Why we need bad music

Is bad music real

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1:10Instagram reels the other day, and I found this creator who has a whole series that she calls testing the quote, I love all music person. We know these people, they're like, oh, I love every type of music. This person is like, really? Do you love this song? Okay, that song is Taylor the Latte Boy by Kristen Chenoweth, and that creator is Nigerian Bombshell.

1:53And, you know, this stopped me in my tracks, Charlie, because not only had I never heard that song before, but I feel like this raised a question that you and I have perennially debated over the course of 500 episodes of the show. Can you really love all music, or is some music just bad? Welcome to Switched On Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding.

2:28And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So that's the question. Is there such a thing as bad music, and how do we know it when we hear it? I feel like this is something that I have an internal battle with. Yeah. Here's what I mean. On one hand, I feel like one of the powerful lessons from making this show is that all music is created equal, and everyone loves a certain song for a reason. And learning that reason is a way to access our collective humanity in a powerful way.

3:01Sounds nice. And yet, deep inside me, deep in my gut, you know, in my small intestine, in my pancreas, I cannot deny that I hear certain songs and think to myself, yeah, that's bad. So, Charlie, how do we reconcile this? How can we finally come to a conclusion once and for all? Is there no bad music? I feel like there's a lot of ways that we can test this question, but perhaps we can begin

3:33with a piece of music. This is called The Most Unwanted Song by Komar and Melamed and Dave Soldier.

The most unwanted song

3:39Hey, everybody! It's Labor Day! Labor Day! Labor Day! Schools are closed and schools are open! Labor Day! All the way! To all your shopping! At Walmart! Oh, yeah. Accordion. But what is this? What are we listening to? This is The Most Unwanted Song. It was constructed based off of information from a poll by the DIA Art Foundation,

4:10who, after speaking to 500 people, found that listeners most hated the following sounds. Bagpipes, a children's choir, an opera singer rapping, cowboy music, and basically this contains all of these sounds and more of the things that people most dislike. Wow. What was your reaction? I have an intense allergy to children's choirs, so that was a tough listen. At the same time, I think the novelty of it kind of made me enjoy it

4:41and, like, ignited a certain curiosity in me as, like, what is happening here? I need to hear more. Okay, so a bit of a mixed reaction to The Most Unwanted Song. Yeah. I feel like there are a lot of ways that we could approach the issue of bad music. Here's what I propose, though. Okay. I want to look at today a bit about how you and I listen. This is really about reflecting on the 500th episode of our show. Yes. But in thinking about our relationship to so-called bad music, there's a whole history of other people who have attempted this question,

5:14and there are a lot of modern critics who have something to say. And so throughout our episode, I'm going to play you clips from critics, friends of the show, musicians who have their say about bad music. I wanted to talk about this with you, though, because I feel like it's a real issue for the two of us.

The book writing argument

5:33Okay, Charlie, are you talking about the book incident right now? The book incident. Ah, yes. When we were literally sitting across from each other at a desk writing our 2019 book from Oxford University Press, which on pop, how popular music works and why it matters. Yeah. And we were getting into one of our rare arguments. Over whether bad music was actually a thing or not. I feel like you at the time were really obstinate and just being like, no, no such thing as bad music. And I was like, come on, man.

6:04I had more of that like gut reaction. Like, of course there's bad music. There's things that really irk me. And yet you, sir, on multiple episodes of our show in the series Learning to Love. Yeah. Have maybe ventured into the world of vitriol. Yes. We have looked at acts like The Killers, Oasis, Coldplay, where things got maybe a little bit negative and the listener reaction was very strong. We received email saying, whoa, whoa, whoa. Why are you going hard on these folks? You rarely go negative. That's not what we like.

6:34So much of the project of our show has been taking music that historically has been marginalized for some reason and raising it up. But on the other hand, we can't deny those feelings we have. When we listen to a song, we just go, oh, that's tough. And I do have that feeling when I listen to The Killers. And I'm sorry, everyone, that hasn't changed. Oh, interesting. So you did not learn to love. Maybe we will change how we listen by the end of today. You are not alone in that feeling. One of our first critics that I polled was our producer,

7:06Rihanna Cruz. And I want to include their voice in this conversation. So on the topic of if there's bad music or not, I used to believe that there was no such thing as bad music. That music, even if it wasn't for me, was for somebody. And ultimately, because of that, had something to love within it, even if I didn't see it. However, you know, over the past few years of being a professional critic, I have unfortunately changed my opinion. And I do have to say that I believe there is bad music,

7:40that bad music exists in the world, and it is very prevalent. There is so much music that is made every day. There is no way that all of it is good. And I think bad music comes from a place of mediocrity. And a palpable lack of inspiration. I see it a lot from mainstream pop artists, where it just feels kind of phoned in. There's really no light behind the song or what we're hearing.

