FEATURE
You Make a Good Case…
IN THIS PHOTO: Olivia Rodrigo/PHOTO CREDIT: Hanina Pinnick
The Overuse of UPPERCASE and lowercase Song and Album Titles in Pop Music
IN THIS PHOTO: Lil Nas X
phenomenon or thing, but there is a proliferation of artists using lower and uppercase lettering in their song titles. One can go back a long way t see other artists doing this. Prince has done it a few times. He also liked to abbreviate and use the letter ‘u’ instead of writing ‘you’. In terms of using upper and lowercase, it is something that has become more pronounced in the past few years. I am not sure whether using bold casing or dropping it down is a form of emotional emphasis. I have spoken to people about this. Some say that it is artists expressing themselves. Why keep things conventional if you are trying to stand out?! Uppercase definitely emphasises a point. If you have your song with capital letters, that makes it seem more urgent. To me, the whole thing smacks of poor English. In a texting age, it seems like, rather than upper and lowercase being an artist statement, it is a sign of laziness. I feel artists should be original when it comes to song titles and how they present their music. The industry always needs to evolve. By having a song or album where all the lettering is lower or uppercase, it just seems messy and frustrating. Not that this generation will adopt similar habits when they write, but people will see song titles written out like this and it might affect the way they write – whether that is in school or something else. Some artists blend upper and lowercase lettering. They might have a song title where one word starts with a capital letter and the rest is in lowercase.
I am not sure which is most annoying. I do feel artists doing all lowercase is the most irritating. It is how I imagine most people text these days. Is it a chance to connect with a teenage audience? Does a song that looks like text-speak offer great connection with the target audience? Many might opinion how it is not a big deal, though I think it does represent a trend that is worrying. There are particular artists culpable of having their album and song titles all in capital letters. I feel this is a sense of declaration; the need to be heard. Rather than let the music do the talking, the titles are there is all their striking (and annoying) capitals. I want to refer to an article from The Washington Post that explored this phenomenon. From artists such as Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish, big artists are not immune from all-lowercase or all-uppercase:
“It’s hard to pinpoint when the QWERTY became the most significant keyboard in contemporary music, but pop’s strange relationship with the shift key has mutated from a trend into a practice. Taylor Swift likes to type out her song titles in all lowercase letters, “like this.” Lil Nas X prefers them in all caps, “LIKE THIS.” On her latest album, Willow Smith — who performs as WILLOW, mononymously uppercased — is getting the space bar involved, too, which means that some of her song titles look “l i k e t h i s.”
If there’s a consensus explanation for why our playlists and pop charts now look as typographically gonzo as our messiest group texts, it’s generational: Today’s stars are 21st-century digital children who grew up expressing their multitudes by tweaking the keystrokes in their text messages, social media posts and more. And this isn’t exactly kid stuff anymore. All of the songs on Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 album “DAMN.,” were titled with single words, every letter capitalized with a period at the end of each word. By simply showing us the album’s track list, Lamar was framing his music as something declarative and decisive. Our eyes were listening before a sound touched our ears.
And yes, these stylizations may have seemed superficial and annoying at first, but now that we’ve stared at them long enough, our listening experience is beginning to change — and in ways that vary from artist to artist, song to song. For instance, Billie Eilish’s lowercase song titles might underscore the delicate intimacy of her singing, while Swift’s tiny letters telegraph modesty, humility and down-to-earthness. For the caps lock crowd, a sequence of big, blocky letter-shapes can feel triumphal, or boisterous, or rude, or needy.
Or, in the case of Lil Nas X’s debut album, “MONTERO,” all of the above. After the history-making success of “Old Town Road,” the Atlanta native is still learning how to close the gap between his massive persona and his developing songcraft, which means the big-lettered tunes on “MONTERO” run the gamut from totally anthemic (the title track) to somewhat anemic (“VOID”). But Lil Nas X obviously knows how to stand out in a digital crowd, so on the major streaming services, where all the fonts are uniform, his uppercase song titles perform a function: HEY, OVER HERE.
