The Four Chords That Made a Million (And the Freaks Who Ignored Them)

Weird music is good music, but good music doesn't have to be weird

Preface: This is a diatribe on music that doesn't come close to capturing the breadth of all that is music, like my love for Garth Brooks, or America, or Chopin, but rather walks the path of the music geek in a sort of overview way and I hope you will fill in the blanks.

I use to argue that music needed to be avant-garde to be worth something, or at least something worth noting. But anymore I think that sometimes music is great just because it makes you tap your foot or shake your butt a little - ask my wife who's constantly dancing, even when she's the only one who hears the music she's grooving to - and that idea of what is good music can change moment to moment, not requiring you to analytically dissect a concept album or pick apart a time signature. Music is emotive, it's fluid, it captures you differently throughout your day, let alone your life, and it's not a competition.

A little weirdo, like me

My niece and I have a shared Spotify playlist. No rules, no true theme — just a running document of music we pass back and forth like a digital version of a mixtape. Some weird, some catchy, but all interesting. She'll add something, I'll add something, and we'll occasionally text each other about whatever just landed in the queue. The cool thing is she started it right after we took a road trip during which we all took turns picking the next song. I choose the most obscure songs I know, and my niece reveled in that and appreciated it way more than my brother-in-law or my wife. The stranger the song the more I heard giggles and glee emanating from the back seat.

A few weeks ago she dropped in a band called Femtanyl — and I had to sit with that for a second, because it is exactly the kind of name that sounds like it's designed to make parents uncomfortable, which is to say it is a perfect band name. The music matched the name and conjured visions of what I imagine cartoon nightmares would consist of; strange, frenetic, chaotic... like something dreamed up in a fever. I loved it immediately.

Then she added bands like My Chemical Romance, Weezer, Wheatus, and Mindless Self Indulgence, and I felt this warm, dumb wave of nostalgia wash over me as I realized "oh, she's finding the mid-2000s". It made me irrationally happy in a way I'm not even a little embarrassed about.

I added Animal Collective's "Leaf House" and Dan Deacon's "When I Was Done Dying" and then threw in some Ween because why not? A brief aside: The Deacon song has made me cry more than once — something about the way it moves, the images it conjures, the feeling that you're being carried somewhere you've never been - it has this vibe professing that it's okay to let go as it tells this story of dying and the psychedelic trip that is the process of death. That is a beautiful way to capture such a heavy thought, so much so (to me) that every time I listen to the song and it comes to the lyrics "And the Earth looked at me as it said 'wasn't that fun' And I replied 'I'm sorry if I hurt anyone'"... it makes me weep. Perhaps I have guilt in my overly empathetic heart, or perhaps I just realize that we all make mistakes we don't even realize and yet we are surly forgiven for in the end... I'm sure both hold weight. Many songs have this wonderful ability to give goosebumps and evoke an emotional response, that's a great power of music as we interact with it.

That playlist with my niece — two people, a generation apart, handing each other music they love, watching each other's eyes go wide — is the whole argument of this post. Music discovery as a secret club. The ritual of sharing something that feels almost too good to be on a public playlist. That still exists, but it exists in tension with something that worries me, and I want to talk about both.

Why Pop Music Works (It's Not a Conspiracy, It's Just Your Brain)

I used to despise pop music and wore the pretentious hipster hat well (probably still don that hat a bit if I'm being forthright with myself). Pop just seemed to be cheap and bland and permeated everything, but before we talk about the blanding of everything, I want to give pop music its due — because the truth is, the reason it works is fascinating, and it's not the fault of lazy artists or cynical executives. It's neuroscience.

There's a chord progression you've heard approximately ten thousand times in your life: I–V–vi–IV.

In the key of C, that's C–G–Am–F.

It underpins "Let It Be," "No Woman No Cry," "With or Without You," "Don't Stop Believin'," "Someone Like You," and about four hundred other songs you could sing right now without warming up. The progression works because of how our brains process music — it delivers a hit of resolution (the I chord, home base, safety) followed by tension (the V, pulling away), a dip into minor emotional territory (the vi, a little sadness to keep things interesting), and then a satisfying return journey (the IV, almost home). Repeat. Your brain releases dopamine. You feel good. You want to hear it again. Dang you science!

The progression is also sometimes called "the Axis progression," and Porcupine Tree — famously not a pop band — wrote a song called "Four Chords That Made a Million" that is essentially a musical eye-roll at how inescapable it is. The irony is that even songs written as reactions to pop formulas sometimes accidentally end up using them, because the formula is that hardwired.

