66 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
PODCASTDEPT.
CHORD TALK
“Switched On Pop” brings musicology to the Top Forty.BYALEX ROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY SEB AGRESTI
W
hen I was a music-obsessed kid,
in the nineteen-seventies and
eighties, I could easily find radio and
television shows that purported to ex-
plain how classical music worked. Karl
Haas genially elucidated form and style
on “Adventures in Good Music,” and
Leonard Bernstein held forth on PBS
about Beethoven. These were late-pe-
riod examples of a genre known as
music appreciation, which peaked in
the thirties and forties, when Walter
Damrosch, on NBC radio, invented
ditzy ditties for the classics—“This
is/The sym-pho-nee/That Schu-bert
wrote but nev-er fin-ished ...”—and
Aaron Copland had an unlikely best-
seller, “What to Listen for in Music.”
Music appreciation is having a resur-
gence, although the music being appre-
ciated has changed. Early in the twenty-
tens, song-explainer videos began pro-
liferating on the Internet. When podcasts
took off, dissections of the innards of
pop hits were in demand. Now TikTok
has its own pithy army of music theo-
rists. I occasionally checked up on the
trend, usually when musicologists be-
came incensed about something on so-
cial media. In 2016, Vox Media pub-
lished a video claiming to have identi-
fied a “secret chord” that made songs
sound “Christmassy.” This esoteric har-
mony turned out to be a half-diminishedseventh, which has appeared in count-
less pieces across the centuries, Christ-
massy and not.
The podcast “Switched On Pop,”
which began in 2014, offers music ap-
preciation at a higher level. I started lis-
tening in September, when the hosts,
Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, pre-
sented a four-part series on Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony. I almost fled when
Sloan began singing along to the Fifth
in the Damroschian style: the second
theme of the first movement became
“Lit-tle Fräu-lein Hen-ri-et-ta.” But
the earnest enthusiasm of the effort won
me over, and I set about exploring other
episodes, which focus less on Beetho-
ven than on Bieber. I gave up trying to
follow current pop years ago, but I soon
found myself absorbed in disquisitions
on the creative arc of Taylor Swift. Per-
haps the ultimate test of good music
criticism is whether it can keep you in-
terested in music you don’t know, even
in music you don’t think you like.T
he secret chord in “Switched On
Pop” is that the hosts know what
they are talking about. Sloan is an assis-
tant professor of musicology at the Uni-
versity of Southern California, specializing
in pop and jazz. Harding is a songwriter.
Friends from college, they had the idea
for the podcast during a road trip along
the California coast. When Carly Rae
Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” came on the
stereo, Sloan told Harding about how
he’d used the song to teach some stu-
dents the rudiments of music theory.
After losing themselves in an analysis of
the song—or an “overanalysis,” as they
like to say—they decided to record their
conversations.
The basic pedagogical technique of
the podcast might be called mutual man-
splaining. Sloan and Harding take turns
imparting musical basics to each other,
with one adopting a tone of expertise
and the other playing dumb. (“Can you
explain the major/minor chord?”) As the
bantering rhythms of a long-standing
friendship take over, this artifice threat-
ens to collapse. When, in the middle of
a discussion of text painting in Justin
Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!,”
Harding describes the technique as “a
paintbrush that has, like, a word on it,”
Sloan responds, “I think you’re being
Episodes often pair a hit with such musical topics as text painting or modulations. deliberately obtuse.” Indeed, Harding