THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021 67
soon delivers a succinct definition: “Text
painting is where something that hap-
pens lyrically is mirrored musically—that
the musical form resonates along with
whatever the message of the song is.”
A typical “Switched On Pop” episode
pairs a contemporary hit with a musi-
cal topic—modal scales, descending bass
lines, modulations, and so on. The strat-
egy that Sloan used when he taught har-
mony by way of “Call Me Maybe” re-
mains in play. Because the songs are so
familiar to much of the audience, the
hosts can wallow in technical lingo with-
out fear of losing people. A sly bait and
switch is at work: the conversation often
wanders far from the song in question,
ranging across pop-music history or delv-
ing into the classical past. For me, the
switch operated in the opposite direc-
tion. For the sake of listening to Sloan
and Harding musicologically jabber away,
I received an education in the myster-
ies of the modern Top Forty.
Somewhat at random, I clicked on a
2019 episode that scrutinizes “If I Can’t
Have You,” a song by the young Cana-
dian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes,
who was known to me mainly as an un-
derwear model. The topic was declama-
tion—the art of setting texts to music in
a way that follows the rhythms and the
stresses of speech. The general rule is
that songwriters should imitate spoken
language as closely as possible, but the
rule can be bent. Sloan notes that Tay-
lor Swift, in “You Need to Calm Down,”
sings “some-bo-dy,” while Whitney
Houston and Freddie Mercury, render-
ing the same word, waver between em-
phasizing the first syllable and empha-
sizing the second. Harding expresses
distress over Beyoncé’s “Sand-cas-tles.”
The conversation then spirals back in
time to Handel’s “Messiah,” which con-
tains the peculiar prosody “in-cor-rup-
ti-ble,” and eventually returns to Mendes,
who is found to practice nearly impec-
cable declamation.
“Switched On Pop” delights in such
detours. The episode that assesses Tim-
berlake’s text painting takes in Bernart
de Ventadorn’s twelfth-century trouba-
dour song “Can vei la lauzeta mover”
(“When I see the lark beat its wings”).
A look back at Queen’s “We Are the
Champions” includes a digression on
the operatic cadenza. A survey of musi-
cal selections from the Netf lix series
“Bridgerton” becomes happily distracted
by the erotic dimensions of four-handed
piano playing in the nineteenth century.
This isn’t to say that the podcast is en-
tirely a Trojan horse for music-history
lessons. An investigation of the Weeknd’s
monster hit “Blinding Lights” concen-
trates on the song’s eighties-era produc-
tion and dives into an almost line-by-
line reading of its lyrics, pinpointing a
tension between its danceable beats and
its allusions to depression and addiction.
Harding links the ambiguity to the song’s
main harmonic template—a “chord loop”
that sways between darker minor chords
(F, C) and brighter major ones (E-flat,
B-flat). This zest for detail sets Sloan
and Harding apart from most pop com-
mentators now working.A
s a persnickety classical-music critic,
I inevitably had some issues with
the Beethoven series, which is called
“The 5th.” The first two episodes con-
sist of a movement-by-movement ac-
count of the symphony, and, as I lis-
tened to Sloan and Harding banter over
the score, I thought of “New Horizons
in Music Appreciation,” a brilliant skit
by the composer-comedian Peter Schick-
ele, in which the Fifth is narrated in
sports-announcer style. (“And they’re
off, with a four-note theme.”) Still, they
efficiently lay out the piece’s structure,
with apt commentary from members of
the New York Philharmonic, which col-
laborated on the series.
In the third installment, the guys
confront the posthumous cult of Bee-
thoven, the ossification of the canon,
and issues of élitism and racism in clas-
sical music. In September, a stray tweet
about this episode riled up right-wing-
ers on social media, who warned that
podcasters were threatening to “cancel”
Beethoven. If those self-appointed de-
fenders of Western civilization had lis-
tened to the entire series, they would
have found that the hosts were simply
arguing for Beethoven to be played
alongside newer music. I had my own
reservations about Sloan and Harding’s
narrative. It’s never clear what role the
Fifth itself plays in the undeniable syn-
drome of classical élitism, and when
they merrily catalogue pop-culture riffs
on the symphony’s opening gesture—
Walter Murphy’s disco track “A Fifth
of Beethoven” and the like—they tes-tify to Beethoven’s uncannily wide reach.
What struck me most about “The 5th”
is that it adopts a mode of sociological
critique not often found on “Switched
On Pop.” The show tends to be formal-
ist and apolitical: melodies are melo-
dies, chords are chords, patterns recur
across the centuries. There is, however,
no such thing as “pure music,” as Bee-
thoven’s afterlife makes clear. The issue
surfaces in a fascinating way when Sloan
and Harding address Kanye West’s re-
cent ventures in gospel music. They
begin by explaining that they’ve been
tuning out West of late, making brief
mention of his “maga-embracing” side.
Midway through the episode, they reach
the provisional conclusion that West’s
gospel music merits attention, insofar
as it’s “deconstructing conventions and
norms.” Then they bring on a gospel
authority, the critic Naima Cochrane,
who supplies a much harsher assess-
ment. West is dabbling in gospel, Coch-
rane says, at the same time that he’s
supporting Trump and describing slav-
ery as a choice: “He’s saying things that
are very anti-Black, even in a space that
is modelled after call-and-response tra-
ditions and musical narrative traditions
that go back to slavery.” Sloan and Hard-
ing, in a commendable exercise in self-
critique, allow themselves to be led away
from their initial praise for West’s gos-
pel incursions.
An irony attendant on contemporary
pop is that the discourse around it re-
cycles many of the grandiose formulas
that have long beset classical music. Re-
views of Taylor Swift’s 2020 album “folk-
lore” routinely used the words “genius”
and “masterpiece.” Sloan and Harding
have called Swift “Beethovian.” Such
genuflections may seem less problematic
in pop than they do in classical music,
where the grim weight of European his-
tory looms behind the idolization of
Beethoven and Wagner. Yet American
culture has its own engulfing shadows:
white supremacy has shaped popular
song from the minstrelsy days onward,
and celebrity power mirrors the radical
inequality of the winner-takes-all mar-
ketplace. I’d love to see an intelligent
podcast like “Switched On Pop” push
past the façade of triumphal innocence.
The deepest kind of music appreciation
takes music not as a divinely gifted art
but as an agonizingly human one.