Today I’d like to chat about why so much modern popular music sucks so bad. (Yeah, I know. Should have been ‘badly’. I don’t care.)

I’m going to try to not be boring, but I realize that not everyone shares my particular obsession with music.

First of all, modern music isn’t recorded in the Sixties (which lasted until about 1976), and that’s three strikes right there.

During the Sixties, the various popular musical genres were tossed into a blender which was then set on ‘Shred’. Musicians assumed control of their product in a way that hadn’t been seen before. Radio stations weren’t trapped in the rigid formats that they now are, and music could easily cross boundaries that are now almost impenetrable, resulting in an explosion of hybrid vigor that is rare today.

There are a myriad of examples of this, but the one that comes to my mind immediately is the Byrds. Their ‘Eight Miles High’ is one of the two or three most intensely psychedelic songs ever recorded, but they also made a classic country album when they cut ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’. Check out this performance of ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’, from that album. It’s transcendental. (And Earl Scruggs on banjo proves that this is a pure country song.)

Blues, returned to America by bands such as the Stones, and infused with a rock sensibility, was also central. Dylan scandalously and permanently fucked up acoustic folk music at Newport with the help of the Band, who were subversively wide-ranging themselves. (Dylan also wrote ‘You Ain’t Going Nowhere’. How’s that for cross-pollination?) I could go on for a long time, but that isn’t the focus of this essay.

Increasingly, as the record labels conglomerated and merged, the bean-counters took control and the focus shifted to making money more greedily than ever, so that music became even more product than art. Bands no longer get a chance to learn their craft and build a fan base. They better hit a home run within their first few albums, or they’re out of the game.

As the Sixties drew to a close, in 1976, musicians began to once again lose control of their music. Bad things happened.

Along came Pro Tools, and, shortly thereafter AutoTune, and it became possible to hone and rearrange and retune and clean up songs, down to the millisecond level, until all the breath and life and glorious imperfection has been wrung from them.

Back in prehistoric times, when vinyl records roamed the earth, there was a limit on how loud they could be at any given place on the volume slider. Too loud, especially in the bass area, and the grooves in the record would be so deep that the needle would bounce out of them. The rise of CDs and digital music in general ended that limit.

These factors all converged, and the Loudness Wars started.

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Psycho-acoustically speaking, louder sounds better to our ears. Up to a certain point.

Artists and record labels began making their music louder and louder to compete in the market place against their rivals’ ever-louder (and thus ‘better’) music, and it spiraled out of control. They use excuses like saying that consumers demand it, and that we now listen to music as background sound in noisy environments. They might even be right about those factors, but they’ve still wrecked a lot of music in the process.

CDs have a dynamic range of 96 decibels (dB). That is the range between the quietest sound they can record and the loudest. Sound doubles in loudness every six dB. Absolute saturation happens at digital 0db. Nothing louder is possible. A song will have an average level, with different sounds and passages being perceivable as louder or quieter. Most vinyl recordings averaged at about -18 dB loudness. Therefore, there was lots of room, in both directions, for louder or quieter music in a song.

Modern major-label music often averages under -9 db. About three times as loud. And these songs don’t have quiet passages.

I know this sounds like immaterial geekness, but it’s crucial.

Dynamics are among the most important ways that emotion, subtlety, and artistry are communicated in sound. Musicians refer to this as ‘touch’.

The way you get to higher average loudness is by destroying the dynamics of the sound. There are fewer and fewer differences between the loudest and quietest passages. The term used is ‘squashed’. Squashing also can destroy tone, by mucking up the EQ balance.

You achieve squashing by applying compressors to the sound, both on the various instrumental and vocal tracks, and on the final master track where all the others are combined. Paradoxically, a compressor works by making the loudest part of a signal quieter, giving you more room at the top. But then, you can turn up the now-constricted signal to an even louder average before the maximum loudness hits 0 db again.

At the very end of the signal chain, you can then apply a ‘brick-wall limiter’. This is a specialized compressor that looks ahead, before the signal plays, and squashes it however much is needed, as it’s played, to prevent it from going over 0db. This lets you turn up the average level of the sound even louder. It also destroys transients, those brief initial attack parts of a sound that spike upward, and that so often define the character of an instrument, especially percussive ones, such as drums and guitars. There are some tricks to minimize this destruction, but they often result in ugly distortion.

Compression and limiting can be good, by leveling out a signal with erratic loudness, bringing up delicious overtones, making the vocal sit more smoothly in the track, and so on.

Overused, compression and limiting turns music into mush, and that’s where we live today.

Even worse, radio stations strap yet another compressor on the song, to make it louder and be at the same level as all the other songs they play.

Some mastering engineers, the people who put the final touch on recordings, are rebelling against this trend by refusing to master for extreme loudness. They get less business than they used to.

MP3s make it all worse, because this is a file format that loses detail anyhow, in the interest of making CD-format songs one-tenth as large as they were originally.

There’s a fair amount of anecdotal evidence that many younger listeners no longer actually listen closely to their music. It’s just the background soundtrack to their lives. Another product to be consumed. And a lot of older listeners don’t try out new music, partly because much of it isn’t to their taste, but partly because they grew up with much more discriminating ears. Lots of older albums are now being remastered for loudness, for the modern consumer.

Increasingly, this insane loudness sounds normal to us. We’re losing our ability to discriminate, because it’s all we’re presented with.

Much of the pros and cons regarding loudness are arguable, and Sturgeon’s Law always holds anyhow.

But it still sucks. Bad.

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For personal examples, here is the stereo wave form for Brad’s mix of ‘Charlie Watts’, with my mix for comparison directly beneath it. HIs are the grey spiky froms on the green background. Mine are the dark green spiky things on the grey background. The lines at the edges are 0db.

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Remember that these are MP3s, and therefore detail is already degraded. I tried hard to not hurt the song with over-compression, and you can see that there is still some room at the top. The peaks are much closer to 0 decibel, and the skinnier, quieter parts of the waveform are thicker, or louder.

Next, we have a sample of the MP3 waveform for my song ‘Do Me Good’, once you get past the intro. Mine is the grey not-so-spikey things on the teeny green background. Mine is about 6db louder, on average, than my hot mix of ‘Charlie Watts’. It has a lot more bass in it, which is where a lot of sonic energy lives.

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Notice how the whole damn thing is near 0 db throughout. I deliberately squashed the hell out of this one, and applied multiple saturators on top of that. I actually think it works pretty well for this song. If you look at the wave form, you can tell that there’s room for even more loudness. The unused headroom is the green parts.

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At the top of this post, the clickable pic leads to the video for another of the songs that I used for morning wake-up when I was all gimped. It’s the normal mix of David Usher’s ‘Black Black Heart Version 2’. Frustratingly, I can’t find a web-based version of the hot remix that I listen to, so I’ve uploaded a chorus for comparison to the vid’s loudness:

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bbhsample.mp3

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I’m sure there are louder songs, but I haven’t heard them. I love this song. Not for its dynamic range, but because it’s LOUD.

Here is its stereo wave-form. By now, you should be able to interpret what’s going on with it. I’m not sure what color the background is, because there’s so little of it visible.

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