Why Charlie Puth Makes So Much Sense, Especially This Week

I didn’t plan to write about Charlie Puth this week, but I had just watched a reel of him breaking down why so many songs sound alike. Suddenly it kind of felt like he was accidentally teaching a segment of our class...

In the clip, Charlie Puth sits at a piano and starts breaking down how the same chord progressions show up across a lot of hit songs. He plays them one after another, moving between different artists, and once he points it out, it’s hard not to hear it. On the surface, the songs feel different. The lyrics change, the production changes, the overall mood shifts. But underneath all of that, they’re built on the same harmonic structure.

That’s what immediately brought Adorno to mind. In “On Popular Music,” he argues that popular music is fundamentally standardized. Even when songs sound new or innovative, their underlying framework is already in place. The chorus lands where we expect it to, the harmony resolves in familiar ways, and the emotional payoff is essentially built into the system. For Adorno, this kind of repetition isn’t accidental. It shapes how listeners respond and encourages a more passive form of listening.

Watching Puth explain these similarities feels like a modern version of that argument, even if he isn’t making it critically. He seems genuinely intrigued by the patterns, but the result's the same. Certain formulas work and trigger recognizable emotional responses, and the industry continues to rely on them.

At the same time, Sellnow’s “illusion of life” perspective complicates the picture. Music symbolizes intensity and release patterns. Certain chord progressions create tension; others provide resolution. If those emotional structures are widely shared and culturally recognizable, then repetition might not simply reflect industrial standardization. It may also reflect the use of a shared musical language that allows artists to communicate emotion efficiently and effectively.

So when Charlie Puth shows us that multiple hit songs use the same musical framework, I wonder if it's proof of Adorno’s culture industry, or proof that humans gravitate toward familiar emotional rhythms. And if songs are similar, remixing them becomes easier and more fluid. Basically, shared musical architecture makes borrowing almost inevitable.

So now I’m sitting here honestly wondering... If you found out your favorite song shares the exact same chord progression as ten other hits, would it lose meaning for you?