The McDonaldization of Our World Takes Away Unique Color and Sound
But there’s opportunity hidden in the grayscale and unoriginal pop music
Something is going on right in front of us that’s escaping our notice due to its sheer magnitude. In a way, it’s like viewing a whale from a ship. You can see pieces of the creature but can’t make out its entire shape and enormity due to the ocean around it.
Our whale, in this instance, is globalized industrial sameness.
Likely, this is nothing new to you. In 1993, sociologist George Ritzer coined the term McDonaldization, which is a reference to the streamlining and uniformity of things across cultures and countries. Businesses do this to increase efficiency, predictability, profit calculability, and control.
Ritzer’s term pays homage to McDonald’s, who offer us the same Big Mac across the globe, under the same golden arches.
In fact, this hamburger is so universal, it’s used as a method to track currency inflation around the world. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is an effective financial indicator, that works by comparing the price of this same sandwich on every continent except Antarctica.
Now, the McDonald’s, Starbucks, or the global franchise of your choice is the obvious section of the whale you can see. But Evan Amato at The Culturist points out the true creature underwater is larger than you can imagine, and slowly dulling our senses in a blanket of sameness.
In his opinion, McDonaldization is also homogenizing color and sound. Personally, I rolled my eyes after reading this. But after an hour stuck in traffic, I got a bit of a color shock.
Grayscale Conquering Our World
Amato claims that most cars in our present day reside somewhere on the grayscale (either white, black, gray, or silver). I confirmed this sitting in traffic the next day, from my gray car, as I looked upon a sea of grayscale. Unlike mine though, Amato’s claim isn’t subjective.
Analysis by auto trade groups tells us anywhere from 75% to 80% of cars today are painted in grayscale. So, while the quality of paint gets better, its palette shrinks — all part of the whale of efficiency, predictability, and control. But it isn’t just cars.
Data scientist Dr. Cath Sleeman conducted a study where she analyzed over seven thousand pictures of “everyday common” objects that fit within twenty-one varied categories for color, shape, and texture. The most common color was a dark charcoal gray.
She was also able to do an analysis over time, producing charts and videos showing colors of materials changing over the past couple hundred years. According to Dr. Sleeman, something noticeable appeared:
“The most notable trend, in both the chart and the video, is the rise in gray over time.”
She cautions that this may be a reflection on using less wood and more adoption of plastic and metal. Also, seven thousand items is only a small sample. However, a noticeable number of everyday objects we deal with are graying, and you can see it in other aspects as well.
This is reflected in industrial design (stainless steel appliances), minimalism, the grayscale phones we all carry, and monochrome coloring in architecture. So it isn’t just McMansions and cookie cutter apartment buildings, there’s a minimalizing of color palettes in the name of efficiency.
Although it doesn’t stop in the visual field with color, our submerged whale is also eating away at sound.
A Music Assembly Line
“Thus began the difficult phase of not only pulling the show together but getting the four stars to resemble a functioning band. Dolenz, for one, was learning his instrument from scratch, and the varied styles and influences on display made for a collective sound that didn’t entirely mesh.”
— Tim Ott, The Monkees: How the Band Created for TV Conquered the Pop Charts
In 1966, the Monkees’ debut album topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for thirteen weeks. There was just one issue. The Monkees weren’t a functional band. The group was assembled for a TV show, and the music produced was filler for the series.
The group went through boot camp-style training to give the image of coordination, but studio musicians played the instruments on their first two albums, not the actors. Micky Dolenz couldn’t even play the drums; he was a guitar player.
This event captures one of the first appearances of the McDonaldization of music. The Beatles were a big hit band at the time, so production studios tried to artificially build their own version of the British group for a television show. But once together, they took it a step further.
If you look at the recent K-Pop (Korean pop music) phenomenon, it’s just recycled girl and boybands that the west has been doing for years. It’s also manufactured. These “bands” don’t know each other; they’re assembled by producers and blended to fit a desired mold (both visually and acoustically). Then, other producers promote them.
