TikTok has destroyed pop’s best asset – the bridge
Has TikTok demolished the bridge? For many pop lovers, it is the moment when a song really takes flight, unleashing us from the grip of verses and choruses, twisting melody and lyric into unexpected shapes only (in the hands of the greatest songwriters) to artfully modulate its way back to the welcome embrace of the final chorus coda, the whole song somehow transformed before our very ears.
It can be hard to define exactly what a bridge is, but we all know it when we hear it: a moment of transition, a sonic refreshment, literally a bridge between song parts taking listeners to another level. On Motown soul classic Ain’t No Mountain High Enough it allows duet partners Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell to breathlessly and defiantly reaffirm their commitment whilst setting up a key change and resuming the song even more on fire than before.
In George Michael’s Careless Whisper, the saxophone solo leads seamlessly to a bridge (“Tonight the music feels so loud”) when the singer stops beating about the bush and admits his true feelings, the “please stay” ending casting the chorus refrain in a bittersweet new light. A finely wrought bridge can be the difference between a good song and a great one. But in a brave new streaming world of two-minute TikTok pop, who’s still got time for bridge-building?
TikTok’s short-form videos have become a major force in creating hit singles, driving a trend for shorter, simpler, meme-friendly songs that bang straight in on a chorus and end as quickly as their streaming royalties have triggered. A recent New York Times piece about the changing shape of hit songs proposed that a typical modern song structure effectively begins “with a hook, followed by another hook, ending with another hook.”
It could be describing American singer and rapper Tommy Richman’s 2024 hit Million Dollar Baby, a 123-second squelch which topped the TikTok chart for 10 weeks, became a Billboard global number one with over 750 million streams, and caused an outbreak of soul searching on Reddit’s popheads forum. “It goes without saying that soundbite form doesn’t favour complex or varied song structure, but it’s interesting how rapidly the bridge, in particular, seems to be disappearing,” wrote one worried user. “I’m wondering if we’ll see it disappear altogether.”
For anyone lamenting such a loss as a tragedy, it may be worth noting that the Bee Gee’s 1979 classic hit Tragedy doesn’t have a bridge. The same can be said of many of the most beloved pop songs of all times, from ABBA’s Waterloo to last year’s Miley Cyrus’s smash Flowers, instead maintaining variety with double verse structures including pre-choruses sometimes rather unhelpfully referred to (usually by American musicians) as, er, bridges.
To add to the confusion, when James Brown famously snaps “Take it to the bridge” in his steaming 1970 funk classic Sex Machine, he’s not indicating a new lyrical section, he’s leading his band into an instrumental break featuring altered melodies and rhythmic lines. In modern electronic dance music, this is known as the drop, and arguably serves much the same function as a bridge: to refresh listener’s ears before leading us back into the song at an elevated level of excitement. And also, in Brown’s case, to give him a chance to show off his dance moves.
It’s easy to get into a semantical tangle with bridges, especially when we throw in the synonymous term “middle eight”. That originally referred to an eight-bar section in the 32-bar song form that became prevalent in 20th-century jazz but which has been bent out of shape since the rock and pop explosion of the 1950s and 1960s. Musicologists make rules that musicians wilfully break in pursuit of something that flows and modulates whilst gripping listeners’ attention, leading to middle 8’s that last for 16 bars or repeat like extra verses.
The Beatles were absolute masters of this form, and their use of bridges remains the gold standard for pop songcraft, from the “Why she had to go” emotional peak of Yesterday to the “life is very short” perspective switch of We Can Work It Out. Bob Dylan was less enamoured, composing epic songs that barely had a chorus let alone a bridge. Dylan sometimes characterised bridges as unnecessary affectations yet he conjured some beauties, from the “long time curse” in Just Like a Woman to the “contacts / lumberjacks / facts / attacks” rhyme charge in Ballad of a Thin Man.
As Dylan said in 2012, songwriting “has to do with melody and rhythm. After that, anything goes.” Pop is an ever-changing format connecting to the needs of listeners in this moment, not the requirements of theoreticians. But is the bridge really in danger of falling down?
It does seem to be true that pop songs are getting shorter under pressure from streaming and social platforms, but not perhaps by as much as you might think. The average US Billboard hit has decreased by 20 seconds in the past 10 years but still clocks in around three minutes 30 seconds (in the bloated 1990s, it was over four minutes). Yet whilst intros and outros have undoubtedly become compressed, the bridge remains prevalent – featuring in eight out of the 15 most popular songs on Spotify in the 2020s so far. The current UK number one, Sabrina Carpenter’s Taste, boasts a particularly neat little bridge (the chugging drop “Every time you close your eyes and feel his lips, you’re feeling mine”) switching the song’s impetus at 1:38.
She is amongst a wave of young female singer-songwriters who clearly adore bridge, which flourish in songs by Billie Eilish (her current hit Birds of a Feather has a beauty), Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. It is a basic human instinct to seek changes in patterns and find stimulation in variation – and pop practically demands it. To my ears, even most of the rap, electro and dance songs in today’s charts feature drops, breaks, switches and alternate hooks that serve essentially the same function. It makes me question whether TikTok is really the dominant and destructive pop force some people seem to fear? Sure, it’s a format for musicians displaying their wares – but when those two-minute wonders make it back to the real world with their meme-friendly short-attention-span hooks, they still have to hold our attention as the rest of the song plays out.
