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Comment by stanferder | Hacker News Reader

It's like the opposite of a "millennial whoop", major-izing a minor chord instead of emphasizing the minor interval in a major chord, only more drastic because of the key change.

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You are confusing the interval from the previous note and the interval from the root. The millennial whoop might be a minor third, but that in no way makes the chord more minor. And I think plenty of non-musical people would characterize the "millennial whoop" as annoyingly upbeat, most the time, so claiming it is unlike the Picardy third for that reason isn't putting theory ahead of empiricism.

"Mode mixture" where the minor 4 chord is "borrowed" in a major context however is basically stealing the picardy third sound for an otherwise major piece. "American Boy" would be a pop song that uses this very well.

For anyone else wondering, this is the "millennial whoop":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN23lFKfpck

(the first 3-5 seconds let you know right away)

Yikes. Not sure how much of that video is nearly-naked woman, but the split-second I had it up at work didn't make me a fan.

perhaps a NSFW tag?

It’s only the first second of Katy Perry at the start of the video. This link should skip over that bit:

https://youtu.be/MN23lFKfpck?t=4

Thx for the update. I only had it up for a split-second and shut it right down.

It's just common pop music videos, as far as I could see. It doesn't strike me as particularly NSFW, any more than any other music video. It's not soft core porn or something.

I found it by searching for millennial whoop, and thought I'd save anyone else a search.

I just realized you can do a Picardy third with a millennial whoop over it!

[joker voice] I have given a name to my pain...and it is millennial whoop.

Seriously, though - this is interesting and I'm glad I know have an additional, identifiable reason why modern pop sucks so bad.

I saw one of the YT commenters said they call it the millennial yodel instead. I think I like that better.

> I'm glad I know have an additional, identifiable reason why modern pop sucks so bad.

Music is subjective and popular music is always aimed at teenagers. You're always going to think the pop music you liked when you were 17 was the best pop music ever.

Indeed. There’s somewhat of a selection bias here, too. The older the song, the longer we’ve had to filter it out from other songs. Meanwhile, the blurriness of “modern” in “modern music” means that any comparison will be naturally biased. The mediocre songs of yesteryears are forgotten – but the mediocre songs of today are still gonna appear on the radio.

You're referring to survivorship bias and yes, that's a factor. But while there was a fair amount of garbage topping the charts when I was a teenager, there was also a fair bit of great songs as well. For a variety of reasons, the selection process of what becomes a chart-topping "hit" has changed, and I think that is part of the problem. The biggest factor is that the business side of the industry has virtually perfected cramming what they want into our ears until we like it - or at least until they make money off it. In the past, society as a whole mostly selected the winners through tuning into radio stations, buying albums, etc. The nature of the business has changed dramatically over the decades where now people just pay for streaming services which for all but a few artists never come close to replacing the income they would have had via the older methods. The industry execs have also gotten really great at manufacturing pop hits through people like Max Martin (and the other guy who's just like him) who crank out similar/familiar songs with the same structure over and over so people like it because it feels like they already know it and it's so close to something else they already "approve" of in their brain. It's the music industry equivalent of how social media hijacks your dopamine system.

To me, if a singer is going to sing a lot of non-word syllables, I want them to have earned it first. It makes sense to cry out with gibberish of joy if the song actually went somewhere that such exclamations make sense. If not, I'm like, "Why are you celebrating?" It feels lazy.

I don't see the whoop that way. More generally, the whoop is just noodling around a major triad. Its sound never leaves major tonality.

C.f. on the other hand blues music, which often digs into the flattened third degree of a major scale to make it a bit more, well, bluesy.

I'd like to know more, what's a millenial whoop?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H4P0c9xBu1A

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