Ringtones Are Ruining Pop Music

Anyone watching the BET Awards in June may have noticed a suspicious coup in the “Best Collaboration” category. So-called singer T-Pain (above) appeared as a collaborator on four of the five nominated tracks. Perhaps alerted to this loading of the dice, BET left T-Pain’s name off the long list of collaborators on DJ Khaled’s “I’m So Hood (The Remix)” on its BET Awards page.

But collaborate he did, for his presence has been ubiquitous on the pop charts this past year, a beneficiary of the pop production strategy of discovering a gimmick and then saturating the airwaves with it. Lil Jon’s outboard-motor growl was omnipresent in the same way in 2004. He seemed to pop up in half of that year’s hip-hop and R&B songs like an unwanted birthday clown.

But Lil Jon’s vocal splash did not make as great a ripple. His guttural yelp could not be replicated by many others. The robot-voice effect achieved by T-Pain, on the other hand, is mechanical, created with a pitch distortion device called Auto-Tune. The trick has since been co-opted by Kanye West (for his part in Young Jeezy’s “Put On”) and that other promiscuous collaborator Lil Wayne (whose brittle patter is rendered completely unintelligible by the Auto-Tune on the new T-Pain single “Can’t Believe It”), among many others.

I don’t like the Auto-Tune on its own merits. Suffusing a voice with technology and polish, it turns a singer into a sound effect. T-Pain, who just dropped a new album, brings little vocal personality to any song, which perhaps explains why he always overstates his visual presence attired as a magician pimp drum major. On his website, T-Pain absurdly classifies himself as a soul singer, where he could more accurately be described as a man yodeling lyrics about strippers through a tracheotomy tube. His 2007 single “Buy U a Drank” is to soul what Huey Lewis’s “The Heart of Rock n’ Roll” was to rock and roll. Never mind that T-Pain can’t sing without the Auto-Tune and anyone can sound like him with it.

What I really don’t like about T-Pain and his Auto-Tune, however, are that they epitomize a new kind of pop song, designed not for radio or iPod play, but for the twee, jangly speakers of a cell phone.

above: Melodyne auto-tune plug in for Cubase (from HERE)

Auto-Tuned vocals sound great in ringtone form—high-pitched, tinny, thin, and artificially inflected. That the climbing popularity of ringtones would influence the pop charts was inevitable, of course. The tide that only a few years ago allowed cell phones to mimic radios has begun to wash back. Now, ironically, at a time when sound technology has never been better, much of pop music is being laid out on the Procrustean bed of shrill, weak, handheld speakers. This year’s Top 40 fare was light on sonorous bass beats and drop-tuned guitars, since low, weighty sounds are flattened in ringtones anyway. Instead we had zippy, reedy synthesizers and the snigger of hi-hat cymbals. Missing also, at least among new artists, were the fluttering melismas of the likes of Beyonce and Mariah Carey, since no cell phone on the market yet can project that kind of vocal fullness. Rihanna and Katy Perry just don’t work the octaves the same way, and they don’t need to.

But the constraints of cell speaker timbre are only the most obvious limiting factor in pop songwriting, and also the least consequential. After all, the quality of cell phone speakers may improve.

A look back at many of the high-charting singles of the past year or so reveals a spate of songs that actually sound like phones. Some have instrumentals that mimic the polyphonic ringtones of distant 2005. Consider, for example, the boops and beeps marching up and down in Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” or Three 6 Mafia’s “Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body).” Other hits seem to mirror the ring-ring echo of truly old-school phones with hooks (discrete, catchy musical phrases) consisting of short, cascading insistences. Here consider Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine” (“Take me away!/ take me away!/ take me away!/ take me away!”), Chris Brown’s “Kiss Kiss,” (“Lovin’ lovin’/ lovin’ lovin’/ kiss kiss/ kiss kiss.”), or, most recently, Ne-Yo’s “Closer” (Come closer/ come closer/ come closer/ come closer… I just can’t stop/ I just can’t stop/ I just can’t stop/ I just can’t stop.”). Nearly all these ringtone-friendly songs are partitioned so that there are as many hooks as possible in each chorus, which creates more break points at which a listener can cut off the tone and answer her call. This placates the same impulse that makes you idle your car for a moment and wait for a song on the radio to play out a phrase before you turn off the ignition. Something strikes me as sinisterly Pavlovian about all this. When I hear these songs, my brain looks for a phone to pick up.

above: Ne-Yo hears a familiar ringtone, attempts to get closer (from HERE)

The trend is more annoying than alarming, though. It’s a shame to see how ringtones have effectively dumped unusual time signatures, discordances, and other nuanced or challenging sound textures out of the pop toolbox. But what really deserves doomsaying is the way ringtones have straitjacketed pop singles into a structure that privileges chorus over verse and catchiness over content.

In a very unscientific study, I timed the choruses of twelve R&B songs that received heavy radio and ringtone rotation this year. They fell between twenty-five and thirty-two seconds, with twenty-nine being the median. The chorus is usually the part of the song excerpted for a ringtone, and, as it happens, the typical ringtone chirps for about thirty seconds. The popularization of ringtones is encouraging songwriters to work in the thirty-second medium of the ringtone rather than that of the two-to-four minute radio single.