Intriguingly, however, there are also three classic Oasis hits back in this week’s Top 20 – Don’t Look Back In Anger, Wonderwall and Live Forever – none of which feature anything you could mistake for a bridge. Noel Gallagher apparently has little use for them. Which certainly hasn’t stopped millions of fans from spending a small fortune for the chance to sing along on the reunited band’s stadium tour. It’s hard to imagine a single Oasis fans tearing up their ticket in disgust when they realise their favourite song hasn’t even got a middle eight.
So let’s forget hard and fast rules and just cross those beautiful bridges when they appear before us. Standing on top of a mighty bridge offers fresh perspectives, challenging or deepening an established lyrical idea whilst shifting listeners to sonic terrain that makes a return to the other side even sweeter, a point of tension and release that, for many, will be the actual high point of the whole song experience. Which is why I don’t think songwriters are going to ever stop building bridges.
The 10 best bridges in music
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Any list of all-time great bridges could be happily overstuffed with the Beatles’ thrilling contributions. How about I Saw Her Standing There, You Can’t Do That, This Boy, Girl, Nowhere Man, No Reply, Here, There and Everywhere, Back in the USSR … all the way up to Oh Darling and The Long and Winding Road. Perhaps it had something to do with the dual songwriting perspectives of Lennon and McCartney chipping into each other’s songs from different angles. In their early years, particularly, you can feel the excitement of the songwriters as they find new ways to lift standard formats. This bruising, bustling, bluesy rocker led by John Lennon is charging along with swaggering masculine energy when Paul McCartney takes over and lifts it to another plane with his softer, emotional rejoicing: “When I’m home, everything seems to be right, yeah …” As in many Beatles songs, the bridge appears twice, effectively acting as an alternate verse structure.
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Exactly eight bars long, this simple but beautiful example of a perfect bridge arrives after the second chorus to give us a new and deeper perspective on Otis Redding’s lonely vigil. There’s no great sonic shift here, the legendary Stax band (featuring Booker T Jones on keyboards, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald Dunn on bass and Al Jackson Jr on drums) maintain their gentle pace and mellifluous tinkling in a folky style far from their usual soul attack, but the horns press in a bit and the all-time great soul singer raises the internal temperature as he gently cries: “Look like nothing’s going to change / Everything still remains the same …”
It is goosebump raising and seems to dump Redding back on the dock even more resigned to stoic loneliness than before. In one of music’s saddest losses, Redding died in a plane crash aged 26 before his most famous song was released.
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Anyone fearing bridges are going out of style need only listen to Taylor Swift. The reigning American superstar singer-songwriter’s loves bridges so much she even did a medley of two of her own personal favourites during one of her recent Wembley Stadium Era concerts (for the record, they were Hits Different from Midnights and Death By a Thousand Cuts from Lover). Cruel Summer is Swift’s most streamed song on YouTube. It sets itself up as a romantic electropop song full of dreamy longing, with quite an old-fashioned almost Roy Orbison-esque falsetto chorus, but it switches tack almost completely when the bridge arrives with a whole new melody and skittery rhythm.
Swift turns the table on her neglectful lover in a punchy, accusatory rant: “I’m drunk in the back of the car/ And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar / Said, I’m fine, but it wasn’t true / I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you.” It lands on the kind of line Swift fans love to scream at the top of their voices: “I love you – ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?” It’s so good, Swift returns to it after one last chorus, boldly ending the song on a bridge.
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Two of the finest and in some ways most underrated American singers of the Seventies and Eighties combined with Michael Jackson’s British collaborator Rod Temperton and the great producer Quincy Jones. That is some songwriting team. This faith-based RnB synth-pop-soul charger has an addictive urgency that goes up a notch when the bridge arrives after the second chorus. It’s not that it marks a great change in tone or direction, rather that it compresses the song so far and shoots it out – bang – with a new impulse, serving as a big refresher for the listener and reinspiring us.
It is as if the writers are saying, ‘how can we really make the best of what’s come before? What’s the best way of getting out of the trap we’ve set so we can end up back with the song?’ It’s a belter, even if no-one can agree whether the Yah Mo in the song means “you must”, “I am gonna,” “God will”, or maybe just “yeah, Mo will definitely be there guys, just keep singing your socks off.”
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The saddest, sweetest and oddest pop song ever, about a man missing the smell of his baby’s nappies. There is a wonderful synthesis between Chris Difford’s detailed, hard-luck narrative (inspired by social conscience Play for Today TV dramas like Cathy Come Home) and Glenn Tilbrook’s flowing, catchy tune. The song is almost the definition of bittersweet, filled with a melodic promise of happiness before a crushingly downbeat conclusion. It doesn’t have a chorus, just a succession of six verses split in the middle by a bridge which casts the first faint shadow over the couple’s joy (“I worked all through the winter / The weather brass and bitter”).
