“The one thing I noticed,” he told me, “is that they have ambiguous key centers.” What’s an ambiguous key center?
Pallett is a brilliant pop music theorist who is a frequent Arcade Fire collaborator and an art-pop auteur. I couldn’t figure it out, so I called Owen Pallett and asked him to listen to both. (Like other songs mentioned in this piece, “Sorry” was technically released in 2015, but it remained at or near the top of the charts for a good chunk of this year, which makes it a 2016 hit for the purposes of this exercise.) Despite being performed, written, and produced by entirely different people, there was something in the chord structure that made the two songs sound the same. I first noticed the 2016 tone in the Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” featuring Halsey, when it played immediately after Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” on a playlist I was creating.
What’s so interesting about 2016’s pop hits, though, is that so many songs with this tone (and there are a lot of them) get there through the same exact music theory principle. In 2008, that tone was pure optimism, with songs like Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and Colbie Caillat’s “Bubbly.” In 2015, the songs were minor-key and kind of frantic: songs like Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space,” and Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.” This year, the songs are even more similar: They all sound like songs for dancing and crying, songs whose uncertainty could go on for a minute or for 40. Every year, the songs that become staples on the American Top 40 charts have a tone.
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