We’ve been harping on this pattern for a long time, and it’s never going away. #Mode5 (alternating scale degrees 5/3/5/3)
XC33596 Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor) You know what else could we say has a millennial sound to it? The name is just branding, like any other thing we apply it to. Which, uh, can be a pretty busted approach both musicologically and politically.” He also asked the most important question, “is the idea that the Millennial Whoop expresses something about millennialness? Or that something about our “generational character” draws us to it?” No. It’s just another hallmark of a style.” A pretty tired style if you ask me!Īwl pal and musicologist Brian Barone said, “There’s a long history in western thought about music of essentializing moves equating certain sounds with certain groups of people - “women’s music” goes like this “African music” works like that. The Outline’s audio director John Lagomarsino wrote in an email, “It may be true that that gesture is occurring more frequently in modern pop music, but I’d be inclined to read that as just part of the musical vernacular, like certain patterns in drum beats, or common bassline gestures. We know it’s fixed but we want to believe.īut the whoop is not exactly a hoax or a trick, but neither is it something we should be so impressed by. Having your mind blown by this is like having your mind blown by those “crazy card trick” websites that read your mind and tell you which card you chose because you were subtly directed to by the game’s instructions. Now we all know THIS WEIRD MUSIC THEORY WILL BLOW YOUR DAMN MIND ( Paper) The millennial whoop: the key to modern pop ( BBC) The ‘Millennial Whoop’: The Musical Trope That’s Suddenly Everywhere ( Mental Floss)
Yes, because it’s literally everywhere, not just pop music. Once you hear it, you can never un-hear it ( Maxim) This one actually might be accurate, but it’s still fueling the millennial fire. Isn’t it whoop not woop? Also the subhed is really reaching: “singers using secret subliminal messaging that has their songs in your head for days” The Millennial Whoop: the melodic hook that’s taken over pop music ( The Guardian) Just look at some of the headlines around this whoop story: The Millenial Woop: The Reason Current Pop Songs Are So Catchy Quartz’s Michael Tabb basically struck platinum by quilting all the whoops together into a video, sponsored by the luxury car brand Jaguar. The real story here is the lag time between Metzger’s post and the explosion of the story in the general population’s newsfeeds.
Also, what’s more interesting here is not the notes themselves but the repetition of the same syllables, “wa-oh, wa-oh, oh, oh.” This isn’t happening in all pop songs, it’s just that pop songs have become so tautologically defined as to require a millennial whoop to sound like pop music.īut we’re determined to credit the mysterious monolith-we are captivated by a demographic that marketers basically invented because we live in a social era where the only thing that matters is an audience. So if we all know it, then what does it have to do with millennials? Most of them aren’t producing or really even writing any of this stuff, they’re just iterating.
As Metzger writes, “It’s the kind of musical phrase that we seem to know instinctively.” Yes, yes. It’s also an echo chamber: many of them are written by the same few producers. All the songs sound the same because they ARE the same. “The Millennial Whoop”: The same annoying whooping sound is showing up in every popular songįirst of all: no. The Millennial Whoop: A glorious obsession with the melodic alternation between the fifth and the thirdīut the real pickup came a week later, when Quartz turned it into an insanely sharable video with all the examples compiled next to each other and next thing you know we’re back to “decoding millennials” as though they’re sending each other subliminal messages. Even though it’s obviously been around forever, as long as there’s been music and probably long before then too, it is definitely having “a moment.” Two weeks ago, a musician named Patrick Metzger wrote a slick-looking blog post about a trend he’s observed in recent pop songs that he says has “plagued the airwaves for the past several years.” He nicknamed it “The Millennial Whoop”-the toggle between the fifth and the third pitch on a diatonic scale. Why do we want to be surprised by “The Millennial Whoop” in pop music? Image: white_pop_headphone_girl
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