Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction

357 Pages·2009·4.32 MB·English

by  Derek Thompson

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Portions of this book first appeared in The Atlantic under the following titles: “The
Global Dominance of ESPN,” “Turning Customers Into Cultists,” “The Shazam
Effect,” “Why Experts Reject Creativity,” “Presidential Speeches Were Once
College-Level Rhetoric—Now They’re for Sixth-Graders,” “Hollywood Has a
Huge Millennial Problem,” and “Facebook and Fear.” Copyright © 2013, 2014,
2016 by Derek Thompson (as first published in The Atlantic).
Credits for graphs
Here: Courtesy of Barak Orbach; here: Courtesy of Matthew Ball; here: Karim R. Lakhani; here (also
here): Courtesy of Diana Deutsch; here: Courtesy of McKinsey ISBN 9781101980323 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781101980347 (eBook)
Version_1
To my parents:
Schlaf nun selig und süß,
schau im Traum’s Paradies.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
The Song That Conquered the World
PART I: POPULARITY AND THE MIND
1. THE POWER OF EXPOSURE
Featuring Claude Monet, Adele, and Donald Trump
2. THE MAYA RULE
Featuring ESPN, Spotify, and the First NASA Space Station
3. THE MUSIC OF SOUND
Featuring John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, and ABBA
INTERLUDE: THE CHILLS
4. THE MYTH-MAKING MIND I: THE FORCE OF STORY
Featuring Star Wars, Isaac Asimov, and Hollywood Psychohistory 5. THE MYTH-MAKING MIND II:
THE DARK SIDE OF HITS
Featuring Hungarian Vampires, Disney Princesses, and Cable News
6. THE BIRTH OF FASHION
Featuring Taylor Swift, the Printing Press, and the Laugh Track
INTERLUDE: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TEENS
PART II: POPULARITY AND THE MARKET
7. ROCK AND ROLL AND RANDOMNESS
Featuring the Mona Lisa, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Chaos Theory 8. THE VIRAL MYTH
Featuring Fifty Shades of Grey, John Snow, and Pokémon GO
9. THE AUDIENCE OF MY AUDIENCE
Featuring Etsy, Bumble, and Moonies
INTERLUDE: LE PANACHE
10. WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT I: THE ECONOMICS OF PROPHECY
Featuring Game of Thrones, Seinfeld, and Shazam 11. WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT II: A HISTORY OF
PIXELS AND INK
Featuring the Tabloid, the Television, and the News Feed
INTERLUDE: 828 BROADWAY
12. THE FUTURES OF HITS: EMPIRE AND CITY-STATE
Featuring Mickey Mouse, BuzzFeed, and Kid A
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
The Song That Conquered the World
Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
“But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.
“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by
the line of the arch that they form.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the
Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who
were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that
vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it
up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there
are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars . . .
—Jorge Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science
T
he first song I loved was my mother’s. Each night, she would sit on the
left side of my bed and sing the same lullaby. Her voice was sweet and
small and shaped to fit inside a bedroom. On trips to my maternal
grandparents’ house in Detroit, my Momi would sing the same tune in a lower
register, with a scratchier timbre and German lyrics. I didn’t know what the
words meant, but I loved them for their ancient mystery in the old house: “Guten
Abend, gute Nacht . . .”
I used to think the song was a family heirloom. But in first grade, at one of
the first sleepovers in my Virginia hometown, a young friend turned the dial on
the small music box by his bed and digital chimes tinkled to a familiar tune.
I learned that my mother’s melody was not a family secret. It was
astonishingly common. There is a strong possibility that you have heard it
dozens of times, and perhaps thousands. It is Johannes Brahms’s lullaby
“Wiegenlied”—“Lullaby and good night, with roses bedight . . .”
Millions of families all over the world have sung a version of Brahms’s
lullaby to their children, every night, for more than a century. It is one of the
most common melodies in the Western Hemisphere. Considering that a lullaby is
sung every evening for hundreds of days a year for several years in a child’s life,
there is real possibility that Brahms’s lullaby could be one of the most heard
songs in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world.
“Wiegenlied” is undeniably beautiful and simple and repetitive—all
necessary elements of any song produced for infants from the throats of tired
parents. But a melody so universal is also a mystery. How did a nineteenth-
century German tune become one of the world’s most popular songs?
• • •
J
ohannes Brahms, born in 1833 in Hamburg, was one of the most well-
known composers of his time. “Wiegenlied” was his most immediate
success. Published at the height of his popularity in 1868, the song was written
as a lullaby for an old friend to sing to her new baby boy. But it soon became a
hit throughout the continent, and the world.
One of Brahms’s tricks for replenishing his deep well of pretty melodies was
genre blending. He was a student of local music and a subtle thief of catchy
choruses. When he traveled Europe, he would often visit a city’s library to go
through its folk song collections to study reams of sheet music and transcribe his
favorite bits. Like a savvy modern songwriter sampling another artist’s hook for
his own music—or a clever designer stealing flourishes from other products—
Brahms would incorporate far-flung folk tunes into his art songs.
Several years before he wrote his famous lullaby, Brahms fell in love with a
