I tried to ask the following question the other day, but I think it is too muddle a concept: “if the Beatles had recorded the exact same songs over the exact same period of time but were as popular as, say, the Animals, would the songs sound worse?” I chose the Beatles for simplicities sake but it was probably a bad idea, people got unstuck on the question as to whether the Beatles would have changed their sound, but it was a theoretical concept.
Still, the good news was that I knew the answer to a degree anyway because it happens every day.
Somewhere between some Jungian meets Joseph Campbell power of mass thought telepathy meets power of the crowd cyber contingency, the same songs sound different. The way you can get hundreds of people on Facebook calling you an asshole or (if you’re famous) the greatest: the pile on effect affects the way sound sounds, in a mass hypnosis that quite literally makes a track that sounded one way sound another way.
On a personal level, I only have to hear that Pitchfork and Consequence Of Sound like a song for me to doubt my own instincts. And absolutely, for me, popularity improves a sound. Lorde’s “Royal” is a perfect example where I dismissed it and dismissed it and though it took a live performance to turn me all the way around, its success was what had me wondering.
This is true as such, it is a truism: success changes songs, it might make the song worse or better, but it will sound better. Not just “Imagine”, but any success with a huge audience gains power even if the power hurts it, it vibrates as mass concept. It sounds truer and deeper, it sounds like powerful aphorism.
It is similar to organized religions where the Tenets and traditions become different, larger, as a religion grows. All that stuff in Scientology that you sneer at would read different if the religion wasn’t the slowcore of faith.
This is an incomplete theory I am still messing with it and I can’t get a clear handle on it because there are too many variables: there is too much noise, to use the vernacular. However, I have noticed, as a serious student of the Record Charts, how songs I heard one way when they were released, I hear another way if they become popular.