Four Chords: The Other Videos About This Fact & Its Consequences

Last week I played Axis of Awesome's Four Chords Song, a demonstration of how so many well-known popular music songs use the same four chords repeated over and over as the whole of their arrangement. There are others that touch upon this stuff.



This is the Pachelbel Rant, a video performance that went viral a few years back, and uses the same melody-style presentation to make the point.

The other name for this phenomenon is "Sensitive Female Chord Progression", and National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" covered this a while back. You can see for yourself how the music industry recognized this and built upon it to record profits, at the cost of a healthy mainstream artistic music culture. More and more songs, especially those performed by women, are built around those same four chords; men who are not explicitly masculine in their stage persona, such as Justin Bieber, are also pushed in this direction.

This industry manipulation of music, and the pushing of fandoms for specific groups or singers, plays directly in to our sense of identity- and the executives running these corporations also sit on the boards of corporations in related culture industry outlets (film, television, etc.) are hardly above using this power to increase corporate profits (and thus their own power, wealth and influence).

Today's teens screaming for their idols are tomorrow's office drones toiling for their employers; today's idols are tomorrow's speakers for various organizations. The fandom of today becomes the brand-loyal base of tomorrow. (Witness the use of fading or faded celebrities to push political movements of all sorts, from all corners; these groups get those celebrities to push this stuff because it works, and it works well. It's not all bad, either.) There are consequences, now manifesting, to this industry practice; we are unwise to remain ignorant of them.