8:12You know, I think AI music is inherently bad music, because it doesn't have a human inspiration on the other side of the line. And I think as we careen towards a slop-filled culture, more and more bad music will come across our plates. And we got to choose whether or not to eat it. You got to eat that slop, Nate? I mean, I'm not surprised to hear this take coming from the producer of an episode we titled Drake's Slop Era. And Rihanna also seems to be zeroing on a certain type of badness here,

8:46which is music that isn't made for the right reasons, perhaps. Hmm. Yeah. I really admire Rihanna for communicating that they can change their mind. I think that's a big part of being a critic, and being a listener at all, is just listening and developing and changing your mind about things over time.

Music used for harm

9:04I think, though, we can probably all agree on one thing, that we can just sort of carve out, as like, yes, there is bad music when music is used for harm, right? There is music that has been used for fascist propaganda. There has been music that has been used as instruments of torture. Yes. There is music that is used for, you know, white power and white nationalism. Yeah. And yet, at the same time, the sounds underneath those things might not necessarily be harmful. It's always the context.

9:35I mean, take, for example, in the world of, like, punk music that has been used by white nationalists, you could hear guitars in a harmful punk song, and yet you could go to another group like Black Flag who are rooted in anti-authoritarianism and individuality, where they're using the same sounds. The harm isn't from the sound. I think it's often from the context, how it's used, how it's deployed, and what the artist intends to do with it. So, yes, there is music which is absolutely used for harm,

10:06but I don't think that that is largely what we are thinking about when we're talking about bad music. No, I think we're more interested in the aesthetics of bad than the sort of socio-political impact of bad music. Yeah. And to be fair, there is a long history of people wrestling with this issue of aesthetics, of what is good and bad. I'm sure we could go back to pre-history, but you can look to the Enlightenment era.

10:37Philosophers like Hume and Kant are debating, you know, what is beautiful? What is actually... Is there anything that is not subjective about the aesthetics of art and music? And they basically end up in this place of like, yeah, yeah, subjective. Maybe you can use some expertise and some effective judgment to make a determination. But part of my favorite part of the history of looking at this question of, is music good or bad? Are all of the people who have fumbled along the way.

Historical critics getting it wrong

11:06Who? Like who? Do you know Edward Hanslick? I did not expect this conversation to lead to the founder of the idea of absolute music, Edward Hanslick. Tell me about absolute music. Well, this was a moment in the 19th century when there was this big debate over whether instrumental music or vocal music was better, which is a funny thing. I mean, it tells you about like what people's priorities were in the romantic era. You know, this was like a big, you know, a hot button issue.

11:38And this guy, Edward Hanslick, was firmly on the side that instrumental music was superior to vocal music and that people should be listening to symphonies and not operas because instrumental music challenged you as a listener to engage with the purely intellectual appreciation of shifting sounds. It required you as an interpreter to do more work, to create meaning out of just these abstract sounds.

12:11And yet he was not supportive of all symphonic music. He was quite the critic. When he heard Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D, this is, he's writing back in 1881, this is what he has to say about the finale, the Allegro. He says that music can exist which stinks to the ear.

12:37Damn, I didn't know Hanslick was such a savage. But I mean, I mean, listen to this. It's trash, obviously. It's, ugh, ugh. It's just like making me ill to listen to, really. How dare Tchaikovsky. This review was captured in a book called The Lexicon of Musical Invective from 1953. Written by Nicholas Slomensky. In the book, Slomensky says that Hanslick's review called this portion of the Violin Concerto

13:08like a drunken Russian village festival. Yeah, so a little bit of xenophobia mixed in there as well. I think what we have here is Hanslick falling for a trope of bad criticism, which is just revealing your own cultural bias. But there's all kinds of when taste goes wrong, if you will. In Rolling Stone back in 1969, John Mendelsohn panned the first Led Zeppelin album. Oh, wow. He said that it offers little that its twin,

13:38the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago. He says that Jimmy Page is a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs and in their willingness to waste their considerable talent on unworthy material, the Zeppelin has produced an album which is sadly reminiscent of Truth. Truth? What does that mean? Truth here is capitalized. This is the album by the Jeff Beck Group. So this is another thing we can fall into calling music bad, which is to say, well, somebody already did it better.

