Number Ones: Flume (feat. Kai)’s ‘Never Be Like You’ And The Rapidly Changing Sound Of Pop

In his semi-regular column, musicologist Tim Byron takes a deep dive into the new song at the top of the ARIA Singles Chart. ‘Never Be Like You’ by Flume (feat. Kai) debuted at #1 on the chart last week, and is currently at #2.

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Flume — the nom de plume of Harley Streten, a 24-year-old producer who grew up on Sydney’s Northern beaches — is in some ways a very unlikely chart-topper indeed. Streten does not give off the vibe of being a star in interviews. He has the shyness of a young adult who mentally still has acne and braces. And ‘Never Be Like You’ doesn’t sound like an obvious hit. You’d call it dance music, but it’s not exactly easy to dance to — it’s at the glacial half-time pace of 60 beats per minute, about as fast as the average song by Sigur Ros, and features some pretty disorienting rhythms. It features explicit language, which makes it harder to hear on commercial radio. What’s more, the song came out on an indie label, Future Classic, who don’t quite have the promotional muscle of a major label.

And yet, despite all this, Flume is at #1. And it’s not really an enormous surprise that Flume is at #1. His 2012 self-titled album won ARIAs, went to #1 in the charts, and dominated the Triple J Hottest 100 that year. it feels like Triple J’s younger audience saw something of themselves in Flume; there’s plenty of younguns out there who imagined themselves in his place and promptly downloaded Ableton.

Flume is one of the prime movers in a genre of music that, for lack of a better term, I’ve been calling ‘jaywave’; it’s a very prominent sound on Triple J right now. Jaywave is a style of electronic dance music influenced by R&B. It has slow-paced, vaguely exotic chillout beats, and fragmentary, heavily manipulated vocals that are often relatively flat emotionally. There’s often a Fender Rhodes electric piano sound, and a sense of restless melancholy. To my ears, the proximate influences of jaywave are the likes of Burial and How To Dress Well; deeper down there’s some late-‘90s IDM, trip hop, and 2000s-era Radiohead. Major Lazer’s ‘Lean On’ — a #1 last year — has something of the jaywave sound, as does a sizeable proportion of recent Triple J Hottest 100 lists — alt-J, Chet Faker, Peking Duk, etc.

The music that Flume has referred to as influences in interviews is instructive. He says he grew up listening to ‘90s trance, thanks to an older brother, and that he remembers buying Daft Punk’s Discovery for a friend when he was nine. He apparently liked his parents’ Deep Forest album and The Prodigy’s Fat of The Land. As he got older, he got into the abstract-feeling jazzy hip-hop beats made by the likes of J Dilla and Flying Lotus. ‘Never Be Like You’ ticks a lot of the jaywave boxes — the slow-paced beats influenced by R&B, the heavily manipulated vocals in the outro. And it’s not that much of an outlier in pop in 2016; there’s a lot of jaywave-ish stuff in the charts (see this week’s #5, ‘Gold’ by Kiiara, below).

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The Superman Of Pop: Max Martin’s Domination Of Modern Music

The Swedish producer Max Martin did something almost unprecedented recently: he let a journalist interview him. Apparently Martin felt that winning the Polar Music Prize justified a brief moment of ego. Max Martin, more or less, is the personification of mainstream pop over the last 20 years. Put it this way: August 2013 was the last time there wasn’t a song featuring Max Martin’s fingerprints in the Australian Top 50 Singles chart.

A list of Australian #1 singles that were masterminded by Max Martin includes ‘…Baby One More Time’ and ‘Oops, I Did It Again’ by Britney Spears, ‘I Kissed A Girl’, ‘California Gurls’ and ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry, ‘So What’ and ‘Raise Your Glass’ by Pink, ‘Dynamite’ by Taio Cruz, ‘Love Me Like You Do’ by Ellie Goulding, and ‘Shake It Off’, ‘Blank Space’ and ‘Bad Blood’ by Taylor Swift. Martin was one of the men standing behind Swift as she accepted the Grammy for Album of the Year earlier this week. He’s basically the Superman of pop.

