The idea of a song

Charlie Harding, host of Vox Media's Switched on Pop, has spent nearly 500 episodes trying to understand what a song is. "I don't think I've cracked the nut yet," he tells Unexplainable. But in a new Netflix series, he and musicologist Nate Sloan attempt something more contained: breaking down the individual sections that make up a pop song — the intro, verse, chorus, bridge — to understand how each one works emotionally. The first episode tackles the intro, and Harding arrives with a strong bias: he hates them.

The case against intros

Harding admits he tells his songwriting students at Berklee and NYU to cut their intros in half — or shorter. His frustration comes from growing up in the 1990s, when pop songs routinely opened with 30, 40, even 50 seconds of instrumental setup before a single vocal line appeared. He cites Shawn Colvin's "Sunny Came Home" (30 seconds before lyrics), the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight" (44 seconds), and the Cranberries' "Linger" (over 50 seconds). "What is the old adage?" he asks. "Don't bore us, get to the chorus." In TikTok time, he says, those intros are "epic."

But Harding also knows those songs were hits. So he sets out to test whether the intro actually matters — or whether it's a relic of an era before streaming and short attention spans.

First impressions and thin slicing