Minimalism. That’s a word that we’ve read a lot over the last decade. Although not quite as popular as it was a few years ago, the old concept of “less is more” has made some serious damage. Now don’t get me wrong. Many people think of me as a minimalist. While not inaccurate, this statement doesn’t quite paint the whole picture.
For those of you who think minimalism means having only one grey T-shirt and one fork, here’s a quick reminder:
Minimalism is not about numbers. It never was. It only means having enough. Nothing superfluous. Your enough will be very different from my enough, or your cousin’s. And that’s okay. Minimalism doesn’t judge. Has it started feeling like a cult yet? Good. The theory is that you should get rid of everything you don’t use or that doesn’t bring you joy (that’s Marie Kondo’s take on it). It led to some extreme examples online, with people keeping only a tiny number of possessions. That’s the beauty of the internet, I guess. There will always be a more extreme version of something, someone who will take it way too far (lookin’ at you, Reddit).
But I digress.
You get the idea. It’s about doing more with less. Getting rid of unneeded possessions. Why? Because they clutter your life and your mind, leading to decision fatigue. I could write about how I apply these principles in my life, but that’s not what we’re here for, aren’t we? Also, Ryan Bingham already did it pretty well. I recommend watching his infamous TedTalk What’s in your backpack?
What I’m truly interested in is the music. Shocking, I know. So after this somewhat long introduction, let us dive in the matter at hand.
At the very end of the nineties, digital recording became a viable option. Thanks to massive advancements in technology, the industry started to embrace it. Offering more flexibility and lower costs compared to tape, it became the new standard in only a few short years. For the price of a single hard drive you could record hours and hours of music. We were there at last. The promised land was reached.
But after only a decade of this extravaganza, in the early 2010s, a massive change happened. Even though we were finally able to record as many tracks as we wished, the industry went the other way. That’s one thing I love about my job: it’s never boring.
Someone somewhere (or many someones everywhere) started to get tired of that race. Stacking more and more parts was exhilarating at first. However, it complicated the mixing stage beyond reason pretty fast.
The quest for more tracks had been going on since the earliest days of tape machines. The Beatles’ four tracks evolved into eight. Then we got to 16 tracks, before 24 became the standard. We reached 48, but that wasn’t enough. So then we linked two machines together… Sessions were getting ridiculously big. Daniel Lanois famously said: “If you can’t do it on 24 tracks, there’s a problem.” U2’s producer had a point. Even top-shelf mixers were starting to miss the good old days of simpler arrangements.
Finally, the race came to an abrupt stop.
Ten years ago, on one fateful morning in 2013, one track changed the game. It was Royals. Lorde’s single destroyed everything. Before I go any further, some of you might argue with this. If you want to send me other songs released prior to this one, go ahead. But you might as well save your time, because I’m not interested. This is my post, hence, my perception of things. I encourage you to start your own blog if you want to write about your own perspective.
Back to Lorde. That banger was a bold move. It put her (and NZ) on the map. She didn’t just put her foot in the door: she chopped it off clean with a fireman’s axe. That’s how big that song got. It became a millennials’ anthem, and one of the best-selling singles of all times. But it did much more than that.
It shifted our entire mindset.
All of a sudden we were able to create music with very few elements. We didn’t have to fill the stereo spectrum with dozens of instruments anymore. It was now allowed. Everything released in the following years was heavily influenced by the aesthetics of Lorde’s debut album.
As humans tend to do with everything, we went too far. We went down that rabbit hole and made music with fewer and fewer elements. Mainstream pop loved it, and hip hop as well (hello, trap). Don’t sue me yet, lads. I know trap appeared way earlier, sometime in the mid-nineties. But when did it cross over to the mainstream? Thank you.
You can hear this influence in many tunes, ranging from Minaj’s 2014 Pills and Potions to Perry’s 2017 Chained To The Rhythm. I love Minaj’s take on it, because it’s a sound we weren’t used to hearing from her. I’m pretty confident that track wouldn’t have existed without Royals, though.
Even Taylor Swift released her own spin on it. Look What You Made Me Do, on Reputation (2017), was a brilliant ode to simplicity. The arrangement is a bit more complex than Lorde’s, yes. But she simplified it by removing the melody from the chorus. Don’t believe me? Go and have a listen. She’s singing that line, the title of the song, on a single note. Pretty ballsy move. It produced a chain of its own spinoffs.
Today I like to think that we’ve reached a nice balance. We know we’re allowed to go the simple route, but we can also add a hundred tracks to a song. It’s all about the contrast. Venetian red looks great on its own, but it looks even better next to the right shade of blue.
That’s why I don’t consider myself a minimalist when it comes to music. I like complex arrangements just as much as the next German composer. It’s about finding what’s right for the song. Sometimes it means not adding much, sometimes it means adding many, many parts. If you listen carefully enough, the song will tell you what it needs.
But then again, what do I know…
*****
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