Of course, it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Martin. He had an initial golden run of chart success from 1997 to 2000 on the back of teen pop written for the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. But then the hits dried up. So perhaps the most revealing moment in the recent Max Martin interview was this grab: “there was a period when we thought that Pharrell (Williams) and the others came and ruined it all for us with their super cool beats.” Britney Spears, for example, left behind the Swedish melodies of ‘Baby One More Time’, opting for the “super cool beats” of ‘Toxic’ or ‘Slave 4 U’. The Neptunes and Timbaland seemed unstoppable in the early 2000s, and it took half a decade for Max Martin to hit chart gold again in 2005 with Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’.

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Max Martin’s Kryptonite: Flume’s Super Cool Beats

Despite Max Martin’s genuine pop genius, his current run of chart success — from ‘Since U Been Gone’ in 2005 to The Weeknd’s ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ in 2015 — can’t last forever. And maybe the end is sooner rather than later.

After all, if ‘Never Be Like You’ being at #1 is any indication — and it is — pop music is rapidly returning to being focused around Max Martin’s kryptonite: ‘super cool beats’. Martin’s musical DNA is stuff like The Beatles, KISS and Bon Jovi, bands whose success was largely based on selling indelible melodies. Martin is the kind of guy who listens to a lot of Chet Baker rather than a lot of Chet Faker. He just doesn’t have the instincts to thrive in an environment where rhythm and texture matter more than melody.

As a collection of melodies, words, and chords, ‘Never Be Like You’ has much to make Max Martin wince. There’s a virtual catalogue of what Max Martin would see as dumb mistakes in ‘Never Be Like You’. The words fit poorly into the melody. When the Canadian singer Kai sings “I’m only human, can’t you see”, the natural linguistic rhythm of the words fits a little awkwardly with the rhythm of the words. The melody feels slightly too busy for the song, like Kai is rushing through the words. There’s a bunch of swearing on the track — Kai sings “now I’m fucked up and missing you” in the verse – but it’s not properly exploited for full effect; Kai isn’t extracting maximum emotion from those emotionally charged words like Max Martin would almost certainly be telling her to. Additionally, the melody feels pitched too high in Kai’s vocal range, leaving her sounding a little shrill. The big hook — Kai singing ‘never be like you’ at the utter peak of her range — feels a bit yelped.

Max Martin as co-producer would try to fix a lot of things about ‘Never Be Like You’, in other words. Perhaps fixing those things would turn ‘Never Be Like You’ into a better song, but I also half think that ‘Never Be Like You’ works precisely because of its limitations as a song. What makes ‘Never Be Like You’ work isn’t the melodies – it’s the stuff that Max Martin wouldn’t have given a second thought to. ‘Never Be Like You’, in other words, is all about the 2016 version of ‘super cool beats’.

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Why ‘Never Be Like You’ Works

The first verse rolls by with Kai singing over chiming bells, without rhythmic accompaniment. When the beat finally drops in the first chorus, disorienting, woozy rhythms appear. There’s the heavily manipulated rhythm tracks reminiscent of the slightly less frenetic side of Aphex Twin. The chorus also features sidechain-compressed synths reminiscent of Justin Timberlake’s ‘My Love’ (a song featuring circa-2006 ‘super cool beats’ from producer Timbaland).

Flume and his co-producer/co-writer, American R&B producer Geoffro Cause, are deliberately doing their best here to disorient you with unexpected rolls of scattergun percussion. Because of this, the song sounds both as if things are moving very slowly, and that everything is happening all at once. The progression of the chorus section in ‘Never Be Like You’ sounds something like being punch-drunk, and increasingly losing the ability to stand up on your own. The first round through the chorus sees rapid-fire bursts of three semiquavers replaced by the end by polyrhythmic triplets.