Stack 4/4 time on top of that — four beats per measure, the steady pulse of a heartbeat, the most natural rhythm for a body with two legs and a heartbeat to follow — and you have the basic architecture of probably 80% of everything that's ever been on a pop chart. That's not a failure of imagination, that's evolution doing its job. Our brains are pattern-recognition machines, and music that confirms the pattern while introducing small surprises is deeply, chemically satisfying.

The music industry didn't invent this, it just industrialized it.

The problem isn't that the formula exists. The problem is when the formula becomes the only game in town — and when the machinery of production starts optimizing so hard for the formula that everything else gets squeezed out.

The Golden Weird (Or: What We Passed Around on Tape)

Here's what I remember about music in the late 80s and early 90s: the good stuff felt secret.

I grew up in Arizona, and we barely got reception of The Box — a TV music station out of LA where you could call in and request songs, then painstakingly wait, without reference, for an eternity for it to play — and it was frustratingly awesome how you had to put the TV set against a specific wall and adjust the rabbit ear antenna at exactly the right angle until the static reduced enough that you could actually make out what was on screen. Some nights is was more clear than others, but it was worth the effort every single time. The Box played things MTV wouldn't touch. Things that felt like they'd been smuggled in from somewhere else.

The cassette tape hustle was its own ritual. Keep a blank tape loaded — or an old one you didn't care about anymore with the record-protection tabs taped over — fingers hovering over the record button, waiting. You'd wait through whole songs you didn't care about just to be ready when the right one came on, and if the DJ talked over the intro, that was a genuine grievance. I'm still not over a few of those.

That's how I found Green Jellö's "Three Little Pigs" and thanks to The Box, I was able to see the incredible music video that went with it. That's how Metallica, Cypress Hill, Beck's "Loser," Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis was discovered — all of it spread not through algorithms, and not through algorithmic recommendations. Through someone handing you a tape or CD and saying "dude, you have to hear this", it was a personal recommendation. The value of the music was inseparable from the value of the gesture.

What made it feel precious was scarcity and specificity. A radio DJ wouldn't play it. A major label wasn't promoting it. It lived in a small circle of people who cared enough to seek it out and pass it along, and if you were lucky enough, you were in on something.

I shared "Three Little Pigs" with my niece recently. She loved it, and the look on her face when she listened to it was identical to the one I imagined on my own face when I first heard it. It didn't matter that we were streaming it instead of fast forwarding through a cassette, some experiences are format-agnostic.

This is also how Mike Patton entered my life, and I have to pause here because talking about Mike Patton without going overboard is incredibly difficult for me. His work with Faith No More gave us one of the most surprising covers ever recorded — their version of the Commodores' "Easy," a buttery 1977 soul ballad that Lionel Richie wrote and that Faith No More played completely straight during the Angel Dust era, just to confuse everyone... it worked. Patton's vocal range is the kind of thing that reminds you what a human voice is actually capable of. Everything he's done, from Mr. Bungle to Mondo Cane, carries that same energy: I refuse to stay in the lane you assigned me. That refusal is the whole philosophy. I could write a whole post about my love affair for Mr. Patton and his golden trachea, but I'll save that for another time.

Since I'm on the topic of vocal ranges and astounding talent... Björk. The Icelandic pixie goddess who I mention not as an aside but as a counterweight to everything the formula represents. When Björk sings, it sounds like an alien opening its throat to another dimension made entirely of sound — and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. She operates in a register that has nothing to do with hooks or dopamine loops or any of the machinery I described above, yet she has the capability of producing Pop hits - and she has. She just is uniquely mesmeric and happens to be one of the most singular creative voices in the history of recorded music.

The esoteric music and the Billboard top 100 co-exist. The formula was never the whole story.

The Compression (Or: When Everything Started Sounding the Same)

At some point — and I can't give you a precise date, more of a feeling that accumulated — the center of gravity shifted.

Streaming changed the economics of music in ways that quietly punished weirdness. Completion rate — the percentage of listeners who make it to the end of a song — became a signal that influenced playlist placement and algorithmic promotion. Songs got shorter. Intros got shorter. Anything that took time to develop became a liability. Concept albums became scarce. The algorithm doesn't have patience and it trained millions of listeners not to either.

The loudness wars compressed the sonic range of recorded music into a narrow, fatiguing band of maximum volume. Bro-country discovered that the I–V–vi–IV progression plus truck references plus a female character objectified in the second verse was a repeatable formula that printed money. EDM's four-on-the-floor kick drum — literally the simplest rhythmic statement a producer can make — became the backbone of mainstream pop for a decade.

