Ethan Hein discusses recent claims that pop music (lyrics) have gotten dumbed down

That there are articles claiming music has been getting dumber and simpler at MusicRadar is not in itself news.

https://www.musicradar.com/tutorials/music-theory-songwriting/music-genres-have-undergone-a-noticeable-simplification-a-study-concludes-that-modern-music-is-not-complex-enough-and-its-all-your-fault

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Only jazz and classical music remain on a complexity par with one another and are certainly more intricate than other, newer genres, but even they have both become simpler.

The team concluded that the fact that there are more people making music has to be a contributing factor to the increased simplicity. That's right, the 'more people' being you and us – we're all basically to blame.

"The observed results could partly be attributed to the rise of more homogeneous and less complex genres in recent years," the study said. "However, our analysis indicates that even enduring genres like classical and jazz have undergone a noticeable simplification compared to their origins.

"Our study highlights that the democratisation of the composition process and the advent of new technologies and platforms have fostered the development of genres characterised by reduced complexity relative to earlier eras."

The science behind the fact that music has become less complex is probably more interesting than the fact itself, and it's a shame the team didn't analyse the reasons more. We'd say that the increased use of technology has meant a decreased need for understanding complex music theory, and maybe that has resulted in less complex tunes. 

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There is probably a vast sampling bias afoot that gives me no reason to take the results very seriously.  The history of classical music is full of peaks and valleys and cycles of complexity and simplicity.   The complexities of polychoral polyphonic music by the likes of Tallis was followed by the absolutely threadbare scores of figured bass and recitative in Italian opera and Lutheran liturgical music.  The proverbial high Baroque era gave way to the simplicity of the galant style and that, in term, slowly mutated into the nascent Romantic era.  So I just can't buy any claim that music has been getting simpler as if it were a bad thing.  When paradigms in musical organization reach a saturation point past which hardly anything new can be added, I guess, "then" styles give way and new approaches to conceiving of organized pitch and rhythm across time can get invented or embraced.  From Monteverdi to Art of Fugue was a generations long process.  Mind-bending complexity and schematic simplicity have co-existed in music for a long time. Scores don't always tell you even the half of anything.  You can go look at the musical puzzles in a work like J. S. Bach's Musical Offering and get a sense that just that one single line by itself will not directly tell you how that crab canon is going to go unless you're a well-trained musician who knows how to read that kind of score.  You could look at a musical puzzle where you get one line of written music and you have to know from contrapuntal practice, for instance, that that single line is supposed to be set in canon against itself in two treble voices while it is eventually answered in its own inversion by a bass voice and all this from a single solitary line.

So what about lyrics in pop songs?  Well, Ethan Hein has written a bit on that lately.  Naturally, as I like reading him, I'm sharing his thoughts.

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2025/is-music-getting-dumber/

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/is-pop-music-really-being-dumbed-down-what-the-science-actually-says

If simple lyrics were defined by the use of monosyllabic words then, hey, Peter Gabriel's "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" comes off as super dumb on paper.

But how simple is the song, really?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8xPWyyjmFM

The lyrics can seem downright juvenile in their monosyllabic simplicity and the gnomic referentiality of the lyrics will mean nothing to anyone who has never heard of Milgram's experiment (let alone read rebuttals to and criticisms of the ethics of Milgram in even conducting the experiment). Gabriel's lyrics are really, stupidly simple.  The music even seems simple enough with its spare textures.  But the song is, I suggest, not a very simple song at all. It's still one of the weirdest things Gabriel's written across his career.  

some reservations about Ethan Iverson's suggestion that symphonic musicians should learn how to play blues and a beat

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-468-identity-politics-postmortem

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On the musical front, let me take this time of liberal bloodletting to mention Florence Price. In the woke era, the classical establishment decided that elevating this long dead black woman composer would expiate their sins.

 

Price’s ragtime-ish piece “Nimble Feet” has had new reach; I just counted 40 performances uploaded to YouTube in the last few years. The piece is attractive although a bit bland. However, that’s not my problem, for a basic argument for diversity is easy to understand. What I find so frustrating is that none of the performers I listened to treated “Nimble Feet” like common practice black music, meaning a situation where the pulse is ruthlessly even and the syncopations work in African opposition to the ground rhythm. Rather, the performances are full of a romantic European attitude.

 

Going one step further: Florence Price took the gatekeepers off the hook. The gatekeepers could fund the performance of an old Price symphony (or a new Concerto in Memoriam George Floyd or whatever), get the social justice kudos at the gala, then go home and watch their stock index go up. Meanwhile, nothing about common practice black music was learned within classical institutions.

 

Our symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat! It’s not that hard! If you can learn to play Mahler, you can learn to play the basic blues and a basic beat. Once again, this was the point of my New York Times essay about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece.”

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Related post: Philip Ewell’s musicological book from 2023 is peak woke, and I found plenty to criticize.

 

The question begged in Iverson’s comment is why “symphonic musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat”? 

