By Chelsea Wahl
A few weeks ago, I was in a Payless Shoe Source with my
friend Elly. A song came on that I recognized but couldn’t place. I remember
thinking, “This is really catchy. Where have I heard this before?” The answer
is, likely, everywhere: the song was “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People.
Since its release in September of 2010, “Pumped Up Kicks” has been featured
everywhere from TV shows, such as Gossip
Girl and Entourage, to films, such
as Friends With Benefits and Fright Night. Even indie rock legends
Weezer have taken notice, covering the song at the Orange County Fair earlier
this year. And, to cap it all off, the song has topped charts in the U.S.,
Canada, Australia, Belgium, Poland, and New Zealand. Not bad for a two-year-old
band with no credentials to speak of.
After listening to the song a few times, it started to sound
a lot like another song I like. You know that weird cognitive trick, when
you’re humming one song and then you start humming another? It kept happening
with “Pumped Up Kicks” and a song called “Do What You Will” by Papercuts. After
comparing both songs, I was shocked at the similarities: the syncopation
between the drums and the bass,
the nearly identical fuzz in the vocals (not to mention low range vocals
in the verse and high range vocals in the chorus), and even the same
three-chord structure from verse to chorus. “Pumped Up Kicks” certainly
benefits from cleaner production, and a few handclaps, but apart from that they
are virtually indistinguishable.
Of course, the songs are not identical, for many reasons.
Foster the People is signed to Startime International, a subsidiary of the
colossal Columbia Records; Papercuts are signed to Sub Pop, the indie darling
of labels. While popular on the festival circuit, Foster the People has a very
mainstream following (as I said, I first heard the song at a Payless), while
Papercuts has not even debuted on a Billboard chart. The bands are just
“packaged” differently, which has an indelible effect on the popularity of
their material.
~
While this parallel may seem trivial, it says a lot about
the way we consume music. Why should one song be so much more ubiquitous than
the other if, musically, they are so similar? Music, in its popular conception,
isn’t as much about music as we
claim. A song’s popularity is dependent on the flexible preference of social
groups (hipsters, Goths, punks, etc), the visual and verbal messages associated
with songs themselves (music videos, lyrics), and more than anything, the
marketability of the group and its musical products. If something can be marketed
well, it will be accessible to a much larger audience.
“Pumped Up Kicks” is a commercial success precisely because
its constituent parts form a neat, consumer-friendly package. The song is
structured simply, and organized around an ascending bassline that varies only
during the 8-bar bridge. What could be easier to follow? The band is a
genial-looking gang of twenty-somethings. They’ve got Ray-Bans, so we know
they’re cool, but they don’t have visible tattoos or gauges in their ears, so
we know they’re not going to hurt anybody.
And while most music videos attempt to tell a story, or at
least to add some visual depth to the auditory experience, the video for
“Pumped Up Kicks” tells the viewer nothing that could not be inferred just by
listening to the song. The video features the band members playing shows,
driving around in a van, surfing, bopping their heads in the studio, and being
admired by girls in midriff tops. The theme is, apparently, “These Cool Guys
Are in a Band.” Plotless music videos, driven by presumably “intimate” shots of
a musician on tour, seems to be a pattern for massive chart-toppers; see Jason
Mraz’s “I’m Yours” for comparison.
“Do What You Will,” on the other hand, doesn’t go down quite
as easily. First off, “Do What You Will” was featured on Urban Outfitters.com,
on one of the apparel site’s digital mixes. While Urban Outfitters is nothing
shy of a billion dollar corporation, it markets to a very specifically alternative
demographic—it inspires the word “hipster,” in both noun and adjective form,
more than probably any other singular corporate entity. That “Do What You Will”
was featured on their site says a lot of about the target audience.
The video for the song centers on a bearded man, who leaves
a party along with his bearded friends, and is subsequently chased around city
streets by a mysterious gaseous substance. The gas follows him to his
apartment, and soon the entire place is enveloped in a fog and the protagonist
falls to the floor. He is motionless as the gas recedes. Seriously. Whether
this video is meant to be a kitschy horror clip or a self-referential joke, it
is nearly unintelligible to the average viewer. Indeed, the top-rated user
comment for the video on Youtube states, “Indie rock beard chased by fart.
Interesting concept.”
To be fair, music (contemporarily conceived) is not all
about popularity. Papercuts probably markets itself as alternative
intentionally, as a means of distinguishing itself from the seemingly endless
horde of attention-mongering pop groups. But it speaks to our means of
categorization that literally no band gets heard without conforming to a marketable,
pre-established musical identity, as both Papercuts and Foster the People do.
~
It really isn’t about the music, and it hasn’t been since
the advent of technologies like the radio—technologies that widened and altered
our understanding of music, and almost everything else. This redefinition of
music has been crucial to our culture: where would we be if Elvis Presley had
never swung his hips, if The Marvelettes had never sung “Please Mr. Postman”?
But as the internet increases the scope of music to an almost infinite degree,
spawning new genres and new forms of musical creation all the time,
generation-defining music becomes less and less likely. Already, we see that
the musical giants of ages past (the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Queen, Led
Zeppelin, ABBA) have no contemporary counterparts.
This is why the musical similarities between “Pumped Up Kicks”
and “Do What You Will” are so disturbing to me. The endless stream of internet
sensations and college radio station hits has dulled our musical taste buds,
and now nothing tastes quite as fresh. The only thing to separate one act from
another is now the consumer package in which it is presented, because one could
never actually listen to enough songs
to form a truly educated opinion about musical forms today. This scares me a
little, and maybe it should scare you too.
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