14:09Yeah. Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck, obviously both acclaimed, but I believe that Led Zeppelin 1 is often top of the ranks of one of the more important albums. So that review is a really stunning example of how collective taste might change over time. Yeah. And, you know, at a certain point in the history of rock and roll, there are critics who say that, you know, rock music has not only deteriorated, but that it is rotting people's minds. The critic Alan Bloom in 1987 in the closing of The American Mind

14:41says that rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal to sexual desire. Love, not Eros, but sexual desire, undeveloped and untortured. It reaches kids with all the public authority of the entertainment industry. Oh, I love just a little dose of classic moral panic about rock and roll. That's a great vintage, yeah. And yet, of course, writing in 1987, this is sort of the era of hair metal, which is about to completely transform

15:12into grunge and alternative that will take over the rock charts for the next decade. And since the 2000s, rock music has had very little impact commercially. Yes, it's been supplanted by other genres like hip-hop and now country. So there's no shortage of critics who have gotten it wrong throughout history, and we haven't even gotten to talk about Theodore Adorno. That's going to have to be for another episode. Instead, I want to hand the mic to one of my favorite critics. Hi, this is Chris Malanfi,

15:43host of the Hit Parade podcast and friend of Switched on Pop. Happy 500th, guys. Does bad music exist? Of course it does, as long as Bon Jovi music exists. But seriously, one of my favorite quotes about pop music and bad songs comes from the book The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time, in which the two authors, Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell, write, quote, rock and roll is unlike most other pop culture forms in that there is no consensus

16:15as to who the lowliest practitioners are, unquote. So, for example, I happen to think Four Non Blondes' What's Up is very probably the worst pop hit of the 1990s. However, in the 21st century, that song has emerged as a top karaoke favorite, especially among millennial and Zoomer women. Or, I can tell you I hate Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville, and indeed most of his Irv. But Buffett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

16:47a couple of years ago. Conversely, I've seen polls of worst songs that list Hanson's 1997 number one hit, Mbop, as one of the worst songs of all time. But I consider that song a minor pop masterpiece. And by the way, most poptimist critics agree. So, no consensus in pop music, just like those two critics said. And they wrote that in 1991, before the internet was a thing, before we could broadcast our opinions easily to the world.

17:20So, really, it has always been thus, as long as I've been following pop music and the charts. As a woman with a loud voice once sang, that's what's going on. So, Chris is brilliant, and yet, I feel like his message disproved his own hypothesis. Oh. Right? He says there is absolutely bad music, and no one can agree on what it is. Thus, is there actually bad music?

17:51You know, I think that this raises the question of, what does it mean when we say something is bad music? Like, who is doing the policing here? And, there is a great amount of writing dedicated to this question of, what does it mean when we call something bad? Hmm.

Class and taste in sociology

18:12There is the classic Pierre Bourdieu's distinction, a social critique of the judgment of taste, which I learned about via Carl Wilson, the great music critic at Slate, in his book, Let's Talk About Love. Yes. And, basically, Bourdieu says that, when we classify music, what we're really doing is classifying the person doing the classifying. Hmm. So, here's what Bourdieu really means. In 1960, he puts together this survey of over 1,200 French people,

18:43and he asked them to name their favorite pieces of music sorted by their class and education. And what he found is that 65% of working class respondents with no diploma picked the piece The Blue Danube. The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss.

19:09Classic banger. Oh, yeah. I feel like I saw this in a lot of Looney Tunes growing up. I just have to say, I love the image of, like, a hard-working miner coming back from his shift and just, like, putting Strauss on the turntable. But I'm sure that is what people were listening to back then. Yeah. In comparison, though, only 11% of graduates of top schools chose The Blue Danube. They instead preferred music like Bach's well-tempered clavier. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

19:40this is music that reflects your bourgeois sensibility and acumen exactly i mean it's kind of funny to debate these things now because the role of classical music has so deeply changed both these are very popular pieces but uh when this study was done it basically was showing that

20:10those who maybe had more education maybe piano lessons that taught the value of these preludes and the fugues that bach wrote uh showed that your preference uh your preferences basically could sort you into your into your background and for a long time this held up this idea that highbrow taste snobbery basically could determine you know what was good and bad and you would be right because you know by your class and by your upbringing you could tell what was good and bad and yet this all gets disrupted uh in the era of globalization neoliberalism uh there is a study called

20:47changing highbrow taste from 1996 by richard peterson and roger kern who look at this question of how the new elite status symbol is no longer to be a snob of what is good and bad but instead to be an omnivore of culture ooh interesting so they put together a study that compared the u.s arts survey from 1982 to 1992 looking at people whose favorite music was classical or opera and what they found is that in 10 years those highbrow classical and opera heads started to enjoy more frequently so-called

21:21lowbrow music genres like country bluegrass gospel and blues the point being that elite status moved it flipped from being something about snobbishness to now you have to like everything wow and yet in that very same year 1996 bethany bryson puts out this paper anything but heavy metal that examines not what people like but instead a survey of what people dislike and amongst the most musically tolerant people

21:52there were four genres in particular that were still disliked rap heavy metal country in gospel sort of saying that those who dislike music there still is some kind of classism built into it because she calls these the genres with the least educated audiences so broad taste can be a status marker but there is still what she calls multicultural capital you have to know the right stuff and if you do it reinforces your class-based exclusions that's fascinating because i do sense that things have

22:28changed a bit since we were kids where you really sort of allied yourself with one style of music one genre made that your identity to a pretty strong degree made that the way you dress the people you hung out with the things you did and i don't see that as much for better or worse i don't see you know punks and goths and uh people who whose whole identity is wrapped around their musical taste and maybe that's because of this omnivorous tendency we have now i feel like today in the idea of like

