When I was a music-obsessed kid, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, I could easily find radio and television shows that purported to explain how classical music worked. Karl Haas genially elucidated form and style on “Adventures in Good Music,” and Leonard Bernstein held forth on PBS about Beethoven. These were late-period examples of a genre known as music appreciation, which peaked in the thirties and forties, when Walter Damrosch, on NBC radio, invented ditzy ditties for the classics—“This is / The sym-pho-nee / That Schu-bert wrote but nev-er fin-ished . . .”—and Aaron Copland had an unlikely best-seller, “What to Listen for in Music.”
Music appreciation is having a resurgence, although the music being appreciated has changed. Early in the twenty-tens, song-explainer videos began proliferating on the Internet. When podcasts took off, dissections of the innards of pop hits were in demand. Now TikTok has its own pithy army of music theorists. I occasionally checked up on the trend, usually when musicologists became incensed about something on social media. In 2016, Vox Media published a video claiming to have identified a “secret chord” that made songs sound “Christmassy.” This esoteric harmony turned out to be a half-diminished seventh, which has appeared in countless pieces across the centuries, Christmassy and not.
The podcast “Switched On Pop,” which began in 2014, offers music appreciation at a higher level. I started listening in September, when the hosts, Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, presented a four-part series on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I almost fled when Sloan began singing along to the Fifth in the Damroschian style: the second theme of the first movement became “Lit-tle Fräu-lein Hen-ri-et-ta.” But the earnest enthusiasm of the effort won me over, and I set about exploring other episodes, which focus less on Beethoven than on Bieber. I gave up trying to follow current pop years ago, but I soon found myself absorbed in disquisitions on the creative arc of Taylor Swift. Perhaps the ultimate test of good music criticism is whether it can keep you interested in music you don’t know, even in music you don’t think you like.
The secret chord in “Switched On Pop” is that the hosts know what they are talking about. Sloan is an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Southern California, specializing in pop and jazz. Harding is a songwriter. Friends from college, they had the idea for the podcast during a road trip along the California coast. When Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” came on the stereo, Sloan told Harding about how he’d used the song to teach some students the rudiments of music theory. After losing themselves in an analysis of the song—or an “overanalysis,” as they like to say—they decided to record their conversations.
The basic pedagogical technique of the podcast might be called mutual mansplaining. Sloan and Harding take turns imparting musical basics to each other, with one adopting a tone of expertise and the other playing dumb. (“Can you explain the major/minor chord?”) As the bantering rhythms of a long-standing friendship take over, this artifice threatens to collapse. When, in the middle of a discussion of text painting in Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,” Harding describes the technique as “a paintbrush that has, like, a word on it,” Sloan responds, “I think you’re being deliberately obtuse.” Indeed, Harding soon delivers a succinct definition: “Text painting is where something that happens lyrically is mirrored musically—that the musical form resonates along with whatever the message of the song is.”
A typical “Switched On Pop” episode pairs a contemporary hit with a musical topic—modal scales, descending bass lines, modulations, and so on. The strategy that Sloan used when he taught harmony by way of “Call Me Maybe” remains in play. Because the songs are so familiar to much of the audience, the hosts can wallow in technical lingo without fear of losing people. A sly bait and switch is at work: the conversation often wanders far from the song in question, ranging across pop-music history or delving into the classical past. For me, the switch operated in the opposite direction. For the sake of listening to Sloan and Harding musicologically jabber away, I received an education in the mysteries of the modern Top Forty.
Somewhat at random, I clicked on a 2019 episode that scrutinizes “If I Can’t Have You,” a song by the young Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes, who was known to me mainly as an underwear model. The topic was declamation—the art of setting texts to music in a way that follows the rhythms and the stresses of speech. The general rule is that songwriters should imitate spoken language as closely as possible, but the rule can be bent. Sloan notes that Taylor Swift, in “You Need to Calm Down,” sings “some-bo-dy,” while Whitney Houston and Freddie Mercury, rendering the same word, waver between emphasizing the first syllable and emphasizing the second. Harding expresses distress over Beyoncé’s “Sand-cas-tles.” The conversation then spirals back in time to Handel’s “Messiah,” which contains the peculiar prosody “in-cor-rup-ti-ble,” and eventually returns to Mendes, who is found to practice nearly impeccable declamation.
