What is the influence of Twitter on pop music? Sure, Twitter plays its role in promotion, marketing, and keeping in touch with the fans, but I think I have detected a deeper effect as well.
Exhibit A is Club of Rome by brilliant, little-known band the Cads. Listen... rightchere! The Cads are my band of the moment, in fact, and one thing I like is their shining, lightly-worn modernity. They deploy their lyrics in short, economical phrases, separated by instrumental bits that give them time to sink in. Sometimes they repeat a phrase a few times. In case you haven’t picked it up yet, that approach reminds me of Twitter.
I imagine the start of Club of Rome as a Twitter feed that would look something like this:
Neat, huh? And that’s getting on for half the song. (Those aren’t real tweets, I mocked it up). What a good way to write lyrics - and so current!
And so to Exhibit B. We leave the indie world and find ourselves in the mainstream, where a couple of months later the Saturdays (and it wouldn’t do to forget Xenomania) are taking the same approach with their track All Fired Up. The UK’s current number 3 single has Cads-style, Twitterish lyrics that could look a little like this:
Again, those are mocked up, but that’s essentially what the lyrics are - a Twitter feed from a pink smartphone on a Saturday night.
I like this trend a lot. Especially in pop music, traditional verses are often wordy filler that doesn’t even fit much of a tune. Now Twitter is teaching people to be a bit more elegant, that filler is getting stripped out and replaced with hook phrases that in the past would have cropped up only once or twice a song at most, and sometimes not at all. Less blather, more poetry. #ThankyouTwitter