 

What does Iverson really mean by common practice black music?  Which blacks?  In the United States?  In Kenya?  In Indonesia? In Ghana? I pick Kenya and Ghana non-randomly because I’ve benefited greatly from books by Christian pastors and theologians from Ghana and a few of my friends in my college years were fellow Christians from Kenya.  I can intuit what Iverson really means by common practice black music but if I intuit correctly then Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is emphatically not part of that common practice black music.  There are a variety of questions begged behind two claims and I don’t consider it hair-splitting to ask what assumptions have gone into the claims.

 

What does Iverson think symphonic musicians have to gain from learning to play blues and a beat?  The ability to improvise? Well, no, they won’t learn anything about improvisation from blues and a beat that didn’t exist in the centuries of figured bass usage or in the Italian partimento practices that span centuries.   Blue notes? If by blue notes we mean notes that can only be found “between the keys”, well,  Anton Reicha was extolling the use of quarter-tones in his Treatise on Melody back around 1810.  False relations where G natural and G sharp show up at the same time or in close temporal proximity?  Those show up in English liturgical music from around the time of Tallis and Byrd.  The trouble is that you could pick almost any random element Iverson might potentially propose symphonic musicians could learn by learning to play blues and a beat and not a single one of those elements, taken in isolation, is something that hasn’t been around within concert music traditions.  Sure, the combination of ingredients in blues is different but there’s a more foundational question that is begged behind the question what is to be gained.

 

Whatever common practice black music Iverson means it is clear that just playing more Florence Price somehow fails to convey the secrets and wisdom contained in common practice black music.  But if Lorence Price, a black woman composer, is bereft of those qualities in such a way that playing her music adds “nothing” whose music would?

 

But which common practice Iverson means leads to another question, whether common practice black music and common practice white music are necessarily different.  We know this isn’t the case when it comes to, say, Christian hymnody.  Thomas Andrew Dorsey made very few changes to “Maitland” when he composed his most famous and justifiably beloved hymn.  This is well-known and gets mentioned by Michael Harris in a book about Dorsey’s Gospel blues legacy.  

 

William T. Dargan wrote about the lining out tradition and showed fairly persuasively that the lining out tradition began in the seventeenth century in low Anglican parishes where literacy was low.  The lining out tradition among poor English and Scottish parishes was so commonplace that the tradition of lining out metrical psalmody migrated to the American colonies. There it flourished for a time until nascent black American churches used it and higher brows contended that white churches should switch to shape-note hymnody so as not to have the same kind of lined out metrical psalmody and Dr. Watts idioms in common with their black churchgoing contemporaries.  At different stages in the American experiment white and black churches in the low liturgical scenes had so much in common there were edicts against the shared vernacular.  There have been periods among white and black communities where there were shared musical practices and yet one side or another decided that for the sake of some kind of racial differentiation or pursuit of distinction commonalities needed to be de-emphasized or a tradition needed to be overtly sidelined. 

 

While in predominantly white churches in the 1970s through 1990s there are accounts of worship wars it might be precisely on this topic of Christian battles over what liturgical music is or isn’t suitable that we learn these battles happen in age after age.  In the United States in the early 20^th century a case can be made that was in black churches in what religion scholars would probably call the mainline in which worship wars were fought in the early 20^th century.  You won’t get a very fair take on the situation Richard Allen faced in founding the African Methodist Episcopal Church if you only read something like Michael Harris’ book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the birth of Gospel blues.

 

On the other hand if you read Mark Burford’s magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black Gospel Field you will learn something, the triumph of Gospel blues and the whoop-it-up Gospel shouter singers was so complete that figures among black classical music who openly expressed reservations about this new popular direction in black American church music were functionally sidelined.  William Levi Dawson was doubtful about the new direction because it would pave the way for pastors and church music directors to just run with the least trained and least talented musicians who knew how to work crowds.  But were those reservations informed by Eurocentric highbrow pretenses?  You could choose to read Singing Like Germans that way. 

 

But the salient point I am trying to make here is that people choosing to reject entire bodies of music in the interest of preserving a perceived racial distinction goes in every direction.  One of my personal reservations about Ewell’s book was that he wrote as though the erasure of BIPOC composers within classical music were done by white theorists.  Doubtless this would be the majority pattern, I surmise, but Mark Burford’s work suggests another possibility, that the triumph pf black popular musical styles entailed a parallel rejection of musical styles and forms that were construed as too Euro-aspirant.  In other words, if Burford’s observation that men like William Levi Dawson had reservations about nascent Gospel blues as the purview of musical hacks it’s not a foregone conclusion that blues and ragtime and jazz were all there is or was to a common practice black music.   The violin works of Joseph Boulougne will be sidelined if those whose idea of black music is Armstrong and Davis keep calling the shots just as much as it will be sidelined if people of the cult of Beethoven keep doing their thing.  Classical music by black composers may have been sidelined by black communities choosing to stop backing composers of symphonic and operatic music as by white hostility. 

 

The triumph of blues and jazz as “the” common practice black music may be an overlooked part of the failure of Florence Price’s music to have gotten more traction.  It’s not that her work is badly made it’s that we’ve already got Scott Joplin and I just think it's patently obvious Scott Joplin’s music is more memorable than the music of Florence Price. I recall Iverson had a few words about Harrison for the centennial of the composer’s birth but I don’t recall a similar post that same year observing the centennial of Scott Joplin’s death.  Harrison’s music for guitar using just intonation octatonic scales is fun and I recommend you give it a listen.  That said, is there some kind of tell in Iverson having not written much about Joplin’s death and his influence back in 2017?  What was it about Harrison that got a post but not the King of Ragtime? 

