the decline of melody

I blame funk music. The emphasis started to lean towards the beat rather than the tune.

I think that fewer "professional songwriters" are responsible for pop hits now than, say, in the 80s. I'm not exactly sure how this affects melody, but I can say that professional songwriters (like the Diane Warrens and Richard Marxseses of the world) tend to write very much in the vein of other professional songwriters - that is, influenced by their counterparts of the past (like say Burt Bacharach, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Carol King, et al). I guess most people writing songs are indebted in some way to the past, but if one particular sect of music makers is less prominent (in the charts) than in the past, it seems natural to me to hear differences in the music itself.

Maybe blame it on quality of musician?

Me too, because one of those fucking awful things is quite enough, thanks.

A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop-a-wom-bam-boom

As my inability even to name the artist in question suggests, I say all this as someone who's basically ignorant about commercial country. But my weakly-supported hypothesis is: given pop's overall turn away from melody, melody-oriented genres have gone slack.

Mapping out a history of the "decline of melody" seems iffy. In fact, you could argue that within a genre the route is usually the opposite. Early rock'n'roll -- a kind of dance music -- wasn't very vocally melodic, but "rock" quickly folded back in the sound of traditionalist pop melodies. Early hip-hop -- a kind of dance music -- was only melodic via the stuff it sampled, but then people folded back in the sound of traditional r&b melody to make today's version of pop. Electronic dance music has had more weird shifts and ups and downs, but once its unmelodic variants emerged into mass consciousness, it wasn't long before the most popular applications of it circled back to melodic Euro-pop and melodic trance.

So I think what we tend to see is this. The biggest leaps forward in genre tend to come from music-for-dancing, since there's a certain framework there that allows people to radically change a lot of the ways they make music. Once a new dance-based form gets somewhat popular, it becomes inevitable that someone makes the effort to link it back to traditional vocal melody -- except the part of the original that's still there (the beats, the lack of chord structures) leaves it feeling less "melodic" than whatever came before. Circle back, repeat.

I blame Hip-Hop to DJ'ing in general as the catalyst though.

I'd like to think that melodic and anti-melodic music can coexist, but its clear that non melodic music is dominant now....in the way that the Jazz era coexisted with the Rock era, but Rock was clearly the successor.

And Dan: what "songwriting technique" do you mean -- the sing-a-melody-over-static-background one? You could push that one a long way back -- I'm just saying it seems to be the pop standard now. (Root of it might go all the way back to the blues, actually -- where chords would stay static for a really long time before coming around to the change.)

This is maybe another thread, but I'd be interested to hear what acts -- in any genre (except New Music) -- people think have managed to come up with ways of treating chord sequences that aren't, you know, traditionalist. I mean, we've surely heard every single chord sequence that sounds western-proper; if people try to get around that by being super-complex, they just sound like classical-wannabes or bloated prog. A decent amount of 90s indie-rock came at guitar chords from weirdo angles, often just through lack of training -- but most of it just sounds like spazz instead of something fresh. (Do chords only satisfy because we recognize the shapes they're supposed to form?) The only examples here I can think of are like limited amounts of Sonic Youth and Radiohead, plus a good share of Warpy electronic acts and their "spooky" synth harmonics.

Captain Beefheart

That and its inverse, the static melody over a changing background, specifically relating to your point about repeated notes fulfilling different functions of the chords underneath them.

I don't notice exactly the same thing in radio-friendly pop music. It's more often this sort of singing approximation of rapping, where the singer stays centered around one note, though he/she may go up or down to others.

There might be a nu-metal parallel too, with the increasing mainstreaming of death-metal style scream-singing.

this all depends on what you're willing to consider "traditionalist". you can hear stuff on Beach Boys and XTC records that no one else in pop does - but I'm sure someone else in some other time in some other genre has done. Furthermore, if you're going to give Radiohead the benefit of the doubt, then you have to also give some of it to "bloated prog" too. Bob Drake is using chords that I've never heard other bands use, and writing some crazy ass songs too - as in songs with forms and stuff, not just spazz ADD music. And anyway, since Gesualdo, it's hard to use chords at all, in any combination, and not be retreading someone else's idea.

As someone said above, there are only 12 notes, and it is pretty unsuprising to me that people should arrive at a point where looking for unique combinations of them is less interesting than using parts of old ones to form a new kind of melody/harmony. I wouldn't say that's actually happened yet - or maybe it is, and I'm just too close to notice.

I blame Abba.

DUH this is cos of hip hop!

Picky picky.

I'm with Dom and Nabisco on this (except for their belief that there are only 12 notes in the scale). I don't accept Artemis's premise. The question isn't whether melody will flourish, but how. In some contexts, "melody" and "song" don't define the music, which can be liberating for melody in that if on a particular track it's not forced to carry the story, as it were, it doesn't have to resolve or evolve or be in key or anything like that; maybe this is how crunk gets away with putting "doomy" and "tinkly" in the same song.

Er. This is true in the Western musical scale. That's the default scale that Western pop music is written in. I kind of can't see how you can argue against this...?

