When I drive around my hometown, I typically have my music on a thumb drive plugged into the USB port of my car. If I’m feeling extra special, I have my CarPlay running, having my Spotify or Pandora playlist running amok in the background as I drive way too fast down a road with a 45 MPH speed limit.
My playlist isn’t too crazy, a good mix of the old classics. Oasis, Genesis, Erasure, Queen, and a few miscellaneous tracks from Men At Work, ELO, etc. It’s clear that my music taste was shaped somewhat by my parents, but I’m proud to listen to the masters of their craft sing their songs and play their instruments for all. It’s a sign that I really do need to go back to playing piano.
But when I’m on vacation, the safety net of nostalgic lyrics comes crumbling down. I don’t bring my USB thumb drive on vacation, nor is the roaming data strong enough to run Spotify on my phone. Yes, I could give Spotify my money to get Premium. No, I will not do that. In that case, I’m subject to the radio. And my ears are usually bleeding by the end of it. But it’s not from earsplitting vocals. In actuality, it’s the direct opposite of that. Yes, there are some breakcore pieces that I really do not enjoy. But most music sounds “same-ish”.
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The 2010s were a strange time for humanity. Long before social media truly made the entirety of society doomers, the music world was in a strange place. Only a year before the decade began, Oasis had an altercation with Liam (allegedly) swinging a guitar at Noel in Paris, causing a split that wouldn’t get rectified until last year 2025. The 2000s still held on to that 90s spirit, but something was clearly changing. While the spirit of the 90s was still there, breakcore and alternative rock (Green Day) was truly finding its footing.
Music is always in a state of change. If you showed Mozart a rather mundane 80s song, let's say, for demonstration’s sake, Back in Black, you’d be considered a lunatic and likely run out of Vienna (yes, Back in Black is kind of kosher for some of the stuff produced in the 80s!). Lyrical music had always been a thing, but for a time, it was slightly buried by the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods of music. It made its comeback in the form of long winded “parlour songs”. Listen to a few of the records from the time, they’re always long winded, and you can always put a “date” on them. The 1940s and 50s gave us the first look at legendary crooners, the Sinatras, the Coles, the Crosbys, who wow’ed listeners with a voice seemingly delivered straight out of the heavens. Females were also beginning to find a footing in sung entertainment, with Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday being amongst the most widely renowned singers of their time (unfortunately, Holiday died incredibly destitute and addicted to heroin). Singing was a way to express the voice, the soul, the passion…
The guitar decided to throw a wrench into those plans. Chuck Berry and his ability to play the guitar like no one else. The famous guitar riffs and instrumentals that were behind every Elvis track. The Beatles, with the drumming beat of Ringo Starr behind almost every song. The 1950s and 60s showed the world that you could combine music and instruments and create something cool.
The 70s, 80s, and 90s, in my opinion, were the heyday of what I consider to be the meat and bones of songwriting: lyrics. The earlier decade showed what you could do with instruments with the right people behind them. Now, the lyrics have caught up. Many people, with their own problems and their own grievances with musical systems, decided to project these problems into their lyrics. What society got was one of the most powerful combinations of music + vocals that society had seen at the time.
Queen’s Freddie Mercury was a man that demonstrated incredible amounts of bravado and charisma on the outside. While I was not there to see the improv vocal warmup conducted at LiveAid at Wembley in 1985, I still consider it to be the single greatest live performance of all time. But on the inside, he was a man deep inside himself with thoughts on loneliness, and the songs Somebody to Love and Needing Your Love Tonight are clear projections of Mercury’s love, and I Want to Break Free is one of the clearest references he left, projecting his struggles as a closeted gay man into his music. I am a firm believer that for one to write about experience, one must live it, and I am convinced that one one that experienced incredible loneliness or struggles with sexuality could have written or performed any of those songs with any of the bravado that he did.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney. So different, yet very similar artists. Paul, the master of singing; John, the master of lyricism. When they worked together on the Beatles, you could tell that they had a chemistry that could be rivaled by few. When the Beatles split, you could feel the power of the lyrics of John, or the singing voice of Paul that provided the proper voice to the pop music he wrote with Linda McCartney after he turned solo. Heck, even George was a decent songwriter, and his voice fits nicely with the many spirituality-based works he did later in life.