While you’ll get your general collection of crotchety old folks complaining all pop music sounds the same, science shows some evidence to back up this claim. It’s also a glimpse of the whale under the surface.
Research scientist Joan Serrà from the Spanish National Research Council and his team studied over four hundred thousand musical recordings made between 1955 to 2010 from a variety of genres. They isolated a growing trend. According to Serrà’s team:
“We observe a number of trends in the evolution of contemporary popular music. These point towards less variety in pitch transitions, towards a consistent homogenization of the timbral palette and towards louder and, in the end, potentially poorer volume dynamics.”
So louder, less variety, and homogenized consistency — a figurative Big Mac for your ears. But from a historical sense, what’s so wrong with this? After all, the ancient Greeks dotted their landscape with white marble buildings and statues. Grayscale and homogenization didn’t stifle their society.
But that’s not exactly true.
An Old World Of Bright Colors
While our impression of the ancient Greek world is stale white marble columns and pale statues, this isn’t the case. Statues were painted in lively hues of color, along with the temples and structures we see today. Historians call this art form Polychromy (or Polychrome).
It derives from the Greek πολυχρωμία, πολύ (many) and χρώμα (color). But there’s also evidence the Greeks and Romans scented statues with perfumes because the bright colors weren’t enough to impress their senses.
Color itself was a big business. The Phoenicians built a trading empire from the color purple, or Tyrian purple to be more exact. This shade required monumental effort to make, capturing predatory sea snails and extracting a precursor for the color from their glands.
Modern studies have indicated it may have taken twelve thousand snails to net a few grams of Tyrian purple. It was so rare and decadent, the dye commanded three times its weight in gold. This means an ounce of purple today could cost about $6,000, and some Roman emperors painted entire walls in this color.
Those alive in the Renaissance also went to extreme means to color their world, which involved amazing trade networks to obtain desired shades.
The king of blues in the Renaissance was called ultramarine, which was made from the precious mineral lapis lazuli. It required transport all the way from Afghanistan to Europe. Vermeer’s subject in Girl With Pearl Earring is wearing a head scarf painted with ultramarine.
Although blue wasn’t the only king of color; the brightest red was Cochineal. This shade involved crushing innumerable scales of the kermes beetle. So, while we move to a McDonaldized monochrome world, our ancestors fought desperately for a polychrome one.
This thought may sadden some, or anger others, but I see our whale as an opportunity.
It’s Never Been A Better Time To Capitalize On Uniqueness
Street musicians are nothing new, and you may come across one of these individuals playing in exchange for whatever coins you’ll toss into an open box. But on the random streets of London you’ll see something truly unique. It’s Lewis Floyd Henry.
He’s a bit hard to explain, because if you just listen to him, you don’t realize how special he truly is. See, Lewis plays guitar, bass, drums, and sings…all at the same time. How? Part is through the miracle of technology; the rest is through skill and talent.
Lewis plays a guitar and bass combo. He starts by laying down a bass rhythm and records it with a foot pedal. He then plays guitar, drums with other foot pedals, and sings along. He also channels the dynamism of Jimi Hendrix in a way I’ve never seen.
He plays everything from Hendrix covers, Wu-Tang Clan, and even his own wild original music. Lewis paints and sells vividly colored art online too. In a way, he’s single-handedly fending off the whale dulling our individuality.
He also shows us an incredible opportunity that exists when the rest of the world becomes homogenized.
While we live in an increasingly monochrome world, the desire for the old polychrome one never goes away. There’s an opening if you can provide that unique color or sound fix our cultures are secretly fiending for.
So, in my humble opinion, there’s a model for those who want to achieve great success in our current time.
More Tyrian purple, ultramarine, and polychrome, less grayscale and monochrome.
More Lewis Floyd Henry and Jimi Hendrix, less manufactured pop music.
Even though the whale of McDonaldization threatens to take away color and sound, there’s a unique opportunity hidden in the grayscale and unoriginal pop music for those willing to be different.
-Originally posted in Medium 4/7/25