I'd love to read / hear more about the pop songwriting process. As a layperson, it seems one obvious distinction is whether melodies are written before or after chord progressions (although I'm sure bleeding across that boundary always happens, and of course I'm mostly leaving out hip hop and other genres that don't use chord progressions in the conventional sense anyway). My instinct is to say that the latter option generates more conservative melodies, fewer surprises like the jumping around the scale in, say, Ted Leo. (Although come to think of it he may mostly jump octaves.) Fitting melodies to progressions there must always be the temptation, at least, to go the path of least resistance.

Also: I just thought of at least one approach to melody and chord progression that’s fairly new—and pretty much limited to electronic dance music. I don’t have the best musical vocabulary to explain it, but here goes: someone samples a bit of sound that contains a chord interval. They then run it through a sampling keyboard and use it to play a riff or melody that’s actually somewhat “wrong,” because the interval of the sample isn’t built to transpose, in key, to another note. But it sounds weird and beefy and awesome and is an instantly-recognizable staple of tons and tons of dance music, so much so that it’s considered “cheesy” now—either a sampled riff that does this, or a keyboard that’s set to produce a specific interval (say, five half-steps), and then played in such a way that the harmony it produces is not always necessarily “right.” (Just think lead-synth rave sound, they all use fixed intervals like that, so that on some notes they create proper harmonic intervals, and on others they’re a half-step off.)

But actually so: question for Dan Perry! In Generation Ecstasy, when Reynolds talks about the kind of fixed-interval synth lead I'm thinking of, he keeps making reference to the Carmina Burana. Thinking of the bits of that piece that everyone knows, I'm wondering if it uses any of the same kinds of intervals to create that effect? NB examples of the kind of lead I mean in dance music basically includes dozens of smash-hits no-one knows the name of but everyone's heard, including, umm, that one cheerleader-routine staple ("y'all ready for this? -- BIG TRANCE SYNTH LEAD"), and the morse-code main-riff of what I'm pretty sure is Darude's "Sandstorm." It's almost like a way of saying "no, this is still linear, keep dancing to it, it's not a chord progression because the harmonics aren't actually changing."

Really, all you'd have to do is throw a bridge into every song and it would be structurally indistinguishable from a bunch of 60s pop songs strung together with an overarching theme.

You could substitute any bit of Carmina Burana into "O Fortuna" and the track would still work (see "O Bumbratta", the sample-dodging rerelease that came out after the lawsuit). Also notice that Apotheosis didn't really add anything except for a bassline to the main choral riff and a little screwing around with the initial choral attack to flesh out the transitions in the song to create this gigantic rave monster.

YES.

i don't think this is the case. you don't think ashlee simpson and jessica simpson and kelly clarkson and amerie and all their peers on the pop, r&b, country, etc., charts are writing their own songs, do you?

After reading this whole thread, this still seems like the most relevant observation. But just saying "it's because of hip-hop" isn't really an answer. For one thing, hip-hop itself has gotten more melodic rather than less, with more and more sung choruses, hooks, etc. But for another, there's obviously lots of music much older than hip-hop that plays off sustained chords with what we'd maybe call sing-song vocal lines weaving in and around them. Right now I happen to be watching video from the Festival in the Desert on cable, with Ali Farka Toure, Amadou & Mariam, Nuru Kane and a bunch of other African performers, and while there's a lot of variety it's interesting how much of the music shares those characteristics. A lot of it sounds more like vamping than like "songs" in the Western sense. But that's not because of any lack of complexity in the music or the performance, and it's not just because it's "more rhythmic," although obviously it is. It's because the melodies are not melodic in the Western sense, they don't have the minor fall and major lift, etc.

This is one tenent of minimalism (more from the La Monte Young side of things than the Riley/Reich/Glass side), fixing intervallic movement to achieve a kind of stasis. (of course, I always figured you heard it in a lot of dance music because preset chords you can play with one finger are easier to use than ones that take 3 or more fingers)

First, it's roughly akin to the idea that somehow limited palate/lexicon is equivalent to limited combination, which doesn't work in an infinite combination possibility. It's like saying that the English language is only 26 letters long, or human speech only has a certain finite number of vocalizations (both of which are valid), and as a result, we are somehow limited in the total concepts that can be conveyed. Which is highly arguable, given that we can invent new words like, say, internet, and verbalize them as well.

Second, melody is not a constant. What we think of as melody today is different and more inclusive than what was considered melody 50 years ago. Also, what I think of as melody (if we accept the idea that we're placing things on a spectrum of dissonance and harmony) is different than what someone else does. Also, it could be argued that the method of instrumentation changes melody. For example, the same sequence of notes played on a Cello aren't the same melodically as those notes played on a synth, or sung, because we are usually dealing with polyphonic instruments (differing levels of fundamentals, harmonics, off-harmonics, etc.).

I would be less scattered on my description of this, but amusingly enough, a 15 year old is currently playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on an out of tune guitar in the store and destroying my concentration. Perhaps more later...