A Hook Makes a Song but There is No Song Without the Hook?

In This Day and Age of Instant Gratification, a Good Hook Can Substitute Effectively for a Song

Listen to a few of your favorite songs on the radio closely. Better yet let's do a pop quiz, how many of you actually know the lyrics to your songs. A quick inventory of any of your top ten songs and your remembrance of their lyrics may suggest something telling, particularly if you're into pop music; you listen to the hook and memorize it quickly, which is in part your acculturation to the song, but you may not ever remember the lyrics at all whatsoever.

In some ways this is in part the way it has always been; for as long as I can remember I have known songs by their hook even before I knew the songs name. But in other ways producers and artists have capitalized off of this replacing meaningful lyrics with words that are "good enough" to get the listener through quickly to hear the hook again; hooks are repeated up to 16 times these days, bridges are forever and both can overshadow a song. What's worse is that some songs only have one or two verses.

Take a listen to your average Gwen Stefani song; in Hollaback Girl the first hook is repeated twice and then the second hook is repeated four times. The last verse doubles as a hook "It's Bananas ...", so in truth the song is overwhelmingly outdone by the hook. The lyrics themselves are brief and to the point. One of the singles off of her newest album "Now that You've Got It" isn't much different; the hook is modified and interspersed with the lyrics to the point where the two are indistinguishable from each other! Not to mention the structure of the first single off of that album "The Sweet Escape".

But I've often realized that my hottest songs that I can't do without are often formulated in this way, most of Fergie's songs are the same way, one of my favorite songs "Show Stopper" isn't but the lyrics are rather forgettable and the song may as well be. There is too tight of an integration between the girls voices and that of the accompanying track. When I finally listened to the rest of their debut album, I realized that the entire disc was the same way.