23:02do you know what is good and bad it's become much more complicated you have to listen to everything but there's also the sort of like sense that you have to listen to the right everything there's a difference between kendra kumar who's won a pulitzer versus lil yachty who has not yeah interesting i mean at this juncture in our journey to the center of bad music i feel like we've reached the same destination in another way which is what do you mean well that any perceived badness is really just masking some kind of bias earlier we were talking maybe about a more kind of you know cultural national

23:38bias yeah now i feel like we're talking about more of a a class-based bias right but we haven't cracked the code of like is there objectively bad music that isn't just a stand-in for like you know some other feeling you have about another sure sure group of people honestly i think it's worth naming that for both of us we are coming from all kinds of biases you know we are of a particular cultural class we are two professors we are trained musicians we have certain listening habits being

24:09musicians like we hear things through that lens where so often you know i think you and i find harmony form production lyric exciting and you know we work inside the culture industry and so that is informing i think how you and i think about what is good and bad and i i think it's important for us to name that i would second that and i would say that's applicable probably to every listener listener and part of your story as a listener is like learning about what those biases are and

24:40recognizing how they shape your listening and allowing yourself to listen beyond that when you can but we're still dancing around this charlie is there bad music i have one critic who absolutely thinks so okay let's hear it hi switched on pop my name is laura snapes and i'm the deputy music editor at the guardian does bad music exist yes bad music exists and i personally find it a great critical pleasure to try and identify it i wouldn't count amateurish out of tune out time music by kids

25:12or people just having fun in their garage as bad music in any way for me bad music is lazy it's nakedly trend chasing it's music that's contemptuous of its audience even it claims to say one thing but actually says nothing at all or maybe it doesn't even realize that across a whole album kind of an unpleasant picture of an artist values and worldview builds up through what they're saying truly bad music or music that it's worth saying is bad usually has some kind of investment behind it whether that's from a label or a publicist who's got notably cool clients where money is being spent

25:43to convince listeners that actually this is good i feel like the latest taylor swift deluxe release just answers this question for you really there was universally bad reviews for lazy songs that all sound like try hard versions of much better older songs that she's made and which everybody knows are just a ploy for chart success and grammy recognition i never want to listen to those four songs again but i can't lie to you i had an amazing time writing about them and witnessing thousands of pop fans put their foot down to say no this is bad music and we deserve better i love hearing from laura snapes one of my favorite writers and critics and this is a great example of where i think we disagree our last

26:19episode on taylor swift we might have been one of the few groups that felt there's some real merit to these songs and i love that she had such a strong and opposite opinion i feel like that helps inform my own understanding of music is reading people who feel differently than me one thing i do totally agree with is the pleasure i get from reading a critic just to rip apart an album i feel like laura should be the editor of the next edition of the lexicon of musical invective for the for the 21st century i i hear some overlap with rihanna's take earlier you know bad music it's

26:58not about a specific sound it's not about someone not being technically proficient you know as laura mentioned it's about people making music for the wrong reasons for for dishonest reasons for even corrupt reasons yeah that's what defines something as bad so on one hand there is an argument to be made that music can be bad because of the artist's intent or how it's marketed the larger story around it and yet i think that there is maybe another reason that music can be called bad that has maybe

27:34more to do with listener and audience taking agency over their music okay earlier we had talked about you know lil yachty yeah there was a great dispute between sort of the older hip-hop heads hating mumble rap you might know the artists pete rock and cl smooth their track they reminisce over you troy from 1992 for example so compare that old school hip-hop flow to lil yachty's 2016 track one night

28:23i know you want this for life taking pictures with all my eyes but i can't have no wife i just want you for the night i know you one showcases rhythmic complexity and lyrical dexterity and has a complex multi-layered sampled beat the other has this sparse instrumentation and a melody and a lyric that

28:58feels like a like a children's nursery rhyme honestly these tracks are so different from one another they feel of totally different types and lil yachty is fine with that back in 2016 he said that you know he couldn't name classic songs by classic rappers like biggie or tupac he called 90s rappers old and washed up in response pete rock mocks him online

29:36calling him a whack rapper i mean no one loves anything more than a rap feud and yet i think this debate isn't about what hip-hop is good and what is bad i think it has a lot more to do with how old are you yeah right lil yachty has gone on to be a generationally important rapper who's made very important recordings and i think that you know if you're of uh gen x millennial you might enjoy old school hip-hop and if you're you know young millennial gen z bumble rap speaks to you is it

30:12so bad that music might divide us by age isn't what rock and roll jazz before that isn't what they did as well absolutely and i'm disappointed because we are back in our same little hole again we are back in a world where bad music is just covering up some other bias we've had cultural national bias we've had uh class bias now we have some kind of age bias some generational bias but it's not about the music itself is it charlie as you say it's really about some other underlying issue that you're concerned