Hip-hop was doing genuinely strange and interesting things throughout all of this — Kendrick, Danny Brown, Thundercat warping bass and jazz and funk into shapes nobody had seen before — but the mainstream lane narrowed. The cultural machinery that used to have room for weirdness in the middle ground started requiring you to be either very safe or very underground with very little in between.

I've felt like we're cooked at several different points along this timeline, and then something weird would happen and I'd feel better. The pendulum always swings back, even if it takes longer than you'd like.

The Lo-Fi Canary

I'll tell you about something I noticed on YouTube, because I think it's important — and because I think it's where the AI music problem becomes most visible, at least so far.

Lo-fi hip-hop — or jazzhop, or lo-fi beats, whatever you want to call it — was one of the lovely things the internet produced. Long-form playlists of mellow, atmospheric instrumental music, usually with soft jazz chords and gentle drum loops, perfect for studying or working or just existing without needing to pay attention. The original Lo-Fi Girl stream, with its looping animation of a student at her desk, became one of the most-watched live streams in YouTube history. The genre had warmth. It had human imperfection baked in — the slight drift in tempo, the vinyl crackle, the sense that someone made this in a small room somewhere.

Then the channels started multiplying. Fast.

One channel called "What is?" launched in September 2024 and racked up 130,000 subscribers within two months, releasing 128 tracks — eight playlists, sixteen tracks each — with no artist credits on any of them. Listeners noticed something. The music was technically correct. It hit all the genre cues, but it felt like a very good description of lo-fi music rather than actual lo-fi music. Someone in the comments wrote "this sounds like music made by Suno" — a popular AI music generation tool — and the channel liked the comment. Which is either a wink or a confession, depending on how generous you're feeling. I can't listen to these channels tho, not just as a matter of principle, but also because there is some oddly repetitious quality to it that somehow misses the mark and eventually starts to drive me crazy, like I'm stuck somewhere in the Backrooms, unable to escape this endless faux of a reality.

Pitchfork ran a piece called "How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene." The numbers from platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp suggest AI-generated tracks now account for somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of new lo-fi uploads, a figure that's rising as the tools get cheaper and more accessible.

Lo-fi was the canary because it was the easiest target. The genre's defining aesthetic — warmth, simplicity, gentle repetition — maps almost perfectly onto what AI music generation tools are (sort of) good at - music geeks may go nuts listening to it - but if you can describe a genre in a few sentences, you can probably prompt an AI into producing a passable version of it. Lo-fi can be described in a few sentences.

What worries me isn't just that AI is flooding one genre. It's that lo-fi was first because it was formula-forward. The more any genre depends on repeatable structures, the more vulnerable it is, and a lot of mainstream music has spent the last decade becoming extremely formula-forward.

The broader picture: Suno can generate a fully produced track from a text prompt. Google Gemini, as of this year, can do the same. The economics for human producers who work in conventional styles are genuinely brutal when a competitor can produce infinite content at zero marginal cost. This isn't theoretical. It's happening.

Here's what AI is actually generating: the formula. Infinite, competent, emotionally inert executions of the I–V–vi–IV prison. It's very good at this because it's trained on the corpus of everything that's already been made — and most of what's already been made is, by volume, formula. AI will produce an ocean of perfectly adequate music that means absolutely nothing to anyone, because it wasn't made by anyone, about anything, for any reason other than to fill a content-shaped hole in a feed. That's not music. That's furniture.

One Note on Film Scores

Danny Elfman existed. Ennio Morricone existed. Bernard Herrmann existed. These were composers who had a sound — identifiable, strange, deeply personal — that shaped the emotional experience of entire eras of cinema.

Something has shifted. The Marvel temp-track problem — where editors score rough cuts with existing music and directors fall in love with the temp, making it almost impossible for composers to write anything that doesn't sound like the temp — has flattened film scoring in ways that are hard to overstate.

Nobody seems to be trying to be the next Danny Elfman, and the industry's pipeline doesn't incentivize it. It's a footnote in a longer story, but it belongs in this conversation. Music used to be a part of the cinematic experience, leading you through emotional arcs, drawing out feelings and alluding to something as if it were an audible foreshadowing.

I mean, come on, Jurassic Park (the original) anyone? That was an epic construction of film and music that was original and drove the narrative, wholly without any insertion of the popular music of the era. A masterful thing of beauty really. I've seen an orchestra perform the Music of Jurassic Park and it was an absolute experience, highly recommended, they spared no expense.