 

Since I’m on the matter of ragtime now might be a time to ask whether or not a common practice is actually an accurate handling of a musical style.  Jazz pianists may say you ought to play rags with swing.  I don’t recall Joplin ever mentioning swing in his School of Ragtime.  For ragtime composed and published before the Jazz Age it’s not a given that you should swing the sixteenth note or any note values.  We know that Scott Joplin’s contemporary Joseph Lamb did not exactly play with swing. There’s nothing in Joplin’s School of Ragtime to suggest swing was a concept to apply to his music. “Play slowly until you catch the swing” is not proof that “swing” as jazz players define it was what was meant. Joplin elsewhere said that Exercise No. 2 would be screwed up by pianists who liked to vamp.  When a jazz pianist says that ragtime should be played with swing it’s okay to be skeptical, especially if you’re familiar with the primary sources (Joplin and Scott and not any jazz musicians from 1917 onward who played Joplin). 

 

Let’s say symphonic musicians would benefit from learning to play blues and a beat.  Should blues players be expected to know how to handle a partimento exercise, a figured bass or writing a fugue with triple counterpoint? Dismissing a blues guitarist for not playing one of Bach’s two-part inventions would be obviously dubious and yet Iverson’s case, as he’s made it, simply flips a script. Iverson’s suggestion is simply saying their music would be better if it took my music more seriously and were informed more by the musical values of my music.  But hasn’t this been precisely the script used by symphonic musicians to cast aspersion on popular music made by black American musicians? How is flipping the script rejecting the script?

 

Ethan Iverson’s prescription is very simple, “Their music would be better if they learned to play my music.” If he means that pop and classical could benefit from synergistic interaction and affection, I agree. If that’s not what he actually meant his prescription risks being, dare I say it, a bit Roger Scrutonish.

POSTSCRIPT:

There are times when Iverson writes about American popular music in a way that can read as if he’s nudging and winking to fellow initiates about the things you could only see if you were part of some mystery cult.  Take these excerpts, which again touch on the recent work of scholars to highlight the work of Florence Price. These comments from Iverson’s writing about Philip Ewell’s book:

 

https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell

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Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book; they know that trying to explain some basics about the mechanism to the committee is casting pearls before swine. A whole lot of college professors need to prove that they are worthy of receiving a few secrets before any of this gets much better.

 

The road for respect is long. Sometimes it feels like we take two steps backward after one step forward. The last decade has seen the elevation of minor romantic symphonist Florence Price to something like sainthood in the classical music academy. The academy thinks it is paying off some dues, but those dues are still waiting to be paid. Celebrating Florence Price offers little currency in the actual fight against racism down in the subconscious where it really matters.

I strongly doubt that any of Price’s recent advocates can sing one Louis Armstrong solo.

In his book, Ewell discusses Price, of course, but the few pages on jazz are an afterthought. Indeed, nowhere in On Music Theory does Ewell mention African-influenced rhythm as a theoretical organizing principle.

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For the violinists and the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler. Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the taking, for there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother Africa. And this also might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor play a bit of drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.

 

Knowing basic jazz drums is a quick fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the room, an entry-level command of the drum set would unlock new forms of compositional creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from the best and the brightest if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as they understood notation?

 Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book, huh?  So why teach it? Worthy of receiving the secrets?  Yeah, that resembles a gnostic cult!  To whom are the dues to be paid and how does Iverson know for certain the dues are outstanding?  To whom are the dues due to be paid?  Violinists and conductors should play jazz drums?  

This extended excerpt I've quoted is a more overt form of “their music would be more legitimate if they took my music seriously.” It’s in these kinds of paragraphs that Iverson comes off as a flipped script to the paternalism of Roger Scruton.  This time around it's the symphonic musicians who aren't worthy of the raw realness of blues and jazz musicians and not the other way around.  I made this same point in response to Wesley Morris' 1619 Project piece, flipping the script is not the same as rejecting it outright and rejecting the script outright is what we most seem to need. It's as true on the jazz/blues/rock/country/pop side as it is on the classical music/"serious" music side. 

PS 

None of this means I won't be blogging about Iverson's sonatas because I really have been enjoying those lately.  But sometimes Iverson's writing reminds me that practical musicians would do well to take seriously that the theories we think by become all the more harmful if we've never examined them.  As Charles W Mills put it, the theories we least examine that govern our thinking are the ones that most bind us, whether it was in The Racial Contract or Black Rights/White Wrongs escapes me at the moment.  That Ewell's book was not an equivalent to the work of Mills' work in political philosophy with respect to music education doesn't mean I have to take the worst account of Ewell's motives.  I agree with Iverson that the possibilities of a synthesis of classical forms with the vocabularies of American popular music are worth exploring.  I more than agree with that.  It's all the glib potshots he feels obliged or entitled to take along the way that I find off-putting.