The Trend in Pop Music That Will Never Go Away

In some ways this is sort of a response to the “Why Stitches by Shawn Mendes Is the Worst Thing Ever Written” article written by Chris Hansell. Not a negative response to that article however, it was very good and the song is an abomination like he said, but it inspired me to write about the song and the trend in pop music that will never go away (hey that’s the name of this article).

Many trends die out in popular music, disco and nu-metal are some that come to mind straight away, and more recently there’s the club boom of the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, which has almost died out at this point. In case you think it hasn’t, listen to ‘My House’ by Flo Rida, hardly a banger, I’m sure that guy used to make legitimately fun music. Trends come and go, but no matter how much music progresses or changes in sounds, we’ll never shake off the “young males and their boring acoustic love ballads”, which is a genre that sounds made up, but it’s one that’ll stay for eternity.

‘Stitches’ by Shawn Mendes is one of many bland break up pop songs we’ve heard over the years, and even though the lyrics are filled with overused clichés and Shawn himself couldn’t be recognised in a line-up of attractive boy band members, the masses will always buy into this. It’s really hard to explain why, singers like Shawn Mendes may come and go with nothing unique to offer but they’re successful anyway. There’s a large audience for these “heart on my sleeve” and “girl you broke my heart” kind of songs and it’s quite bizarre that younger audiences take these songs without any question. It’s a basic formula, an accessible song with basic chords and simple lyrics create a hit song. That is why it’s successful, but why exactly does it rule over more interesting or better songs?

Some might think Mendes came out of nowhere, but he’s actually been putting out singles since the end of 2014, his first being ‘Life of the Party’ – a very dull song that made it to 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, and sold fairly well but unless you’re a huge fan of this guy, you won’t remember this song 10 minutes after you’d heard it. He then followed this single up with ‘Something Big’, a bombastic and upbeat song that probably wouldn’t have felt out of place in the charts when ‘Uptown Funk’ was being played 134 times a day on the radio. It actually only charted at 80 in the US despite being an actual pop song, whereas ‘Life of the Party’ really wasn’t.

At this point, the record label probably knew that they needed to release a new single which would do much better; after all, they couldn’t let a young attractive singer go to waste, that would be very out of place for the music industry. The way to do it wa tos release ‘Stitches’, for all the reasons I stated earlier. The most vanilla song he could’ve made became the biggest hit: 4 on the Billboard 100, and number 1 in the UK and other countries. In some ways, this proves that the mainstream want this pandering bullshit over music that’s most likely more interesting to hear.

I’d say this comes down to familiarity. Music like this has been made before so it’ll be successful again. Ed Sheeran could be another example used here. Sure, our favourite ginger has been putting out acoustic music since 2011, but he came back big in 2014 with ‘Sing’, and then followed that up with easily his best song ‘Don’t’. These songs were successful and popular, but they weren’t cutesy enough to be the biggest song of the year.

What was? ‘Thinking Out Loud’, of course, the flavourless love song in which Ed should’ve decided to keep his thoughts to himself. I appreciate the idea of everlasting love, and in music it can work really well, but when it’s this boring I don’t believe it can be possible. The Grammy Award now certifies this song as being the safest song Ed could’ve released. But here we have a musician who has proven to have some real pop talent, yet still managed to prevail with his blandest song.

Another recent example is James Bay, again, an artist that started off fairly well with ‘Hold Back the River’, a very successful song in the UK last year. In the US, however, it seems as though the song has been held back, in favour of his, you guessed it, drab, acoustic-break up anthem, ‘Let It Go’ which isn’t a massive hit as of now, but I’m predicting it will be.

There have been worse offenders here in the past too. ‘I Won’t Give Up’ by Jason Mraz, ‘Let Her Go’ by Passenger, seriously what are those songs. The vocal performances are barely good in those songs as well (Passenger was a leprechaun, right?), so it must be those cliché lyrics that the masses want.

What’s interesting about these songs is that they’re made by artists that aren’t being marketed as very attractive, young males that would have an easy target audience (like a Shawn Mendes), they’re 30+ year olds, that wrote songs that sound like a teenager made them. So, with that in mind, we can only assume that these writers are writing from the perspective of a teenager, to gain more success. A teenager would arguably get more success if the song was theirs. Then you realise that ‘Stitches’ was written by 30 year olds and suddenly this all becomes less genuine. I mentioned the club boom era earlier in this article and songs like those were considered mindless, dumb, and fake, but were they more fake than singing about a love you didn’t experience, in order to sell more copies by appealing to the lowest common denominator, because I’d say that’s worse.

This doesn’t mean to say that teenagers will like a song just because it’s aimed at their age range, that would be unfair to assume, but it’s important to know that relatability in music is very common. Streaming is becoming the norm when listening to music now, and streaming music is being heavily used by young people. With that being said, it’s the sound of the song that matters the most.

You can interpret the lyrics to a song in many ways but really, as long as it sounds good, you’ll listen regardless. It was only a few years ago that people were treating ‘Swimming Pools’ by Kendrick Lamar as a drinking anthem when it’s quite literally the opposite of that, and I’m led to believe some were doing it with ‘Chandelier’ by Sia. This is the same for when lyrics are bad, no matter how many clichés there are in the song, as long as it sounds good, it’s easy to singalong to and catchy, people will like it regardless. Even though ironically songs are built around lyrics, so you’d think they’d be the most important part.

There’ll be more Shawn Mendes’ to come, even if we really don’t want them, but they’re hidden away for now while some middle aged men are writing their songs. Or if they’re not hidden away, they’re already popular but they just haven’t released their clichéd anthem yet, but they will, because this trend will never leave us alone.