Three Music Revolutions

1986 was the least diverse year in fifty years of American pop music. And it came right after a revolution.

Armand Leroi is an evolutionary biologist who treats the charts like a fossil record. He analyzed 17,000 songs from the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010, turning their chords, textures, and rhythms into data.

Leroi found music mostly inches forward. Artists borrow, tweak, and sand down rough edges. Almost always, change is gradual.. Big bang revolutions hardly ever happen.

Except three times. There were three proper revolutions where the charts got turned inside out.

• 1964 - the British Invasion, when rock and roll rewrote the rules.
• 1983 - drum machines and synthesizers.
• 1991 - when hip-hop exploded into the mainstream.

This last one was the biggest by far. The most important single cultural event in twentieth-century American pop music, according to Leroi's data.

A curiosity of the 1983 revolution: it actually flattened diversity. Everything started sounding the same. Drum machines homogenized the landscape - country, rock, pop music all took on that Miami Vice sheen (mullets optional).

And 1986 was the least diverse year in the entire fifty-year span.

Leroi's research shows that real step changes are rare because they need to be. Culture can't reinvent itself constantly - most mutations die out. The incremental approach is safer, more sustainable.

Artists build on what worked before, making tiny improvements.

We convince ourselves we're living through constant revolution because the noise is loud, because change feels dramatic when you're inside it. But the data tells a different story. Most of the time, change is gradual. You'd miss it if you weren't measuring.

Revolutions don't always mean more variety. Sometimes they mean everyone rushing toward the same new thing.

40 years after 1986, it sounds familiar.

P.S. In ’86, the UK had The Smiths, New Order, Pet Shop Boys. More diverse? Or just a different kind of sameness? The geography factor is for another post…