Popular music, especially from the mid-to-late 20th century, holds an oversized place in our cultural memory. It was the soundtrack of adolescences, rebellions, romances and formations of identity. The lyrics often weren’t poetic or profound. More often than not, they were assembled under pressure to meet the demands of a melody, a market and a deadline.

And yet, we loved them and they still resonate.

Consider the lines that have lived far longer in public memory then their quality might suggest:

-            “You’re about as easy as a nuclear war” – Duran Duran

-            “I’m as serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer” – Snap!

-            “Walking slowly down the hall faster than a cannonball” – Oasis

-            “Cracked eggs, dead birds scream as they fight for life” – Radiohead

-            “Only time will tell if we stand the test of time” – Van Halen

-            “The reflex is an only child, he’s waiting by the park” – Duran Duran (again)

Some of these are biologically implausible, some poetically overwrought and many simply nonsensical, although I suspect that the writers of these lyrics must have thought they were just… so great. And decades later, lyrics like these, accompanied by their melodies, are embedded in the minds of millions, recalled without effort and repeated without irony. They keep echoing because they arrived at moments that mattered to individuals, rather than them being specimens of great writing.

Visit any music-related YouTube comments section and you will find people in their late 70s still arguing about bands they loved as teenagers. They defend them with a passion, as though musical preferences were a matter of moral urgency. “Black Sabbath were heavier. Led Zeppelin were just showmen”. “Page was overrated. Iommi changed the game.” These are not just casual opinions, but identity claims: forged in adolescence and carried on until late old age. Why?

Pop as Cultural Wallpaper

For those of us who came of age with walkmans, mixtapes, late-night radio and FM stations, pop music was omnipresent. It accompanies first kisses, first heartbreaks, first road trips and late-night introspection. All of our personal changes were to this soundtrack. None of it needed to be profound; it just needed to be there.

The lyrics we remember so vividly were built for stickiness and not depth. Rhyme, rhythm and repetition all functioned as neural glue. The songs were not designed to challenge listeners but for people to connect with instantly and emotionally. Simplicity was a feature of it. They were tailored for the pulse, rather than the intellect. They occupy a middle space, between art and commerce, feeling and formula. They are the cultural equivalent of fast food: designed for immediate satisfaction but not lasting nourishment. And yet, decades later, they are still with us.

The Machinery Behind the Melody

We often exalt and mythologise pop legends to the status of prophets: Dylan, Cohen, Lennon, Hendrix, Jagger. And while they occasionally captured something transcendent, they were more often working under tight constraints: pressure from the record label, radio formatting and market timing. They had to rhyme “fire” with “desire” because nothing else scanned and the single had to be out by Friday.

Sometimes brilliance broke through, but often the aim was to be timely, rather than timeless. Sell now. Chart fast. Shift physical units of records.

That did not make the work meaningless, but it does mean that much of what we have since enshrined as cultural canon was never created with enshrinement in mind. It was crafted quickly and strategically, to be consumed but maybe not to be contemplated, not too deeply anyway.

And yet many of these musicians believed their own mythology. They thought their compositions were something eternal. Some spoke as if their works had the depth of Dickens or the texture of Tchaikowsky, i.e. they were generational authors of insight and substance. It is what propels some of them into thinking they can change the world: from opining about herd immunity and vaccine mandates to genuinely believing they are experts in the Russia-Ukraine war or that a single concert in the mid-1980s would fix all problems in Africa. It is cute to think about that now, the naivety coupled with the narcissism. But behind these people who believe themselves to be brilliant was the machinery that kept humming: producers, label executives, marketers, who knew what was really being sold: neither literature nor scripture, but just something catchy, just bubble gum. They did not need it to be profound, just memorable. And that is where it succeeded brilliantly.

Cultural Memory

For many of us in Gen X and older millennials, lyrics exist as mental artifacts. They are fragments we carry, quote, hum or deploy in moments of emotion or irony. As we age, we start seeing the scaffolding behind the songs: the formulaic structures, the borrowed riffs, the infantilising repetitions similar to nursery rhymes and the commercial machinery mass-sold to us as the new cool.

Even then, the emotional charge remains. What seemed profound at 16 might seem hollow now, but the memory of feeling it was always authentic.

In the 80s, pop culture critics warned that “pop will eat itself” and they were not wrong. The music industry became increasingly cannibalistic, built on sampling, recycling and rebooting its own past. The subversive quickly became retro branding. Record companies soon become dealers in nostalgia and myth making.

And even though we are aware of the cynicism of this and the shallowness of the lyrics and overall structure, the emotional power of pop music endures.

A Fixed Point in a Moving World

This is why a person approaching 80 still feels the need to argue passionately online about Led Zeppelin versus Black Sabbath. Even when life keeps moving, serves tragedy up to each of us, loved ones leave us, bodies fail and certainties dissolve, the moment of that gig or listening to that album for the first time 60 years previously does not change. It is untouched by the erosion of time. It becomes a fixed reference point of yourself. One that predates your life becoming so much more complex and before you had to compromise. You were still authentic.

So, maybe it is not about the superficiality of the music at all. Maybe it is about each of us owning a moment of clarity. When each of our lives were simple, straightforward and uncomplicated. I suppose it is like sacred trash, echoing through time.

Postscript:

My office building used to be a pub, back in the day. One of our bigger office rooms was the actual disco and it still has the original dancefloor, still intact, as you can see in the photo. I often wonder how many moments were lived out here: bodies moving, drinks in hand, pop music pulsing through the air. It is just a floor now, scuffed and silent and witness to nothing more than me having teleconferences on it. But surely it must hold something, the residue of memory, of emotional highs and heartbreaks, of people briefly feeling euphoric and infinite under cheap lights and loud choruses. I suppose that is the real legacy of something so essentially bland: not the songs themselves, but the lives illuminated by them. Just like mine.

Thank you for reading,

Mark Gibson

Leeds, United Kingdom, July 2025