Before the streaming era, artists liked to pinch and twist the letters in their names, using their album covers to posit themselves as rebels, rule-breakers and typographic scofflaws. In the 1980s, k.d. lang emerged as the e.e. cummings of cowpunk. In the 1990s, OutKast had that capital “K” while Eminem and Korn occasionally reversed certain letters in their monikers for kicks. In the aughties, indie fans experienced an all-caps-no-vowels craze — MGMT, MSTRKRFT, SBTRKT — as well as the sadistic alt-capping of tUnE-yArDs, which, thankfully, was not communicable.
More recently, scores of rappers have taken stage names that seem like they were never meant to be uttered out loud in the first place. The most vexing in the lot — XXXTentacion, 6lack — felt more like screen names, or maybe even like echoes of Prince’s famously unpronounceable glyph, which, in hindsight, may have been the Artist’s attempt at stripping his identity of a vocalized sound. When we thought of Prince, he didn’t want us to hear the word “Prince” in our mind’s mouth. He wanted us to hear music.
Stylized song titles can help us better hear a song inside the silence of our own consciousness, too — as with Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, “SOUR.” It’s the big, shiny, breakout pop record of 2021, and Rodrigo’s stylizations play their part, performing an artful little rope-a-dope: With the album’s title in all uppercase, but the song titles uncapitalized, Rodrigo urgently beckons us to come over and check out the tiny treasures she’s holding in the palm of her hand.
One of them is “drivers license,” a vroom-vroomy power ballad that spent eight consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 this year, its layered metaphors capturing the painful teenage sensation of not being able to control the direction of the road in front of you. In this song, and in most of the songs on “SOUR,” Rodrigo’s singing feels attentive, detailed and highly alert, communicating broad, chaotic, teenage emotions in an elegant, lowercase, teenage way.
Then there’s “t r a n s p a r e n t s o u l,” the opening track on WILLOW’s new album, “lately I feel EVERYTHING.” The song itself is a taut and propulsive rock-like thing with professional punk drumming services provided by Travis Barker of Blink-182. But throughout, WILLOW’s voice remains loose and yearning, like she’s trying to steady herself to that beat. Suddenly, those wishy-washy spaces in the song’s title reveal a surprise tension, like the letters are being pulled back together instead of drifting apart.
Like Rodrigo and WILLOW, Eilish does similar mixing-and-matching on her excellent new album, “Happier Than Ever.” Nearly everything on the track list adheres to the common rules of capitalization, save for one all-lowercase entry (“my future”), and two in all caps (“GOLDWING” and “NDA,” the latter of which is an acronym, so it doesn’t really count). And that’s a shift from Eilish’s 2019 debut, an album of all-lowercase songs that seemed eager to perform a terrific metaphysical trick, quietly drawing us into their whispery verses until we were so close, the music felt colossal. Her smallness became a closeness which became a bigness”.
Whether it is a case of artists copying others and wanting to stand out due to uppercase or lowercase, we do not really need song and album titles shouted out – nor do they need to be all lowercase so it is like the artists could not be bothered to turn on the caps lock button! There are also artists who put their name all in capitals or lowercase. I get what The Washington Post said, specifically when it comes to Billie Eilish – lowercase lettering for her songs on a quieter and whispered album, whilst her follow-up is bolder and more confident. I can appreciate how the casing can reflect the mood and tone of a song (or album). It seems unnecessary to reflect that with the lettering, whereas it was seldom needed years ago. Think back to the Pop or the 1990s and ‘00s. Some artists did dabble with all lower or uppercasing, though it was rarer. It seems there has been this real proliferation and influx. The Washington Post argued that having all lower or uppercase changes the way we listen to songs and how they impact us, I am not too sure myself. I could listen to the same songs with the titles written correctly and get the same effect. How many of us are actually looking at the song’s title when we are listening along? I envisage people listening on phones and not paying too much focus to what is on the screen. I don’t think Pop artists (though it affects other genres too) need to shout everything or have their titles low and whispered – or, worse, mixing the casing altogether and making the title look really odd. If the music is good and original, that is what keeps the listener invested and will make the difference. I do feel the wave of lower and UPPERCASE titles needs to end. The likes of Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift are successful because of their music and their innovation. I don’t think the connection between upper/lowercase lettering and its psychological connection…
MAKES much of a difference.