teenage soprano in Hamburg named Bertha. She sang many songs to him, like
Alexander Baumann’s Austrian folk song “S’is Anderscht.” Some years later,
Bertha married another man, and they named their son Johannes after the
composer. Brahms wanted to show his gratitude—and, perhaps, his lingering
affection. He wrote the couple a lullaby based on the old Austrian folk song that
Bertha used to sing to him. For the lyrics, Brahms took a verse from a famous
collection of German poems, Des Knaben Wunderhorn:
Good evening, good night;
with roses bedecked,
with clove pinks adorned,
slip under the blanket. In the morning, God willing,
you will waken again.
In the summer of 1868, Brahms sent the family sheet music for the lullaby
with a note. “Bertha will realize that I wrote the Wiegenlied for her little one.
She will find it quite in order . . . that while she is singing Hans to sleep, a love
song is being sung to her.” The song’s first major performance came one year
later, on December 22, 1869, in Vienna. It was a huge commercial success.
Brahms’s publisher rushed to make fourteen arrangements of the song—the most
of any Brahms piece by far—including for four-part men’s choir, three-part
piano, the harp, and the zither.
“A lot of Brahms’s melodies are beautiful, but ‘Wiegenlied’ uniquely fits the
standard structure that modern music listeners recognize in hooks,” said Daniel
Beller-McKenna, a Brahms scholar who serves on the board of directors at the
American Brahms Society. “It has the key elements of repetition and then gentle
surprise,” he went on, humming the tune intermittently as we spoke.
“Wiegenlied” was an original. But it was also surprisingly familiar, an assembly
of folk song allusions and Hamburg memories. One music historian said the
piece so resembled Baumann’s original folk song that it amounted to a “veiled
but identifiable parody.”
But this history still doesn’t answer the most important question about the
lullaby: How did it spread around the world? In the twentieth century, most pop
songs became popular because they played on the radio or on other mass media
broadcasts again and again. Songs pushed their way into audiences’ ears through
car speakers, television sets, and movie theaters. To like a song, you first had to
find it; or, from another perspective, the song had to find you.
In the nineteenth century, however, songs by famous composers may have
hopped between concert halls, but there was no adequate technology to quickly
move a song around the globe. To appreciate the slow pace at which culture
traveled in Brahms’s day, consider the leisurely transatlantic voyage of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It debuted at the Kaerntnertor Theater in Vienna
in 1824, when Beethoven was reportedly so deaf he could not hear the
thunderous applause. But the first performance in the United States wasn’t for
another twenty-two years, in New York City, in 1846. It took nine more years
for the symphony to first play in Boston.
Imagine if every artistic masterwork took thirty-one years to cross the ocean
today. Michael Jackson’s album Thriller debuted in 1982, which means Jackson
would have been dead for four years by the time Londoners could hear the title
track and “Billie Jean” in 2013. Please Please Me, the first album by the Beatles,
was released in March 1963 in the UK, so Americans would not have met the
Beatles until the middle of the Clinton administration. In 2021, Europeans could
look forward to the first season of Seinfeld.
Radio signals weren’t moving in the late 1870s. But German families were.
While Brahms was at his creative peak, central Europe was a cauldron of chaos,
war, and famine. In the twenty years after “Wiegenlied” debuted in Vienna in
1869, German immigration to the United States soared, peaking at an all-time
high in the 1880s. The United States took in more German immigrants between
1870 and 1890 than in the entire twentieth century. A popular lullaby was
blessed with fortuitous timing to be exported across Europe and into America,
particularly the northern band of the country where most Germans settled, from
the Northeast and Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan and into Wisconsin.
A historic exodus of German-speaking families accomplished what neither
radio nor any other technology could in 1870. An unprecedented transatlantic
migration distributed the lullaby to America.
Near the height of German emigration, in 1879, a part-time rabbi named
Joseph Kahn lived in the small town of Echternach in eastern Luxembourg.
Joseph and his wife, Rosalie, traveled by ship to the United States with their five
children to find a better life. Like so many German-speaking Jewish immigrants,
they eventually settled in the upper Midwest, in Michigan.
Joseph and Rosalie’s grandson was a handsome and prematurely balding
young man named William. He went by Bill, and he loved to host pool parties
by his house in Franklin, a leafy suburb of Detroit. One afternoon in 1948, in a
green field by his ivy-covered home, he noticed a young girl named Ellen,
whose family had also left Germany, to escape the Nazis. They fell in love and
married within eight months. The following October, Bill and Ellen had a baby
girl. She would hear Brahms’s lullaby in the original German thousands of times
in her life. I knew that girl, too. It was my mom.
• • •
T
his is a book about hits, the few products and ideas that achieve extraordinary
popularity and commercial success in pop culture and media. The thesis of this
book is that even though many number one songs, television shows, blockbuster
films, Internet memes, and ubiquitous apps seem to come out of nowhere, this
cultural chaos is governed by certain rules: the psychology of why people like
what they like, the social networks through which ideas spread, and the
economics of cultural markets. There is a way for people to engineer hits and,