30:47about i think part of this conversation about bias behind it is this this feeling that well music ought to be universal like if we sort of got rid of all of the cultural elements of it it's just music anyway and one of my favorite critics who likes to contend with this issue is caliphacena uh who in his book major labels talks about how music is not about creating a place for everybody to kumbaya music is often about exclusion and by the way i think he's not necessarily meaning that in a negative

31:19way there's no better example than the world of dance music he talks about you know in the world of dance there is literally a gatekeeper there is someone who decides do you get into the party or not based off of do you belong at that party and there are sounds that when you hear them will tell you did you get into that really exclusive place that's no joke adagio for strings by sam loxitan and lonsky

31:59i got it from the berghain techno 2026 playlist berghain of course is like the most exclusive club in berlin and in the world of dance music people call music good or bad as a way of determining what crew are you part of how do you party how do you like to have a good time and i don't know i don't have that much of an issue with that conceptually that's an interesting idea of music being productively exclusive sort of drawing a circle in the sand and saying this is for me and

32:35this is for you and those boundaries can be really productive right dance floors are sometimes about creating a safe space for a marginalized group where they can express themselves without fear of censure or harm so if music needs to exclude to do that in some ways who are we to say that that's a negative thing and one of the ways that it is exclusive is just by saying this is good this is bad this is for me this is not for me okay that's a cool perspective you know as always the answer is found on the dance floor let's go to another perspective though from another one of our critics

33:09who dropped us a video note what's up dudes congratulations on 500 episodes my name is rob harvilla i'm from 60 songs that explain the 90s cole in the 2000s i am too nice in midwestern and sophisticated to hate any songs but i am interested in why other people hate songs i hear a lot of people hate we built this city by jefferson starship you see that show up on a bunch of war songs of all time or war songs of the 80s list and i think people hate that song in part because they they feel

33:41like it's a betrayal like it's inauthentic it's a bunch of 60s rockers bragging about how rock and roll and anti-corporate they are but they it sounds like a cheeseball 80s synth pop jam right it's like 80s stockbroker music so i think that bad music is music that feels like it's lying to you or thinks you're stupid or is just inauthentic in a galling and unforgivable way people also hate cleveland by taylor swift but i'm from cleveland so i think it's fine wow it always comes back to taylor swift

34:15thanks rob that was awesome i'm a big fan of your work and uh yeah and more uh continuity here from rihanna to laura to to rob this idea that music that is inauthentic music that isn't being truthful some for music that that has bad intentions honestly like that's really what marks something as bad i also appreciate that rob was like you know i'm midwestern i don't love calling something

34:46bad but i'm curious about when other people call something bad and i feel like you and i have been kind of avoiding the question of like what is truly bad for us and i feel like that's where we need to go next okay i'm in at t-mobile the new iphone 18 pro is here with a big leap in battery life and you can get it for nothing up front with so many reasons to choose t-mobile you'll want to talk about it i heard at t-mobile you can get iphone 18 pro for nothing up front and get one thousand dollars off pass it on

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Craft and genre mismatches

36:56the first reason i know something is bad is when there's some sort of mismatch of craft basically like the music is working against its own goal and this is something i see most frequently in student music submissions i remember last year a student brought me this song where there was this synth line that was so out of place and i realized oh you're trying to do that like paul jackson jr guitar lick off

37:27of thriller or like daft punk and i could hear that this is what this guy's doing but getting it wrong so i actually recreated uh daft punk's get lucky with the wrong sound in it oh no this sounds horrible here we have this synthesizer that sort of takes over get lucky and it has all of these long echoes on it that muddy up the track yeah even when you get rid of them

38:01it's so clearly the wrong instrument what this song really needs this is good guitars yeah ah oh oh that what what a feeling of relief i experience when those guitars come in just using the wrong sound can be an indicator that you don't quite understand your craft and for me that's bad music okay so that is a compelling category of bad music to me what else you got charles

38:36something that always irks me is a mismatch or misunderstanding of how to perform a specific genre right like in folk music it's completely okay to have pretty rough vocals as long as the storytelling is good a la you know bob dylan neil young opera there's no room for bad vocal technique we got to talk about florence foster jenkins what florence foster jenkins was an american socialite who had a deep love of opera and a

39:10complete inability to sing that did not stop her from self-funding her own tours and even recordings and gradually over time she developed a cult following i feel like her performance of mozart's queen of the night aria is exactly what you're talking about charles one of the most notoriously difficult arias in opera history here's the big note will she hit it

39:42wow amazing amazing ouch that hurts not just bad it literally oh my ears are struggling can't quite get it it's it's and yet it is it's bad and yet it's also kind of wonderful in its way didn't she sell out carnegie hall yeah and and there was a whole movie about her uh starring