“Switched On Pop” delights in such detours. The episode that assesses Timberlake’s text painting takes in Bernart de Ventadorn’s twelfth-century troubadour song “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (“When I see the lark beat its wings”). A look back at Queen’s “We Are the Champions” includes a digression on the operatic cadenza. A survey of musical selections from the Netflix series “Bridgerton” becomes happily distracted by the erotic dimensions of four-handed piano playing in the nineteenth century. This isn’t to say that the podcast is entirely a Trojan horse for music-history lessons. An investigation of the Weeknd’s monster hit “Blinding Lights” concentrates on the song’s eighties-era production and dives into an almost line-by-line reading of its lyrics, pinpointing a tension between its danceable beats and its allusions to depression and addiction. Harding links the ambiguity to the song’s main harmonic template—a “chord loop” that sways between darker minor chords (F, C) and brighter major ones (E-flat, B-flat). This zest for detail sets Sloan and Harding apart from most pop commentators now working.
As a persnickety classical-music critic, I inevitably had some issues with the Beethoven series, which is called “The 5th.” The first two episodes consist of a movement-by-movement account of the symphony, and, as I listened to Sloan and Harding banter over the score, I thought of “New Horizons in Music Appreciation,” a brilliant skit by the composer-comedian Peter Schickele, in which the Fifth is narrated in sports-announcer style. (“And they’re off, with a four-note theme.”) Still, they efficiently lay out the piece’s structure, with apt commentary from members of the New York Philharmonic, which collaborated on the series.
In the third installment, the guys confront the posthumous cult of Beethoven, the ossification of the canon, and issues of élitism and racism in classical music. In September, a stray tweet about this episode riled up right-wingers on social media, who warned that podcasters were threatening to “cancel” Beethoven. If those self-appointed defenders of Western civilization had listened to the entire series, they would have found that the hosts were simply arguing for Beethoven to be played alongside newer music. I had my own reservations about Sloan and Harding’s narrative. It’s never clear what role the Fifth itself plays in the undeniable syndrome of classical élitism, and when they merrily catalogue pop-culture riffs on the symphony’s opening gesture—Walter Murphy’s disco track “A Fifth of Beethoven” and the like—they testify to Beethoven’s uncannily wide reach.
What struck me most about “The 5th” is that it adopts a mode of sociological critique not often found on “Switched On Pop.” The show tends to be formalist and apolitical: melodies are melodies, chords are chords, patterns recur across the centuries. There is, however, no such thing as “pure music,” as Beethoven’s afterlife makes clear. The issue surfaces in a fascinating way when Sloan and Harding address Kanye West’s recent ventures in gospel music. They begin by explaining that they’ve been tuning out West of late, making brief mention of his “maga-embracing” side. Midway through the episode, they reach the provisional conclusion that West’s gospel music merits attention, insofar as it’s “deconstructing conventions and norms.” Then they bring on a gospel authority, the critic Naima Cochrane, who supplies a much harsher assessment. West is dabbling in gospel, Cochrane says, at the same time that he’s supporting Trump and describing slavery as a choice: “He’s saying things that are very anti-Black, even in a space that is modelled after call-and-response traditions and musical narrative traditions that go back to slavery.” Sloan and Harding, in a commendable exercise in self-critique, allow themselves to be led away from their initial praise for West’s gospel incursions.
An irony attendant on contemporary pop is that the discourse around it recycles many of the grandiose formulas that have long beset classical music. Reviews of Taylor Swift’s 2020 album “folklore” routinely used the words “genius” and “masterpiece.” Sloan and Harding have called Swift “Beethovian.” Such genuflections may seem less problematic in pop than they do in classical music, where the grim weight of European history looms behind the idolization of Beethoven and Wagner. Yet American culture has its own engulfing shadows: white supremacy has shaped popular song from the minstrelsy days onward, and celebrity power mirrors the radical inequality of the winner-takes-all marketplace. I’d love to see an intelligent podcast like “Switched On Pop” push past the façade of triumphal innocence. The deepest kind of music appreciation takes music not as a divinely gifted art but as an agonizingly human one. ♦
