My latest conference paper traces the use of the b2 scale degree (like Db in the key of C) through 1980s extreme metal and industrial music, 1990s nu metal, and millennial blockbuster films like Queen of the Damned and The Matrix, before this line of influence finally crossed into mainstream pop music through songs like Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack.” This paper was presented at the American Musicological Society national conference. You can watch the video version here, in full and for free: https://www.academia.edu/video/k7BNYl

Abstract:

Topic theory has evolved as a framework for studying communication and meaning in European classical music. Some scholarship has extended beyond this repertoire (ex. Echard 2017), but many conventional topics in popular music remain understudied. The music theorist Eron Smith has identified a b2-1 “hotness” topic in post-millenial pop, and traced the topic to long-standing orientalist stereotypes associating b2 with non-Western music. Some of Smith’s examples clearly resonate with orientalism, by combining the b2 with sitars or other timbral markers of foreignness.
But many examples of the b2 “hotness” topic do not contain orientalist timbral markers.

I argue for another source: the ubiquitous use of b2 in extreme metal, gothic/industrial/EBM, and other pre-millennial underground music subcultures. Some post-millenial pop examples of the hotness topic, such as Justin Timberlake’s “Sexyback” (2006), imitate the distorted timbres of EBM exactly, rather than the orientalist “foreign” timbres. I trace the transmission of b2 into mainstream pop through millennial films that romanticized these subcultures and brought them to mainstream attention, like Queen of the Damned (2002) and The Matrix (1999), as well as late-90s moments when these underground styles crossed over into the mainstream, like electro house (ex. Benny Benassi “Satisfaction,” 2003) and nu metal (ex. Korn, whose singer Jonathan Davis composed songs for Queen of the Damned). What began as a pre-millennial performative icon of transgressive anti-mainstream aesthetics and ideology was sublimated into an indexical sign for edgy cool, then coopted and commodified as post-millennial sexiness.

This trajectory certainly does not replace the b2’s orientalist resonances, nor is it the only route of transmission to post-millennial pop (b2 is also common in trap music, for example). b2 “hotness,” like all topics, is not a static analytical symbol, but carries contingent, plural meanings that evolve over time as the topic is used by different communities and for different purposes. This demonstrates a crucial role for historical research as topic theory expands to popular genres, to understand how pop topics change, what they have signified, and for whom.