Friday Song: “Radioactive”

Imagine Dragons was formed in Las Vegas in 2008, releasing their debut album Night Visions in 2012. “Radioactive” was the first track. The song is about finding renewed energy to forge a fresh path in life.

Imagine Dragons was able to reach #3 on the Billboard charts with this song, something that is vanishingly rare these days — a band scoring a Top 10 hit.

The diminution of bands was well underway by the time Imagine Dragons burst onto the scene. By 2020, there were very few bands with a Top 10 hit in the US or UK. This was after decades of bands — e.g., the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Eagles, the Police, the Cars, Journey, REM, U2, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day — dominating the charts.

• Bands were so mainstream and venerated that even solo artists listed their bands — e.g., Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, Bruce Springsteen & the E-Street Band, Prince & the New Power Generation, and Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers.
• Hip-hop was highly band-driven initially, as well — the Wu-Tang Clan, NWA, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and a Tribe Called Quest, for example.

To illustrate how empty the field of bands has become, one of the handful of bands scoring a Top 10 hit in the UK since 2020 was . . . the Beatles.

This has been caused by a number of factors, according to a thoughtful and informative video from Rick Beato.

There has been a steep price for creativity and diversity in music. In the band-centric era, bands mainly wrote their own songs. As a result, some new and superb musician/songwriters emerged and had solo careers after or alongside their time with a band — Phil Collins from Genesis, Sting from the Police, Michael McDonald from the Doobie Brothers, and Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, just to name a few.

Starting slowly in the 1990s and firmly taking hold by 2000, bands began hiring — often at the behest of their labels — songwriting producers. These individuals were, in the eyes of the studios, proven hitmakers, and they imprinted their songwriting tendencies on numerous artists, homogenizing music that might have otherwise been more surprising or more of a stellar nursery for new songwriters.

In the case of Imagine Dragons, they hired (or were assigned) Alex da Kid, who is not only their producer but who is listed as a songwriter on “Radioactive.”

• Interestingly, in their narrative of how the song came to be, Imagine Dragons does not cite their producer as having a role.

Fast-forward to this year, and as Beato discusses, of the Top 50 hits on Billboard, not a single one is by a band, with individual artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, Chappell Roan, and Bruno Mars dominating. Even when broadened to encompass the Top 400 list on Spotify, there are only three bands on the list that formed in the past 10 years.

Why has this happened?

• Risk aversion — labels want to have hits, and using proven in-house songwriters as producers instead of letting unknown bands write songs is perceived as lower risk (this also means lower reward, I might add)
• Bands are hard to manage, while individual artists are easier to manage
• Technology has made it possible for an individual artist or a small collab to produce professional music
• Bands are more expensive, and more likely to break up or suffer creative tensions
• Covid made it so more musicians learned how to produce music using technology

That said, “Radioactive” is a great song, and a modern classic from days before the trend away from bands and toward producer-singer music was so dominant.

The version featured here was filmed live at Red Rocks — the best music venue I’ve ever experienced.

Enjoy!