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12 Sep 11 | Re: Social media and the wider cultural sphere

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

Posted by MILLICENT BULSTRODE at 21:20

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