At Tony Conniff Songwriting Workshops we just began a new 5 week group, this one concentrated on contemporary pop songwriting. We do this focus periodically. It’s good to see what’s going on in the world of hits, even if that’s not what you’re trying to write, because modern pop writing is in its way very innovative.

Some people have a hard time hearing past the lack of harmonic variety. This lack exists, but I remind people of the tens of thousands of Broadway, jazz, and doo-wop songs, many of them great, that have the same ‘I VI II V’ chord progressions… and the tens of thousands of folk, country, and blues songs, many of them great, that use the same three or four chords… Lack of harmonic variety didn’t start in the 21st Century!

Some people have a hard time listening past the sounds. If you’re used to electric guitars and drums – the sound of a rock band, or if you’re used to acoustic guitars, or real piano and strings… in short, if you’re used to acoustic instruments and organic sounds, you’re going to have a hard time with modern pop, which is usually studio-created and mostly non-acoustic (though more and more there are hybrid exceptions to this).

And sometimes the lyrics are off-putting – simplistic, adolescent, materialistic; you name it. But hasn’t this always been true of many pop songs of every era?

For today, let’s just consider the melodies. I’ve posted below Billboard’s Top 50 songs for this week.

This is probably nowhere near a historically great week for hit songs! But if you check out some of these tunes, even just skimming through for a while and listening to the first minute of each (hit the fast forward arrow >| to move to the next), you’ll hear this: continuous melody.

Not always great melodies (though some are really good), but melodies with almost no pauses – there’s barely time to breathe.

This type of melody writing has been developing over the past 20 years or so, since the ascendance of Hip Hop and Rap, and has been dominant, or at least highly influential, for quite a while in almost all kinds of songwriting, some of it far from mainstream pop.

If you haven’t been paying attention, if you haven’t noticed this particular development, it might be worth your while to listen and see what you think. You may or may not like the songs, but the way of modern melodies – their momentum, their constant motion, their unpredictability, their inner rhymes used for emphasis, their jittery rhythms – may catch your ear and enliven your songwriting.

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