Music

Here's proof that most modern pop songs sound the same

by Richard Howard

Saying all the pop songs being released these days are “a little alike” is like saying Kanye West is “a little cocky.” In fact, it’s such old hat after call outs on unoriginal lyrical and compositional content (like Axis of Awesome’s brilliant “4 chords” parody), it’s barely used as an argument anymore. Musician and product manager Patrick Metzger, however, has come up with a new reason to call modern pop the laziest genre ever, and it’s a doozy. I’ll give you a hint – start listening around 45 seconds in:

Caught it? No, it’s not the visual of Katy Perry straight up pantomiming fellatio – it’s that insufferable “Whoa-Oh” warble. While we’ve all no doubt noticed that sound running rampant, what not all of us will have realized is that it’s a very specific progression, just like the infamous four-chord I/V/vi/IV progression.

On his blog, Metzger describes the audaciously overused technique he calls “The Millennial Whoop” (not to be confused with every Juggalo’s favorite holla):

“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 songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an “Oh” phoneme, often in a “Wa-oh-wa-oh” pattern. And it is in so many pop songs it’s criminal.”

How many songs is “so many?” Well, Metzger and his readers managed to find no less than forty examples of the Millennial Whoop – and those are just the hits. Above, Quartz compiled a whack of examples for your consumption.

Interestingly, you can find the technique (albeit often with differing intervals) as far as 30 years back in songs like “Video Killed The Radio Star” and Morris Day and The Time’s “Jungle Love.” Of course, back then it was, you know, part of the song (thus the differing intervals) as opposed to “wa-oh equals cash, boys!” Although I guess you can’t blame writers for cashing on on the human desire for recognizable patterns, or to quote Metzger: “a feedback loop has been created in which songs are successful because they are familiar, so in order to be successful, songs are created that play on our sense of familiarity.”

Fun story – he goes on to opine that “peak Millennial Whoop” when the phenomenon exploded was right around 2010. Guess which song which conspicuously featured that vocal pattern was released just one year earlier?

Yep. So there’s another thing we can blame those fucking guys for. There’s hope, though. Conventional wisdom says that a trend has jumped the shark once parodies of it begin to appear.

For funsies, here’s a tiny sampling of the ubiquitous Whoopery that’s taken place in the past few years.