Why pop songs can really move us
What was it that drove thousands of generally sane men, women and children to don red dresses to swoop, leap and sway to the biggest Kate Bush hit of all time around the world last weekend?
The ‘‘Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever’’ was a fundraiser to help organisations dealing with domestic violence.
But the devotees weren’t doing it primarily to fight domestic violence, and they weren’t doing it only because they liked Kate Bush. They were doing it because of the song: because of what four minutes 26 seconds of Wuthering Heights means to them.
In his just-published book, The Memory of Music, Andrew Ford says that while a Beethoven symphony invites us to enter its world, a pop song like Wuthering Heights enters ours; it colonises us, imprints itself on us.
‘‘It is small wonder, then, that we associate pop songs with the time and place in which we most vividly encountered them, the girlfriend we had at the time, the summer holiday we were on, the college we were at,’’ he says.
In most pop songs the repetition begins almost instantly, within seconds, and the fade, beginning mere minutes later, prolongs the sense of endless repetition, sometimes to infinity.
Ford says the repetition encourages us ‘‘to believe the song will never end, that we still have that girlfriend, that we’re still on that holiday’’.
Songs are like elevators between floors of our lives. They transport us to where we were when we first heard them: the faces, the places, even the smells.
In Hit Makers, released in January, and in Climbing the Charts, released in 2015, authors Derek Thompson and Gabriel Rossman lay bare the brutal way in which it happens.
Hit songs don’t ‘‘go viral’’, spreading by infecting one listener after another as is commonly believed, even these days in the age of the internet.
They are spread by broadcasting, as are tweets (in this case by uber-tweeters such as Oprah Winfrey).
‘‘It’s not so much a million oneto-one shares, as a handful to one to one-million shares,’’ Thompson says.
We share our love of special songs with others who grew up loving them, but not necessarily because they are objectively special. Mostly it’s because they’ve been made special.