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The true masters, however, I feel of the lyrics and harmony/melody, is Oasis.
Oasis. Yes, I’ve mentioned them enough times to warrant its own blog. I fleetingly mentioned the physical altercation that split Liam and Noel Gallagher from working together until 2025. But even before then, there was a lot of tension. Liam, the man with the fork in the world of soup, according to his brother. Noel, the angriest man you’ll ever meet, according to Liam. Even before the “soup” comment, the band was tense. Noel and Liam, according to family members, had personalities that clashed. Liam, the unpredictable, Noel, the calculated. The first cracks formed in 1994, with Liam throwing a tambourine at Noel.
While bettors had started to bet on when the carnage between the two brothers would boil over and cause a permanent split, Oasis would release the album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? in October of 1995. Described as a populist masterpiece now, it is perhaps the album that got many into Oasis. The works read out of a Hall-of-Fame of Britpop. Morning Glory, Champagne Supernova, Don’t Look Back in Anger. Anyways, if you thought that was enough, here’s Wonderwall to round it all off. Four of my favorite songs of all time. Each is a masterpiece and completely different from each other. Morning Glory, a story on the brother’s addiction to cocaine. Champagne Supernova, the assumed counter to Morning Glory, a 7-minute masterclass on the personal disillusion caused by drugs and fame. Don’t Look Back in Anger, a song on moving on after personal tragedy, moving forward with passion. And Wonderwall. One of, if not, my favorite songs of all time. It’s stupid, I know, and is overplayed. The friend that will save you from yourself. Sometimes when I listen to it, it’s me. Sometimes, it’s a friend of mine that I hope to marry in the future. Who knows.
The common thread is that every song in Morning Glory is built off of conflict and struggle: each has a theme to it, and most of it is negative. The lyrics don’t pull punches. They want you to experience and viscerally feel what they felt when they fought each other. Each song was sung with every last breath of passion to try to one up each other. Those who have gone to Oasis Concerts feel like Noel’s trying to push one more note, one more level out of that guitar of his.
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Oasis, Queen, Beatles. What do they have in common (apart from all being British/Britpop).
The songs tell us about the man behind the microphone. The group that became more known for off-stage fights and insults than the music itself. The group with the frontman that would make Shinji from Evangelion weep in pity. The group of three different personalities and skills that would split up in a widely publicized and covered breakup.
When you have experience, conflict, tremors like that, the human body wants to project. People aren’t naturally meant to bottle up their pain. Jung and Freud studied this deeply, and noted that people unconsciously project their struggles onto others. The men mentioned above didn’t project onto others, rather, they projected onto their music and into the instrumentals they wrote for the music. They knew that they had a message to share, so they worked exceptionally hard to make sure that the instruments provided the perfect backdrop for the music.
I assure you that someone won’t know Wonderwall, but they’ll know the opening chord progression. Or the “stomp-stomp-clap” from We Will Rock You. And surely, someone out there doesn’t know the names of the four Beatles, but they’ll recognize the faces. The balance they gave the music provided a strong base to project their trauma onto the world. And oddly enough, this caused many of us to give credence to this trauma. We didn’t explicitly see the fights, but we feel them through the psychological trauma of the many works they wrote for us. The beat drives us in, the lyrics connect us to the men that sing the songs for us.
Where is that today?
Trauma isn’t a 90s thing. There are people losing parents, losing partners, fighting siblings, hell, seeing things they don’t need to be seeing every day. Each one of those experiences can be turned into music. Eric Clapton’s finest work, Tears in Heaven, was written after his four-year old son, Conor, fell to an untimely death from a 53rd story balcony. But this isn’t unique to just famous people. People lose their kids all the time (absolutely no disrespect or downplay to Clapton, an absolute tragedy; no parent should lose their son to such a tragedy). My point is that Tears of Heaven proved that projecting your trauma into a creative outlet can work, both as personal therapy and as a way of writing an emotionally rich song. So why don't I see it much anymore?
Blame TikTok and other short-form content.
Works like Wonderwall, Don’t Stop me Now, and Tears of Heaven are long ballads. The audience has to work to get their emotional payoff, and the artist has to work to get their payoff as well. I think that most of these songs are about 4 minutes long.