This has a disorienting effect; we momentarily think the song has slowed down, that the fabric of reality has shifted. The second round through the chorus attempts to disorient us even more: the synth part at the end of the chorus has notes that sit on the second, sixth, tenth and fourteenth semiquavers in a sixteen semiquaver bar. Each of these synth notes comes a semiquaver later than you’d expect, leaving you very confused as to where the beat actually sits.

The video for ‘Never Be Like You’, too, features distortions of perspective. When the disorienting choruses start, there’s a psychedelic funhouse mirror effect; shapes distort. By the time the song reaches its climax in the outro, where the centrepiece is heavily manipulated vocals turned into ‘dolphin noises’, the footage of the cheating lovers in bed is distorted and manipulated to the extent that all you’re seeing is undifferentiated flesh.

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The Psychology Of Why Tricky Rhythms Are Disorienting

The human ability to perceive and pay attention to sounds — whether in a Max Martin song or in a Flume song — is the result of a surprisingly rickety, jerry-rigged machine. We simply can’t pay attention to every single millisecond of sound in a complex multilayered soundscape, while simultaneously piecing together those sounds into a coherent story that makes sense. Our brains just aren’t highly powered enough to do all of that at once (as the video below demonstrates, except with vision rather than sound).

As a result, musicians and listeners usually make a compromise: most notes happen on the beat. You’re more likely to hear notes on the first beat of a bar than on the second beat of a bar, and more likely to hear notes on the second beat of a bar than on an off-beat. Because of this, your brain allocates more attention to the time periods when you’re expecting to hear a beat than the time periods when you’re not. When your brain hears notes it expected to hear, it processes them more efficiently. Those expected notes are more easily integrated into the coherent musical story the song is telling.

In a Max Martin song, the beats are background. They’re almost always what you’d expect. They’re there to help you pay attention to the rest of the song; they provide a very clear attentional time-grid as a background. This makes it easier to perceive the melodies and vocal tricks that are very much in the foreground. Max Martin’s melodies play with your expectations much more than his rhythms.

However, in ‘Never Be Like You’, the beats are foreground and the song is background. As a result, Flume has more of a license to play with your rhythmic expectations. All those disorienting wub-wub-wub synths and scattershot beats, as far as Max Martin would be concerned, would just get in the way of the song. But for Flume, the wub-wub-wub synths and scattershot beats are exactly the stuff he wants you to listen to, to marvel at. In contrast, clever song stuff — a Max Martin melody here, jazzy Pharrell Williams chords there — would just get in the way. And so it’s the song that provides the time-grid background rather than the beat. The point of Kai’s melody in ‘Never Be Like You’ is to be safe and expected and do what you expect, so that Flume’s rhythms are what you actually pay attention to.

After all, Kai’s lyrics speak of disappointment and bitterness. She can only beg for forgiveness of her failures. “I’m falling on my knees, forgive me, I’m a fucking fool”, she sings in the song’s middle eight (the only point in the video where Flume himself appears, the subtext being that she’s cheating on him with the other dude). When the beats get all woozy and disorienting in ‘Never Be Like You’, Flume is trying to musically represent Kai’s bitter failures here. Your brain isn’t having much luck figuring out what’s going on with the rhythms of ‘Never Be Like You’ — listening to it, it’s difficult to consistently expect what comes next until you’ve listened a few times and developed a more vivid internal picture of the song.

And I feel that the analogy between the disorientation of the song and the disorientation of listening to the song is at the heart of its success. Max Martin could have represented that same feeling of disorientation melodically, by making sure that the sound of the vocals singing a particular melody was just so — see The Weeknd’s ‘Can’t Feel My Face’ for an example of Martin doing a kind of druggy disorientation. But in 2016, Max Martin has become so much a part of the soundtrack to our lives that it’s hard for his creative choices to seem disorienting; we’ve become very oriented towards them indeed. And so along comes Flume, with something that sounds a fair bit more disorienting, while being precisely anchored in the pop of 2016. And voila! A Number One single.

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Tim Byron has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine. (@hillsonghoods)

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Feature image via Flume/Facebook.