40:16meryl streep so she she had her moment for sure which is which kind of makes us question like even though it's bad and bucks the genre convention did it fail it like there's there's i guess there's room for camp even in bad music we can enjoy it because it's bad totally there's a record though that for me i've really struggled with for about 20 years that again is sort of playing the genre convention but is is trying to buck tradition transcend genre in a way that completely fails for me it's a crossover

40:50between two of the biggest blues musicians of all time bb king and eric clapton their 2000 album writing with the king on the cover of the album are these two bluesmen in a cadillac and yet the record sounds like corporate elevator music to me glossy drums modern bass sounds this is too clean of a recording it doesn't have what i thought

41:35would be that like back porch kind of music of these you know two great blues musicians and it's a little antiseptic it's antiseptic yeah okay this record was a hit for many people and yet i'm just like i don't want a blues record to have the best production i want it to sound like two people got together and had an experience together a little more alive if you will okay so we can maybe call something bad when it's not meeting the expectations set by a genre or by the artists

Paul McCartney and Lou Reed

42:12themselves oh here we go yeah how about our good friend paul mccartney oh yeah oh i hate to bring sir paul into this but i guess i guess we can't avoid it what are we talking about we're talking about some some some synthetic wings uh nonsense from the 80s uh actually it is a paul mccartney track not a wings track that i want to bring to the table this is 1980s temporary secretary i want to give so much credit here you know the beatles were some of the first band to bring the

42:56synthesizer into uh pop music they were putting uh the early moog modular onto uh abbey road we hear it on here comes the sun and yet this sort of craftworky style kind of discordant synthesizer it was not loved when it

43:30came out this was not what people wanted from paul it was widely panned right it's funny though how history yeah like arguably a cult classic today in 2014 nme ranked it the 167th greatest song of all time wild 35 years after its release in 2015 paul mccartney finally played it live yeah so bad music can come back around it can become good yeah i now i'm also thinking of like wonderful christmas time which is maybe the most disliked christmas song uh i would say just anecdotally

44:06simply having a wonderful christmas time simply having a wonderful christmas time and yet also is like weirdly beloved at the same time so yeah it's fascinating how the the the worst something gets sometimes it comes around to being you know the most loved as well okay so i brought you paul i brought you bb king eric clapton you know artists that were important to me who haven't always met my expectations do you have any i mean i derive no pleasure from

44:37saying this but uh lou reed oh his 2003 track who am i if reminisces make you frown one thinks of what one hope to be and then faces reality what's what's your problem one thing is the kind of mismatch you were talking about this is lou reed you know the velvet underground and yet i'm hearing all these like glossy synths and like reverberant guitars and it just all sounds too clean and bright

45:14honestly and then this guy has written some of the most hard-hitting lyrics in rock music history and it pains me to hear him say i have to think and stop me now if reminisces make you frown it's like it's it's b it's b league stuff it's it's it's jv i mean the next line one thinks of what one hoped to be isn't that like when you're in middle school and you're trying to write in a very

45:46self-important way yeah like who uses one one would like to do this and we didn't hear this but later in the chorus he sings who made the trees who made the sky who made the storms who made heartbreak i'm like lou you gotta do better than that this sounds like that insane clown posse song about you know how do magnets work it's like water fire air and dirt fucking magnets how do they work and i don't want to talk to a scientist y'all motherfuckers lying and getting me pissed i don't

46:18know i i this one this is a rough one for me because i do love lou reed we have to allow our heroes to make uh not their best music it happens it happens we can't all be hits speaking of not all hits i always say there is obviously a category that has been briefly mentioned here that just universally is not interesting to me right now and that is ai music yes corporate slop all that we were always going to arrive here yeah yeah well we can listen to that taiga album the first gosh the first album to receive a 0.0 from pitchfork

46:50maybe not the first actually i don't know don't quote me on that but but certainly a an outlier you know frankly i actually just don't want to listen to it i'm not interested in ai music right now don't even give them don't even give them the streams right now i have a pretty clear line of just no ai music uh and i also just love critics who have strong tastes strong lines in the sand like our vulture colleague craig jenkins one of the great music writers plus surprise winning music writer i think the question of whether or not music could categorically be like structurally and

47:24qualitatively bad is an always yes for a critic that's an easy one we're sure of ourselves we know we have heard some of the worst stuff on the planet um i also think it can be ontologically bad um like the you know ai generated album that has no authorial intent beyond getting next to something that's streaming really well and skimming off of that under someone else's name thanks craig

47:54ontologically bad i need a tattoo that says that what ontologically meaning like bad in uh a proto sense of like where does this even exist where is it coming from it is it should this be in the world like as a as a as an object that these are the questions that ai music raises absolutely we started our conversation nate about a disagreement whether or not you and i have the same feelings about good and bad music yeah i want to put that to the test i feel like we've we've

48:28established a few things we know to be bad in in our core and yet there's music that i like that i think you will not i've selected a song for you that i hope pushes your buttons and it's not the song buttons by the pussycat dolls my loins are girded so so