The max video length on TikTok is, believe it or not, 60 minutes. But TikTok is constantly stressing content creators to produce shorter form content for retention. Shorts are pushing 30 seconds long at most, with many of the “better” posts (according to the platform) being 10 second bursts.
This has led to the collective attention span of many viewers going down. Record labels know that. The average length of a pop song has decreased from the 259-second length in the 1990s to a paltry 197 in the 2020s, according to a Kaggle scrape of Spotify records from 1930s to 2020 songs. For all you fine folks, that’s about 4 minutes and 20 seconds down to just over 3. Our attention spans have caused songs to get shorter.
Now actually take the time to listen to the songs. I did a little experiment the day prior to writing this with my friend, who kindly provided my permission to do a long “listening” session with two of her Spotify Playlists. She’s a smidge younger than I am and definitely more on the social scene. So goodbye Oasis, and hello Metalhead (acceptable) and a creator called Heaven Pierce Her.
To say this was a type of music I don’t listen to on a daily basis is an understatement. I don’t use TikTok much either, and try to limit my short-form content to a minimum (I’m a documentary guy myself). The music that I listened to, dare I say, throws any instance of balance out the window.
This is not to say that lyricless music is all bad. The opposite, actually, can be true. Kernkraft 400, a staple of the American stadium experience, tells a story and generally gets me hyped without a single word spoken (the song MV is actually a fictionalized ad for a microwave, demonstrated by women in bikinis. Very nice.). A lackluster white noise with good lyrics is hard to listen to. An richly noted piece with the finest of musical sense can be ruined by uninspired lyrics. But this? What I listened to, didn’t even attempt to find the balance.
The first song was a Miku Song I believe. Battle Ready, again, I believe from Miku. I might have made the tragic mistake of listening to this in my car’s speakers rather than my more muffled computer speaker. Because that song broke my ears. There was no lyrical balance. It started as a WALL of sound hitting my ears. My music taste had trained me to expect a slow buildup to the top of a musical climax. Not getting hit with it straight away. But the opening did kind of get me hooked.
Only later did I realize that this is what TikTok culture has done to music. They’ve tried to hook me straight off the bat. They’re competing for Spotify views and album buyers. They want my attention.
The next piece was a work by… Femtanyl (you thought Fentanyl was bad? Lets add a feminine charm to it!), called Katamari. I can assure you that if I had to cover my ears to discern any coherent lyrics whatsoever (there were no intelligent lyrics), the piece of music isn’t very intelligent.
And the trend frustrates me. The artists of the past spent years attempting to break out of the mold of their predecessors. And now, because of the chase for the American dollar, we’re back here. Chasing shortened attention span. Very few take risks anymore. We focus more on overwhelming the system rather than building a journey for the artist and listener.
I get why people don’t want to take risks. Many of the bands I covered with great passion were incredibly radical back when they first came on the scene. Hell, even Elvis was considered an obscenity when he first started writing music. But it’s because we’ve become so engrossed with getting that internet fame, we’ve lost any vigor to try new things. I’m convinced that the out-there nature of Queen, or the viscerally raw themes of Morning Glory would be passed over if released today; the slow ballad being lumped with yet another depression vent.
We just don’t consume music the same anymore. Long gone are the power ballads about us as a society, in with the mixtapes and the attention seeking missiles. The mixtape was a cool way to remix music, but now is an empty uterus to blend together and sample, without any of the actual skill that it takes to sample effectively. The substance, the feeling, the pain, all gone. What’s left is money. The guys took the money to start a new bank, but never actually built the bank and left the briefcase under the money tree.
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I’m being nostalgic for a time I was never born in. I’m feeling nostalgic for beats made by a Lancashire I’ve never even visited. But something feels missing when I compare today and yesterday’s music.
The balance between lyric, story, and harmony was smashed, just like the guitar Noel attacked Liam with. And the world is poorer for its loss. As I write this eulogy to the closing of the escalator of rebellion, leading onto the spinning teacups of repetition, let us remember the long lost ability to create nostalgia out of nothing. The ability to connect the world to a common trauma.
Or the ability to belt out Wonderwall to myself on a busy street, because I felt like it.
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