The Freaks Always Survive

Here's what I want to say clearly, before we get to the part that actually made me hopeful again: weird music has never required the mainstream's permission to exist. It just requires people willing to pass it around.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard — a favorite — has released something like 25 albums across almost every genre imaginable, including, pointedly, their own experiments with microtonal tuning. Thundercat is out here making bass guitar jazz-funk that sounds like it's being played by someone who sees colors the rest of us can't. Tortoise and Mice Parade and Bibio and Balmorhea, have been building intricate instrumental architecture for decades with essentially zero mainstream attention and enormous, devoted audiences. The underground is not dead. It's just underground, which is where it's always lived.

And then — just a few months ago — something happened that I want to use to close this out, because it captures everything I've been trying to say better than I can say it myself...

Angine de Poitrine, and Why the Comments Section Made Me Emotional

Angine de Poitrine (it translates, wonderfully, to "chest pain" — or angina pectoris — in French) is a duo from Saguenay, Quebec. Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine — real names unknown, committed to anonymity — play microtonal math rock in polka-dot costumes and enormous papier-mâché masks. They've been operating since 2019 and won Artist of the Year at the Quebec GAMIQ awards in December 2025. Then, in February 2026, a live session they recorded for Seattle radio station KEXP hit YouTube and went viral beyond anything anyone expected. Nine million views and climbing as of this writing.

Let me explain what they're actually doing, because it's worth understanding. Khn plays a custom double-necked instrument — guitar on top, bass on the bottom — with twice the standard number of frets on both necks. Those extra frets give access to the notes between the notes in Western music. Not just the twelve tones we've been working with since equal temperament was standardized — but the half-sharps and half-flats that exist in the cracks. The result is music that sounds familiar enough to follow and alien enough to unsettle you in the best way, because your ear keeps reaching for patterns it almost but doesn't quite find.

On top of that, Khn controls the whole sonic architecture with a loop pedal — recording and layering bass lines, guitar riffs, and textures live, in real time, building songs from scratch on stage until one person sounds like a full band. Then there are the time signatures — 4/4 when it serves, but also 7, and 14, and whatever else the moment requires. Klek on drums keeps all of it grounded with what reviewers have called a raw, almost punk physicality.

Here's what's interesting about their viral moment specifically: a huge proportion of the comments on that YouTube video weren't just "this is great." They were relieved. Things like "this is the only way we can win the battle against AI." People reacting to the band the way you react to something that solves a problem you'd been losing sleep over.

I think that reaction makes complete sense when you understand the photography analogy. When photography was invented, painters panicked. What's the point of depicting reality with a brush when a machine can do it better and faster? Then something interesting happened — painters got weirder. Impressionism, expressionism, Dadaism, cubism. The machine freed them from the obligation to be accurate, which turned out to be the most liberating thing that had ever happened to painting.

Dadaism — which Angine de Poitrine's aesthetic directly echoes — was specifically a response to the machinery of industrial modernity. It was incongruity as resistance. Things that don't belong together, deliberately assembled to break the viewer's expectations. The band's name, their costumes, their instrumentation — all of it is Dadaist in the most intentional sense.

That's what's happening with AI and music right now. If anyone can generate a perfectly competent, fully produced pop song from a text prompt, then the question "why should I make another perfectly competent pop song?" becomes very easy to answer: you shouldn't. Go somewhere the AI can't follow. Find the notes between the notes. Play in time signatures that don't fit in a 4/4 grid. Build something that only exists because a specific human with a specific set of experiences and obsessions decided to build it.

The fact that Angine de Poitrine started as an inside joke — a project that was almost a parody of how weird you could be — and ended up as a genuine cultural moment says something important. The weirder the AI gets at mimicking normal, the more valuable abnormal becomes.

Back to the Playlist

My niece added Femtanyl. I added Dan Deacon. She added Weezer and I had a small, private moment of nostalgia. Somewhere in that exchange is the whole thesis.

Music has always been a tension between the formula and the people who refuse it. The industry optimizes for the former. Humans — stubborn, emotional, weird, incurably alive — keep inventing the latter. AI didn't create that tension. It just turned the volume up.

I don't know what the equivalent of a cassette tape is in ten years - probably digital, perhaps the rabbit ear antennas get imbedded into our heads as microchip implants. I don't know if the lo-fi genre recovers or gets permanently colonized by Suno. I don't know whether the YouTube comments cheering for Angine de Poitrine translate into a broader cultural shift or just a moment of encouragement before the flood resumes.

What I know is that two people can still pass music back and forth between them and feel something. That Dan Deacon can still make me cry on a Tuesday. That somewhere in Saguenay, Quebec, two people in polka-dot masks are playing notes that don't exist on a standard fretboard, and nine million people showed up to watch.

The formula will keep making millions. The freaks will keep ignoring it... someone has to.

Dan Deacon's When I Was Done Dying: