I’ll be honest, I love a good drop. I think you’ll be hard pressed to find someone who really doesn’t – even if it’s just a guilty pleasure.

You know what I’m talkin’ about. That moment where we hit the breakdown, everything suddenly grows quiet. Slowly, something begins to creep back up – it might be a beat, a melody, a synth layer. It grows, it expands. You know what’s coming. It builds and builds until that glorious moment of climax, followed by something new, something dark, something loud.

But we became obsessed. We forget that we can write a song without a drop. A lot of producers start getting really lazy, relying on a drop to carry an entire song.

Some genres can’t avoid it. It’s in their blood, it’s in their very definition – EDM and dubstep for example. Trance, hardstyle etc too, but to a slightly lesser extent. And while a lot of them use it really well, others just don’t.

Some (EDM) producers are lazy and write songs that don’t do anything interesting at all. But they have a huge drop. So people love it. Maybe EDM fans don’t really care? Maybe all they want is the drop, the rest is kinda meaningless anyway. Consider the analogy that EDM is the Two and a Half Men of music: appeals to the lowest common denominator. Cheap. Tacky. Vapid. Nothing happens at all except for occasional dumb jokes. Those jokes are the drops. Fun sometimes, sure, but not really.

Here is a stupid YouTube compilation of 20 EDM drops. The mere fact that a compilation containing ONLY drops exists, is basically proof that these tracks only exist to support them.

Obviously, genres exist without drops. Loads of them, too! And guess what, it’s true! Songs can 1) not have a drop, and 2) be good. But it gets a annoying when some people are so anti-drop that it almost seems like a badge of honour for them. Calm down, buddy.

We don’t need to hate on the drop. It has a place and purpose, and yeah, sometimes it’s misused. But that’s not the drop’s fault, that’s the lazy producer. It’s equally silly to believe that a song is only good when it has a drop, and to believe that a song with a drop automatically sucks.

Here’s a bunch of HILARIOUS parody drops that make fun of exactly that. My personal choices are no. 4, 6 and 10.

To use another analogy, think of the drop as the electronic equivalent of a guitar solo; they’re great when they’re used well; the drop, like the solo, can be pivotal and important moments when used properly. But they can be over-used, or unnecessary, and they can overshadow the rest of the track to the point where you kinda just want to fast forward to that one crucial moment, like that dumb playlist up there.
Look, I think that the second guitar solo in ">Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb’ is the greatest solo of all time. But NO WAY would I skip the song to get to that moment. The rest of the song is fucking brilliant. And the same goes for electronic music and it’s drops.

It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it. When used in moderation, drops are awesome. We shouldn’t be obsessed with them, and we also shouldn’t be obsessed with hating on them.

Finally, here’s an excellent, hilarious video to watch right now: