These Song Titles Are Too Weird Nowadays

I feel like song titles are never where I expect them to be anymore. If you read my prior post on how album titles have changed over time, you'll know that album titles are shorter and more noun-based nowadays. The same applies to songs, but the thing is that some songs almost seem meant to have a different title from the one they have.

My cousin once asked me, "what's that Halsey song about the bathroom? 'Secret,' right?" There is no Halsey song called "Secret," but there is a Halsey song called "Strange Love" which has a post-chorus that goes "that's the beauty of a secret, you know you're supposed to keep it, that's the beauty of a secret" twice. The chorus says the words "secret" four times - can you blame her for thinking that's the song title? Instead, it's "Strange Love," which does not have the word "strange love" anywhere in the song.

They think I'm insane, they think my lover is strange
But I don't have to fucking tell them anything, anything
And I'm gonna write it all down, and I'm gonna sing it on stage
But I don't have to fucking tell you anything, anything

That's the beauty of a secret
You know you're supposed to keep it
That's the beauty of a secret, oh whoa oh whoa oh whoa-oh oh
That's the beauty of a secret
You know you're supposed to keep it
But I don't have to fucking tell you anything, anything

The closest you get is "They think I'm insane, they think my lover is strange" which is only said once in the chorus. There's no way to predict the title of the song from the actual text. I myself probably would have called this song "Anything" from the part where she repeats "but I don't have to f-ing tell you anything, anything" or "That's the Beauty of a Secret," because both lines are catchy enough to be considered the hook. Someone apparently decided that "Strange Love" was a better descriptor for the song. It's just a bonus track, so maybe nobody put any thought into whether it would be easy to recall the song title. That sort of thought is usually put into singles, so that you know the name of the song without having to Shazam it or Google some snippet of the lyrics in the hope of finding the name.

Except, what about the hit song of 2016? It's called "We Ain't Ever Gettin' Older," right? No, actually it's "Closer," which is taken from the line "so baby pull me closer in the backseat of your Rover..." There is nothing important about that line, other than it being the first line of the chorus; there is nothing important about that melody because it's repeated several times for the rest of the chorus; there's no emphasis on the word "Closer," either. Perhaps most people would try to identify the song by singing the drop after the chorus, which is a simplified electro-bloopy version of the chorus. "We Ain't Ever Gettin' Older" is repeated twice later in the song, with Halsey coming in on top of Drew's vocals, and it seems to sum up the theme of the song... but the name of the song is "Closer," not "We Ain't Ever Gettin' Older" or "*bloo bloop bloop bloo bloo bloop bloop bloop*"."

So, baby, pull me closer
In the back seat of your Rover
That I know you can't afford
Bite that tattoo on your shoulder
Pull the sheets right off the corner
Of that mattress that you stole
From your roommate back in Boulder
We ain't ever getting older
[drop]
We ain't ever getting older
We ain't ever getting older

Thankfully the two megahits of 2017, "Shape of You" and "Despacito (Remix)," have titles that are pretty easy to discern. "Shape of You" introduces the title at the beginning of the chorus: "I'm in love with the shape of you, we push and pull [...]", then it goes into the second part of the chorus where the final line is also "I'm in love with the shape of you." If that wasn't obvious enough to you, the final line of the song is "I'm in love with the shape of you." "I'm in Love With the Shape of You" perhaps would be closer at identifying what the actual hook is, but nowadays we really don't like song titles that are that long (it would have been an excellent song title in 1912, though). "Shape of You" is a distinctive enough phrase (a dialectal turn of phrase from Ireland) that you can imagine it's the title.

