Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

by Kurt Andersen

A slightly different expression of the stasis that descended in the 1990s was the disappearance of musical diversity among the most popular pop songs. A 2018 study, by two young data journalists, of the summer hits every year from 1970 to 2015 algorithmically derived each song’s “fingerprint” not from its genre or style but from its underlying sonic components—valence, loudness, energy, and so on. By those measures, from the 1970s through the ’80s and into the ’90s, the hits were extremely different from one another, such as the 1988 songs the researchers deconstructed by Cheap Trick, INXS, and Def Leppard. But then suddenly, in the late 1990s, they discovered, the hits were no longer diverse, and they haven’t been since. Now even when hit songs seem fairly different—such as those by Katy Perry, Eminem, and Lady Gaga in the summer of 2010—their deeper sonic traits (valence, loudness, energy) are actually quite similar. So it isn’t that the most popular new songs now all sound like old songs, but that they all fundamentally sound the same, like one another, thus satisfying the deeper need driving nostalgia—for reassuring familiarity, nothing too strange or challenging.