It accomplishes a very unusual musical trick, modulating down a tone. A lot of bridges take us up a key (Elvis Costello’s Oliver’s Army is a fine example) but by going down, it is as if Squeeze are signalling all is not well. It also leaves them plenty of space to go back up to the original key for the final verse. It’s a bit of a wonder, but so seamless it never distracts from the storytelling.
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Brian Wilson’s bridge for his greatest pop masterpiece is so outrageously daring it’s as if the songwriting genius was showing off. He’s already constructed a pop classic that sounds like nothing before it, bubbling and flowing in washes of harmonies with a theremin playing the hook.
Then after the second chorus, as harmonies escalate towards ecstasy, he decides to empty the song out and concoct a new half-time quasi ballad (“I don’t know where but she sends me there”) which honestly sounds like a hit in its own right. Then Wilson cuts that off at the knees and slows the tempo down again, leaving vocals floating adrift in psychedelic reverie at once discombobulating and perfect, dumping us on the other side clinging to the chorus for dear life.
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There is a notion of Springsteen as a roughneck rocker rather than sophisticated composer, but the great man knows his way around song structures and stretches and plays with them to powerful effect. Born to Run is his signature anthem, an epic rocker of escape that powers along past mansions of glory in suicide machines with its engines at full blast, pumping our fists in defiance at life’s challenges because “tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”
Yet right in the middle of his road rampage, Springsteen takes listeners on a surreal diversion into a strange, dreamily remembered space of abandoned palaces and amusement parks, where girls comb their hair, boys look hard and “kids huddle on a beach in the mist”. It is here that lost boy Bruce affirms undying love for his Wendy, offering to die with her in an “everlasting kiss.” There’s a lot going on, cascades of sound, pianos and saxophones almost formlessly colliding before eventually coalescing in a dramatically punchy instrumental break that powers up to “1, 2, 3, 4” … and we’re back on the road. It imbues the song with an extraordinary sense of otherworldliness, as if Fellini had crashed into an all-American motorcycle melodrama.
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The greatest Britpop hit of them all, Jarvis Cocker’s class war anthem offers a masterclass in how a bridge can change the whole trajectory of a song. Common People is so lyrically witty, melodically catchy and musically bouncy you might think you were listening to a jolly knees-up celebration of working-class life in the style of Madness, albeit with a few pointedly sarcastic jokes at a wealthy interloper’s expense. But then the bridge crashes down with sudden rampaging desperation and lets you know how the singer really feels.
It’s the “Rent a flat above a shop” section, “smoke some fags and play some pool / Pretend you never went to school”, which the band attack with fierce energy. Cocker’s voice rises from dry drawl to something suddenly authentically passionate, at once scathing, gleeful, disdainful and proud. The bridge is a game-changer that heightens the inner temperature of the song that just never lets up after that. It’s akin to the moment in a horror movie when the protagonist belatedly realises they really shouldn’t have stepped through that door, but there’s no going back now.
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It was the song that put the King back on his rightful throne, Elvis Presley’s first number one smash hit single since 1961, when his incredible chart-topping reign came to a pathetic end with the anodyne soundtrack pop of Good Luck Charm. Eight years in the pop wilderness was ended by this monster. Suspicious Minds is a fine, jaunty, country pop-soul snapper, given a bit of Memphis muscle with lubricious strings, a tough horn section and sweet female backing vocals. Presley is on unusually tremulous form with one of his most emotional vocals, pleading for a jealous lover to stop ruining their precious romance with her paranoid suspicions (and one can only imagine what the serially adulterous Presley brought to that role).
But it is the bridge that really sells it, when the band drops out, the rhythm section switches to a slow waltz time, the gospel choir rises up and Presley practically falls to his knees pleading his case, laying his hurt and sincerity on thick. “Let’s don’t let a good thing die / Oh Honey, you know I’ve never lied to you.” I mean, who could resist? When the band picks up the beat again, we are right there with Elvis who knows he’s winning now, pumping his chest back out and practically strutting his way to the conclusion with increasing vigour. It’s an extraordinary performance.
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Surely the greatest bridge of all time, although there are some who will claim it’s not a bridge at all, but rather a whole other song. It illustrates the Lennon and McCartney partnership at its most sympatico. Lennon had the dreamy verse and chorus refrain, conjuring ethereal, stoned musings on mysteries of existence. McCartney had a serendipitous snippet of an unfinished song about an average mundane morning.
Dropped into the middle of Lennon’s wistful, solipsistic whimsy it offered a brusquely different tone and perspective, expanding their mutual vision into a song contemplating life from the earthy to the physical, the ordinary to the cerebral, a prismatic sense given incredible musical life by the Beatles groundbreaking, earth-shattering orchestration. What’s particularly sweet about the bridge is how McCartney literally wakes up from Lennon’s dream with an alarm clock ringing, gets himself together, jumps on a bus, goes upstairs for a sneaky joint and then drifts off to become part of his songwriting partner’s dream again. It’s a freakishly brilliant bridge completing what was already shaping up as a phenomenal song. You’ll never get something like that on TikTok.