I'm in love with the shape of you
We push and pull like a magnet do
Although my heart is falling too
I'm in love with your body
Last night you were in my room
And now my bedsheets smell like you
Every day discovering something brand new
I'm in love with your body

Oh I oh I oh I oh I
I'm in love with your body
Oh I oh I oh I oh I
I'm in love with your body
Oh I oh I oh I oh I
I'm in love with your body
Every day discovering something brand new
I'm in love with the shape of you

Let's look at "Despacito" now, which also has the chorus start with the title, and drops it a second time in the first line just in case you forgot: "Despacito, quiero respirar tu quello despacito [...]" (Slowly, I want to breathe your neck slowly.) The second part has the same techinque: "despacito, quiero desnurdarte a besos despacito [...]" (Slowly, I want to slowly undress you with kisses). The post-chorus makes up for this by not using the word at all. Then after Daddy Yankee's verse, we get the chorus and the post-chorus, but something changes afterwards - Luis Fonsi sings an altered version of the chorus with English lines. "Despacito, this is how we do it down in Puerto Rico." After finishing the chorus, he doens't do a repeat and instead jumps straight into the final post-chorus. This post-chorus is also different in that it ends with Justin Bieber repeating the hook at the very end of the song: "Y que olvides tu apellido, despacito." (...and you forget your last name. Do it slowly). Overall the title of Despacito is repeated 10 times in the song, and each time it has the same hook melody. This makes it very easy to tell what the song's name is, even if you don't speak Spanish (and it's truly a wonder a Spanish language song topped the US charts long enough to tie the record for longest-charting song).

Despacito
Quiero respirar tu cuello despacito
Deja que te diga cosas al oído
Para que te acuerdes si no estás conmigo
Despacito
Quiero desnudarte a besos despacito
Firmo en las paredes de tu laberinto
Y hacer de tu cuerpo todo un manuscrito

I would expect hit songs to have the title be pre-eminently obvious, yet we get songs like "Closer" where it's not clear which word you're supposed to arbitrarily pick as the title. I wonder if this decoupling of hook from title has something to do with the changing structure of pop music. EDM became a popular genre in the early 2010s. In modern pop songs (from the 1950s onward), you have a verse, which expands on the theme of the song and can be a little more experimental, and the chorus, which is the 'payoff', the adrenaline high, the catchiest part of the song. You repeat the verse and chorus, maybe throw in a bridge before the final chorus for some variety, and then end it with a chorus. There are variations like adding pre-choruses which increase tension for the chorus, or a post-chorus which serves as a transition back into the verse, and other things like changing the amount of repetitions, cutting a section short, etc.

The big change EDM brought was replacing the tension of the verse-chorus with the tension of chorus-drop. EDM-inspired pop songs still have verses, but they don't really ramp up the tension the way the chorus does. The chorus starts bringing in more instruments, the drum goes from quarter to eighth to sixteenth notes, the singer's reaching the peak, and then at maximum tension you get the 'drop', which is sort of an electronic hook that's repeated. The drop is not supposed to build tension - it is the result that the song builds up to. Instead of looking forward to the chorus with anticipation, the song looks forward to the drop. Drops, being instrumental in nature, do not have lyrics in them. This is a problem - if the catchiest part of a song is instrumental, what do you call the song? It doesn't really matter much at that point, so you may as well take something from the second-catchiest part - the chorus - and use that. If there's any repetition in the chorus, you can use that (Zedd's "Stay the Night" repeats "Stay The Night" in some way five times, and then it appears during the drop at one point). Otherwise, you can pick a word at the end of a song, since many people remember the last part of a chorus (Zedd's "Clarity": "if our love's insanity, why are you my clarity? [drop]"). The beginning of the chorus is also a good bet ("So baby, pull me closer"). The middle of a chorus is murky ground; it's the least likely to be remembered.

Another structural change may also affect this, but it's not musical - it's technological. Nowadays we have phones and Shazam and many ways to find out a song's title. I mentioned Googling a snippet of song lyrics to find a song's name, but before internet-enabled cell phones you would have had to write those lyrics down somewhere and look them up at the nearest computer. And before the internet, you would have had to hope that one of your friends or the record clerk knew what the song was or that the DJ would play it again. The stakes were higher for song titles in the past - they can't buy your song if they don't know the name. Nowadays it's easy enough to look up names on our own, so you can decide to pick something that's not very distinctive and obvious ("Closer") because people can find it anyway.

I'm still researching why song names are getting shorter. I'm still working on that big old post about song titles throughout pop music history. This is just a short slice of what I'm working on.

Have you ever had trouble figuring out what a song is called? Do you use Shazam or Google to find songs you don't know the name of? Sound off in the comments below!