While the medium may not be the message—no one’s wondering why there are so many songs about Verizon—it certainly clips its wings. More and more singles, especially in rap and R&B, are being structured to showcase chorus and hook riffs, while sloppy and nondescript verses merely buttress them. The verse portions of many songs are neglected because they have become filler: all a single needs to push sales and downloads is a catchy thirty-second clip that can be easily pinched from the rest of the song and dropped into the pockets of fourteen-year-olds. The ultimate victim is the quality of lyrics. Since chorus lyrics, even in the best of pop songs, are often kept simple and repetitive and verse lyrics no longer matter as much, there is little incentive for producers to work with creative songwriters.

There have always been frivolous and stupid songs, but the issue here is different. When it is unimportant to have lyrical continuity that spans more than thirty seconds of a given song, what results are songs about nothing, stuffed with non-sequiturs and nonsense phrases played off as slang. This tendency has been ably mocked before in its worst offenders—consider Alanis Morissette’s cover of “My Humps” or this spoken-word rendition of “Buy U a Drank”—but such lyrical lassitude now seems to be par for the course. Here’s the first half of Flo Rida’s (above) “In the Ayer,” an aggressively average single that has been high on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Ringtone charts for months:

[Chorus: Will.I.Am ][X2]
Oh hot damn, this is my jam
Keep me partying till the A.M.
Y’all don’t understand, make me throw my hands
In the ayer, ay, ayer, ayer, ay, ayer.

[Verse 1: Flo Rida ]
Hey this is my jam
Y’all don’t understand
I’ll make you understand
What’s pumpin’ in my CD player (player)
Party all night like yayer (yayer)
Shawty got a hand in the ayer (ayer)
Make me want to take it dayer
Then I go, here I go, here is my song
DJ bring it back, come in my zone
I get paid for them couple bones
The next wop until the early morn
I need that crunk when I’m up in the club
Even my when my Chevy pull up on them dubs
Give me that drop yellow waist like a drug
Li’l mama hot and she might show me love
Oh hot damn celebrate to the A.M.
I love it so much it got me sayin’

[Chorus: Will.I.Am/Fergie ][X2]

The chorus is repeated twice before and after the first verse, and the verse itself is half lifted from the chorus and half meaningless phrases spit out of a generic party rap lyric generator in random order. Even the near-canonized Lil Wayne trades in suture and disjuncture—his rhymes are tied together by wordplay and flow but divorced from one another in any overarching narrative sense. Some think it works for Wayne, but most other rappers and singers simply have neither the inspiration nor the motivation to say anything coherent at all. Only that thirty-second lode really matters.

It was not thus always for chart-toppers. R. Kelly’s “Ignition” flitted along the conceit that women and cars share some surprising similarities, both anatomical and temperamental. Catullus he is not, but Kelly’s megahit is the sum of its parts rather than just a mess of parts. That was 2003. Same can be said of Nelly’s “Grillz,” which, glittering with long-distance puns (“more karats than a salad”), tropes on dental accoutrements about as poetically as possible. That was 2005.

Then, writing a single with the heart of a ringtone would have still seemed like a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario. Now, when artists have begun releasing albums of only ringtones and hundreds of ringtones have been certified platinum (one million downloads) by the RIAA, it seems like good business sense.

above: fellow auto-tune lovers T-Pain and Kanye West swear that their Hawaiian tiki idol brings them good luck and tons of ringtone sales (from HERE)

Despite T-Pain’s coming album release, he and his Auto-Tune will no doubt soon be abandoned by the faithless tastes of pop listeners. But as far as the ringtonification of pop music, the worst is yet to come. Enter ringback tones.

Mobile entertainment sources trumpet that by 2010, ringback tones will outsell ringtones. A ringback tone, if you’re behind the curve, is the sound that you hear on the other end of the line when you call someone else’s phone. Now, most lines usually just play a dialing sound until the receiver picks up. Ringback tones aim to replace that dialing sound with a song clip of the dialed party’s choice. So, like ringtones, ringback tones are thirty-second song bites (that is the length of time most phones ring before going to voicemail) of poor sound quality. Unlike ringtones, however, you, the caller, will have no choice but to listen to them if you wish to reach the person you’re calling.

How will this new phenomenon affect pop music production? Well, it will continue to promote the high registers and light sounds that weak speakers carry best. And it can only amp up the premium for catchy hooks, since ringback tones are unique in their ability to aurally bludgeon a captive audience. You can’t shuffle past the song or change the station. Musicians have thirty seconds of your undivided attention to lodge their songs in your cortex. The imperative of the thirty-second clip will only serve to promote the reigning chorus-dominated song structure as the most profitable one.

Ringback tones will also continue to drive demand for those tunes that speak for something deep and central to a person’s being, the types of songs people think emblematize them. Because I Got High” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” are two such demographic anthems that already rake in heaps of ringtone profits (though ringback tone users will want to be prudent in selecting what tunes will serenade their mothers and job interviewers on the other end of the line). Could the ringback tone usher in a new era of Bruce Springsteen and Twister Sister cash cows? Will you have to hear “Redneck Woman” every time you call Aunt Trudy?

There is some consensus that American pop music is a bit lost right now, and the typical corporate culprits are usually blamed. But with such huge new markets opening up for the distribution of insipid music, expect pop to get worse before it gets better.
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*above Flo Rida picture from HERE; T-Pain with elephant picture from HERE.
**written by Ben O’Donnell.