Jax Jones, the British dance producer and DJ known for the quick pace and bassy heft of his pop songs, was recently given a new challenge. During a studio session, Steve Mac, who’s produced hits like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and Marshmello and Bastille’s “Happier,” said to him, “I wonder what it would sound like if Jax Jones did a Katy Perry record.”
To some extent, the mission was simple. Jones, who usually works in a tempo around 124 BPM, would slow things down to 104 BPM, which is in the standard range for modern pop songs. He’d craft a melody that was sticky and familiar. For lyrics, he and Mac would bring in Jones’s frequent collaborator, the singer-songwriter Kamille, who’d pen something coyly erotic. As for the singing, he’d recruit an artist whose tone fit a radio register and who could naturally embody the song’s sassy, sexual character.
The result was “Harder,” a single off of Jones’s upcoming debut album, Snacks. Sung by Bebe Rexha, who Jones had long known and wanted to collaborate with, “Harder” indeed sounds like a Perry record. It begins with a light string arrangement, which Rexha overpowers out of the gate with loud, echoing vocals. The chorus is built around a traditional pentatonic melody, over which Rexha sings in a catchy, nursery rhyme style: “When you think you've done enough / Can you love me harder? / 'Cause you know I need that.” (You’ll have to use your imagination to determine what the that is.) The chorus then breaks into a whistley “Ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh.”
But what comes after the chorus markedly diverges from the steadily mounting anthems we’ve come to associate with Perry. Rather than return to her flutey singing voice for the first verse, Rexha’s delivery deepens and she speeds up her flow to the point where her words dribble into one another: “Baby, take the time and get the flow right / Baby, you could get it for the whole night.” The shift was deliberate. “We called it 'modern' in the studio,” Jones explains. “That was the word Kamille used: 'Can we go modern on this?' Meaning, lifting more from hip-hop and rap melodies, where it's based around one note but it's all about the meter.”
As the term implies, going “modern” is increasingly becoming a fundamental component of the pop formula. Benny Blanco’s “Eastside” goes modern off the jump, with a quick verse in a triplet flow from Khalid. Nick Jonas goes modern on the pre-chorus of the Jonas Brothers’ recent single, “Sucker.” And Adam Levine goes modern on the chorus of Maroon 5’s chart-topping Cardi B collab, “Girls Like You.” Even Katy Perry herself, a figurehead of the old pop, goes modern on the post-chorus of her latest single, “Never Really Over,” racing through a thorny bramble of words: “Just because it's over doesn't mean it's really over / And if I think it over, maybe you'll be coming over again / And I'll have to get over you all over again.”
Jones traces the origins of what they were shooting for in Rexha’s “modern” first verse to contemporary hybrid hip-hop acts like Drake, Future, and Post Malone. Those artists, and the general explosion of hip-hop and R&B in the past decade, has, in Jones’s view, made listeners comfortable with the two vocal modes coexisting. “That familiarity helps your record,” he says. “They call it a radio song because it fits in the form of what's being played on the radio.”
Beyond familiarity, though, going “modern” can serve a number of functions within a song: a quick verse can build a sense of momentum or drama; it’s a way to fit more words into what are becoming tighter pop spaces; it adds sonic variety and contrast; and the different modes might appeal to fan bases of different genres. In “Harder,” when Rexha motors through her first verse, she’s giving instructions to an inattentive sexual partner; her clip, you imagine, matches his (which is the problem, and also funnily appropriate).
But the flip side to familiarity is monotony. Where the very act of singing and rapping in a pop context was fairly novel ten years ago, today doing both—or something like both—has become the norm, and as a result it can be banal.
There’s also the question of compromising an artist’s central trademark. One of the few pop producers whose songs rarely seem to “go modern” is Ariel Rechtshaid, who’s worked with an eclectic group of artists that includes Vampire Weekend, Adele, Solange, Snoop Lion, and Sky Ferreira. Rechtshaid tells me that he’s not purposefully bucking the trend so much as he’s simply reluctant to mess with an artist’s vocal approach. “I feel like vocal delivery is so much of what makes an artist unique,” he says.
For some artists who grew up on hip-hop and R&B, diversions into a modern triplet flow sound seamless, a natural component of their specific vocal delivery. For many others though, these efforts lack style and finesse—the art of rapping reduced to the talent of tongue twisting. Rexha, who is 29, falls under the first category, and Perry, who is 34, falls under the second. Ultimately, though, in the context of Top 40 radio or a pop playlist, what’s happening on each quickly begins to sound old. The modern, it turns out, can be the enemy of the new.