Bad Blood: Led Zepplin Vs Taylor Swift – The volume war

The volume wars, it seemed like they might be winding down, appear to be back with a vengeance. Perhaps pop music producers were simply recharging their overzealous compressors, or perhaps they were busy acquiring extras so they could stack them up to multiply the non-dynamic sound over decibels that has become the trademark of acts like Katy Perry, Imagine Dragons and too many others to list.

For example, Taylor Swift’s new hit Bad Blood. Even if you have ear plugs and the volume at “1”, the song is still so surprisingly loud that it sounds like a bunch of people yelling and yelling so they can try to be heard over the drums being completely compressed. no dynamic volume, Obscenely Loud!

To understand exactly what I mean, you can compare Bad Blood to Led Zeppelin’s Good Times Bad Times. No one is going to call Good Times Bad Times a ballad or a weak tune. But you can hear the dynamics, you can hear the feeling, the outro has Robert Plant singing, yelling even, some great high notes. In short, that song is totally scorching performed by some guys who play loud, but with a sonic fullness that doesn’t sound like an assault on the ears or a freight train trying to run you over.

Swift’s song has none of those nuances; What’s more, Swift’s song doesn’t contain any musical intensity on the level of Led Zeppelin’s, an interesting phenomenon that shows that loudness doesn’t equal loudness. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Swift and I enjoy her sound immensely. In fact, Swift’s voice is so wonderfully full of expression that it’s amazing that her producers seem to have been able to surgically remove all of her emotion from her performance in Bad Blood. Swift’s producers have done this to her, and besides, her producers aren’t the worst offenders. I love Imagine Dragons, but my God, someone needs to produce their songs in a way that lets the personality of the band shine through. There’s a genuine warmth to that band that’s buried under a mountain of cheating studio effects from producers.

In general, we need a return to producers who can give singers, rockers, alternative musicians and singer-songwriters a breather. I’ve been listening to some new music lately that sounds pretty good and pretty underproduced in a nice way.