It’s the pop song mantra: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”
Keep it simple, memorable, to the point, don’t waste anyone’s eartime. “They cut it down to 3:05,” Billy Joel famously lamented in song, annoyed with radio’s preferred song length. Bands such as Wire, They Might Be Giants and Guided By Voices chopped things even further, writing catchy tunes that clocked in at less than a minute.
But Jack Simons, a Hadley native currently working in New York City, burst onto Instagram last month with tunes that only lasted ten or twenty seconds, tops, and his label for these fleeting gems is “micropop.”
Each mini-song comes with an appropriately dizzy homemade video (also created by Simons), with playful text and images that whirl you around and leave you dazed, like a hyper-edited roller coaster ride that’s just the twists and dips and loop-de-loops — and as soon as it’s over, you want to experience it again.
So far Simons has created 13 micropop pieces on Instagram, his medium of choice because the app automatically loops the video multiple times, “rendering each micropop song a little mantra unto itself,” he said in an interview last week.
Number 10 is an ultra-catchy, dance-floor thump with the lyrics “Autumn in NYC / I feel it in the breeze / so come on over ‘cause it only lasts for a week.” Number 13 is an ode to the actors who have played James Bond (with a surprise ending). Number 7 distills the spirit of Brian Wilson into a positive-minded 15-second ditty (“I don’t know if there’s a meaning to be clear / but while we’re here / let go of fear and hold love near”).
Number 11, meantime, is a tribute to soft-rock legend Michael McDonald, with whom Simons shares a birthday. (He does his best Doobie Brother impression for the ten-second tune.)
They’re all nearly over before they’ve begun, but each multi-layered composition/video is packed with colorful arrangements and blink-and-miss-it clever visual jokes; they demand multiple repeat visits just to take it all in.
Simons has been recording and releasing albums and EPs since 2010, all available for free on his Bandcamp page. They include playful one-man-band, pop-rock inspired by XTC, Rundgren and Zappa; experimental a cappella tunes dedicated to his pet cat Terry; stripped-down acoustic personal songs, and more.
But Simons decided he wanted to switch gears from any traditional format and find a way to meld his previous influences with a more futuristic process.
“Living in NYC, I’m so accustomed to hearing fragments of pop music from walking in and out of various bodegas, bars, and also from the passing blasts of car radio speakers,” Simons said. “And that was partially what sparked the idea of making condensed pop songs. These little pieces of pop music had left a lasting impact despite my hearing them in abrupt fragments. I began thinking about the possibility of pop music moving in this direction — more concentrated and hyper-stimulating.”
One of the galvanizing moments was Simons’ discovery of the YouTube work of Bill Wurtz, especially his animated video “history of the entire world, i guess,” a 20-minute brain-scrambling thing in wherein Wurtz narrates exactly what the title suggests, with his own jingle-esque harmonies and music to highlight key events.
“My mind was really blown,” said Simons, who watched it repeatedly and sent it around to friends and family. “It really opened my mind about the possibilities of using multimedia and social media to present original music. Especially because I’d always felt that the musical-artist tradition of releasing albums and playing shows was limiting in various ways.”
At the same time as the Wurtz epiphany, Simons checked out Instagram, loved its primarily visual focus, and had a major “aha” moment, realizing he could create clips on his phone and edit them into music videos and release them anytime through the popular app.
“Not only could I engage with people in the most stimulating way I can with my music,” he said, “but it’d also enable me to maintain the momentum of making new music on the regular and pursue ideas/moods/styles as quickly as they enter and leave my mind (which to me sort of parallels how people operate these days, what with the breadth of information around).
“My goal is to create as many as possible to turn my Instagram into a little cosmology of pop songs that one can skip around freely in fun interactive fashion,” Simons added. “It’s absolutely the closest I’ve ever come to making my music the way I really want to!”