49:04so

Primus and the DMV

49:08So that is DMV by Primus. And the bass player and lead singer of Primus, Les Claypool, says, I've been to hell and back, and I call it DMV. Anybody who's been there knows exactly what I mean. The DMV does not get a good rep. You know, people have to wait in long lines. It's hard to get to. And this is a song that is musically unpleasant

49:40about one of the more unpleasant experiences in everyday boring life. How do you feel about DMV, Dr. Sloan? I mean, I love it. You like it? I love it. I love the weird angular slap bass. I love the terse drums. I love the distorted dissident guitar. And I love the lyrics. I mean, I do disagree. I'm a fan of the DMV, you know, personally. What? Yeah, I think it gets a bad rap.

50:10I've only had good experiences. I'm going to be, I'm not even kidding. Do you know the chant that Primus fans yell at Primus? Remind me. Primus sucks! Primus sucks! Primus sucks! Primus sucks! Primus sucks! Oh, yeah. Primus. This is a band that makes music about those... Oh, my God. ...edgy, everyday experiences of life. The places that are uncomfortable, and I think the sounds that they create are dissonant and uncomfortable.

50:42Sometimes music, even when you say it sucks, can feel good. Even the places, the things that are made to make you feel uncomfortable can make you feel something. So, all right. Seems like I have not, I've not presented you bad music. Is it my turn? It's your turn. Okay, here we go.

Iggy Azalea and authenticity

51:14Fancy by Iggy Azalea and Charlie XCX. You know, Iggy Azalea is not an artist that I want to enjoy. And yet you do? Well, I feel like, you know, she really comes about in the era where there is a wider awareness of cultural appropriation and her use of AAVE and the way that she, you know, just severed savagely is happy to embrace black culture while not always sort of naming

51:45her sort of like study appreciation, you know, passing down a tradition. This becomes a big problem for critics in the 2000s when this comes out. And yet, Charlie XCX is on this song. And I know it's super important in blowing her up, but her hook sucks on this song. I'm so fancy. You already know I'm in the fast lane from LA to Tokyo. I hate the melody. I hate at the very end when she says, remember my name about to blow, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm like, oh, that is,

52:16nothing about that feels fancy or fun to me. Yeah, you should throw. I'm so fancy. You already know I'm in the fast lane from LA to Tokyo. I'm so fancy. Can't you taste this, girl? Remember my name. I don't know. It's got that minimalist beat. It's got the swagger and confidence of someone who, you know, she knew it. She was about to blow up.

52:46I mean, it all comes back to this question that all our critics have brought up. You know, bad music is inauthentic. This song starts with the most inauthentic line in rap history. First things first, I'm the realist. No, you're not. You are the least real, actually, perhaps. You are the most inauthentic rapper. And I have no issue with anyone who loves this song. It does have a good beat. A knockoff mustard beat, by the way.

53:16Another ding against this track. Oh, yeah. I don't like this song. I thought you were going to try to convince me of one. I think this is kind of funny. You presented me with a song you really don't like. And I'm a little bit more ambivalent. Someone who's not ambivalent, though, is one of our great friends from the Sam Sanders show, Mr. Sam Sanders. Hello, Switched On Pop. Congratulations on 500 episodes. You know I love y'all so much, and I'm so proud and happy for this momentous achievement for y'all. To the question, does bad music exist?

53:48It must exist. If there's no bad music, there's no good music. If there's no bad music, it would all just be music. We need stuff that's bad to let us know when stuff is good. That said, it's subjective for everybody. I grew up around a bunch of musicians and studied music myself, so I listen for craft. For me, good music means you can sing or play or write better than most people, and I can hear that excellence of craft in your work.

54:22A lot of folks want to hear people who sing just like them or perform music in a way that feels similar to them. I don't know, call me crazy. If I'm buying your music or streaming it, it should sound better than what me and my friends could do. So that's my barometer. My second barometer is physical. The only real way that I think we can start to assess whether music is good or bad for us is to acknowledge how it makes us feel in our bodies. Does this music make me want to move? Does it make me have an emotional reaction?

54:54Does it make me want to play it again? Does it make me hunch up my shoulders? Does it make my body relax? Good music feels a certain way when it hits you, as does bad. And I think that is different for all kinds of people. For some people, death metal gives them the release that they need. For other people, it's like a car alarm or nails on a chalkboard. But the only true measure of whether or not music is good or bad is to gauge the response

55:25that your body has to the music. I know it sounds really woo-woo, but hear me out. Next time you listen to a song, just think about how your body feels hearing it. Also, of course there's bad music. A lot of it. In fact, most music released is bad. But you sift through the bad to find the good, ideally with some help from great music podcasts like Switched on Pop. So if bad music absolutely exists, I think it raises the question, Nate,

55:56going forward, how might you and I and our listeners maybe approach listening to assess that goodness or badness? This is just sort of our Switched on Pop proposal. Here is what I'm thinking. The first is, I hope what we do every week is demonstrate approaching music from a place of curiosity first, not judgment first. Second, think about what is it doing? Using whether it's our training as musicians or professors or just as listeners, just trying to understand, what is that song trying to do?

