Princess Stomper deconstructs the Art of the Pop Song

Girls Aloud are one of the few acts to successfully subvert those structures with the wilfully strange ‘The Show’. It still has recognisable verses, choruses and bridges, but just puts them in utterly the wrong order. It manages to stay interesting throughout because each segment changes at precisely the point that you expect it to – it’s just that the actual part of the song that you expect to hear falls into a different place to the one you’re anticipating. It therefore sounds familiar and strange at the same time. It’s the kind of skill that they could pull off because Xenomania had already demonstrated that they knew how to write good songs.

Yes, innovation is important, and perhaps the other trend in music is its stagnation. The combination of weak songwriting with poor structure is particularly toxic – much more frustrating than the dull Boy Band ballads of the previous decade. What we need to see is innovation in the sounds and styles being played using the framework of traditional solid songwriting. That’s when you get the kind of great songs that make people want to make music.

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by Princess Stomper

Princess Stomper is a former magazine contributor and music researcher, who now works in a marketing department for an academic organisation. She lives in the English countryside and runs the Reinspired blog.

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