just mutate a Bond girl role into something two-dimensional the way Eva Green did. 

But the Sam Smith song "The Writing's on the Wall" was a lame Bond song, maybe not as lame as a few numbers I resentfully recall from the Brosnan era but it was annoying in an upper echelon sort of way.

But choral stuff in pop songs has a long history and it might as well be a history that's thought of as going back to opera.  We "could" try to trace the choral back-up of a popular song to black Gospel music in the united States and that's about what I'd expect a New Yorker contributor to do and in an Anglo-American context that's a defensible approach.  Globally, however, this is a trope that just spans the human species. 

More insidious to me is the tendency in film trailers to do unaccompanied choral versions of pop songs, like "Heroes" aka the kid choir take on the David Bowie song, which isn't even really one of Bowie's better numbers.  The song is melodically fairly staic and relies on oblique motion to get its harmonic effects.  If you were going to do a choral version of a Bowie song pick something with a snappier harmonic rhythm and more interesting root movements.  Pick an obvious one like "Major Tom". 

The other memorably lame choral pop song was the take on "Creep" for The Social Network.  I've never liked Radiohead over the last twenty years so I knew I wasn't going to really care for "Creep" in yet a new form but the high-flown childrens' choir version of an already self-pitying-and-not-necessarily-in-a-persuasively-ironic-way pop song is lame.  Choral pop songs in the 21st century seem tailor made to elicit what is hoped to be a Pavlovian response of tears.  Maybe it's because I grew up in a Christian family in the US but you live long enough you hear enough Christian pop music that this is one of those musical tricks that is even less forgivable in pop music of the secular variety than it is in Christian pop.  At least there's, oh, a THOUSAND YEARS of massed voices singing praise to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to make that chorus backing up a cantor make sense.  As an aside, been listening to Haydn's Masses lately.  His masses don't reach the level of Byrd's and the Classic era isn't always ... usually a strong point for choral music ... but Haydn and Mozart at least knew good singable tunes. 

Now I'm thinking of that polemical book by I think it was Thomas Day called Why Catholics Can't Sing, about how the Irish sweet song tradition, so obviously fantastic for solo voice, has completely ruined Anglo-American Catholic musical culture. That's a decades-old book by now but it reminds me of how about 12 years ago there was a bit of a flare up at Mars Hill where the people at large rgistered some complaints about how difficult it was to sing along with a lot of the songs a few of the bands regularly performed.  Tim Smith let the entire church have it for not being willing to go along without any reservations, although some of the musicians who were in the bands that got complained about said they'd look into making stuff that was easier to sing along to. 

Of course that was back when there was a Mars Hill in which such a thing could happen.