56:27Then asking, how am I responding to it? Like, what's it doing for me? And is it for me? Where am I in this music? Do I belong in this music? Who is it made for? Finally, I think we can ask, what am I going to do with it? Am I going to meditate on it? Am I going to be interested in it? Am I going to admire it? Am I going to celebrate it? Am I going to make it something, part of my core identity? Or am I going to deject it all out and say, no, this is not for me? I like that. But I need to return to a question that we posed at the very beginning of this.

56:59I feel like we've reached a point now, and Sam, I think, put this very succinctly. Maybe we can agree there is bad music, but there's still that element of subjectivity. Are we going to put to bed the notion that objectively bad music exists? Are we going to just close the book on that once and for all? Is there really a most unwanted song, a song that we universally agree is bad? Can I bring in a heavyweight voice to maybe back that up?

57:30Longtime engineer for Prince, producer, professor of music, Susan Rogers. Whoa. I remember many years ago, my young punk Hollywood roommate said to me, all music is valid if somebody likes it. I think that's a beautiful bit of folk wisdom, and I think it's perfectly true. We can analyze music and say that it's objectively more sophisticated or that it's more original, but I can't believe that we can say it's more good.

58:01I think good and bad are subjective impressions, and truly, if somebody likes it, well, it's good to them, so I guess that makes it good. Damn, that was so beautiful and succinct. I actually have to say that Susan's comment reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from A Midsummer Night's Dream. May I, Charlie? May I quote the bard to you? Please. Can I get some, like, renaissance accompaniment for this one, Brandon? This is Theseus.

58:32After he sees the terrible play put on by Bottom and his, you know, cronies, instead of criticizing it, he says this.

58:43The kinder we to give them thanks for nothing. Our sport shall be to take what they mistake, and what poor duty cannot do, noble respect takes it in might, not merit. All I heard was poor duty. You, Charlie, you're so juvenile. Okay, let me, okay, let me break this down for you. What he's saying is, basically, if someone genuinely tries to make something good and really puts the work and thought into it,

59:17our job is to do kind of what Susan says. Why did you try to say this? Who does this resonate with? Yeah. We take it in might, not merit. So, Charlie, I think we've arrived at a moment where I'm ready to put this new philosophy to the test. Okay.

Facing the Killers

59:33I am going to listen to the worst song ever and see if I can't hear it with New Year's. You know what we're talking about, right? It's Human by the Killers. Give me that chorus. Give me that chorus. The one that always makes me break out in hives. You've got to let me go. Are we human?

59:57Or are we dancers?

1:00:01My sign is vital. My hands are cold. And I'm on my knees looking for the answer. Are we human? Or are we dancers? I can't do it. Listen, man, he's confronting the issue of where we belong in the universe and issues of faith. Can't do it. Can't do it, Charlie. I'm not that enlightened.

1:00:31Maybe in another 500 episodes. We'll get there. I don't think this case is closed. I think that song, that song to me, we're right back where we were at the start of this episode. I just, it's bad. There's something about it. I have learned nothing. I have a PhD in music. We've made 500 episodes. Help me here. What's the solution? I love you, even if you don't love that song. I love the people that like that song, even if I don't like it. Like, it's for someone and it's not for me. And that is fine with me.

1:01:03I hear what it's doing. I'm forgetting the last part of your, you know, bad listening breakdown, which is you ultimately decide, is this for me or is it not? Yeah. Okay, great. Okay. It's not for me. You're okay. Okay. But, but what I can't do, this is, this is the learning, is say, no one else can like this. Yeah. Okay. That'd be ridiculous. Okay. There, that's, that's, that's a nice takeaway. Well, I'll try again in 500 episodes, okay?

Credits and wrap up

1:01:32Switched on Pop

Credits and wrap up

1:01:33is produced by Rianna Cruz, edited by Alyssa Soap, engineered by Brian McFarlane, video by Nick Ripps, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb. Our theme music is by Jossie Adams and Zach Tenario of Arc Iris. I just saw them live in concert. It was really good. Yeah. And we're a production of the Vox Media Podcast Network and of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine. You can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod and you can catch us on Netflix if you want to see our faces. Thanks to all the amazing critics and musicians who sent us voice notes. What an embarrassment of riches. In celebrating 500 episodes, if you happen to be watching this right now,

1:02:03you will notice that I have this little Switched on Pop t-shirt on and, you know, got those Switched on Pop mugs. And so if you want to celebrate with us, you can do so by going to Switched on Pop.com slash merch and you can get your own. We'll be back with episode 501 next week. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.