The Pitch Ceiling: You Make It to Break It
- June 09, 2016
- By Dale McGowan
- In Unweaving
- 0
Remember 12-year-old Grace VanderWaal on America’s Got Talent? Sure you do.
4:03
Give me a minute. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.
Okay.
I’m not the only one. A friend of mine said she cries at 2:03, every time, and she wanted to know why. First the obvious: Adorable munchkin who has apparently seen Juno 20 times sings about not knowing who she is, then suddenly belts out, “I now know my name!” Dead. I’m dead.
But as usual, it’s not just the words. In the hands of a good songwriter, the music intensifies the meaning of the words. Yeah, the tempo picks up and she sings louder at that spot, but there’s something else there. Over the course of the short song, she creates a kind of pitch “ceiling” — then breaks through it at the perfect time.
Listen to the A-flats (in red below). She keeps hitting that note over and over and doesn’t go above it for most of the song:
The repetition creates a really tangible boundary. Listen:
16 sec
…then her breakthrough in the lyrics is mirrored with a breakthrough in the music, and the crowd responds instantly:
5 sec
That moment was the difference between polite applause and the audience leaping to its feet.
Simon Cowell’s “you’re the next Taylor Swift” comment was a bit much. But if Grace does happen to make it big, she’ll be able to trace her success back to a single well-placed D-flat.
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House of Cards: Screw Your Happy Ending
- May 05, 2016
- By Dale McGowan
- In Unweaving
- 0
A good opening title sequence moves you to a different emotional place — Walter White’s desert meth lab or a purgatorial island or Don Draper’s 1960s Manhattan — usually in 10-60 seconds.
The House of Cards theme is longer: apparently it takes a full 96 seconds to piss on the last sputtering embers of your faith in democracy. Pission accomplished:
Within 4 seconds, something’s wrong. The key (or tonic, or home) is vague because we aren’t hearing full three-note chords, just two notes at a time in rising thirds. It’s like playing Wheel of Fortune — we only have some of the letters in each word, and we’re trying to figure out the meaning of the phrase.
Your brain draws on a lifetime of listening, ten thousand songs that followed the same basic rules, then uses that experience to piece together clues about where home is this time. It does this by filling in the seven slots of the scale. So far we have E, F, G, A, Bb, and C — six out of seven! — so your brain is pretty sure that F is home. That would sound like this (8 sec):
That’s where we were headed — F Major! If we got there, the show would have been Mr. Rogers instead of Mr. Underwood. Instead, right after hitting that Bb, he drops us to the ‘wrong’ key — A minor (8 sec):
The result is that Underwood feeling (8 sec):
The same progression signals each entrance to the Pit of Despair in The Princess Bride. Different key, same queasy effect (8 sec):
Back in DC, the clouds roll in, and the encroaching shadow takes the city from bright busy daylight down through dirty underpasses and into the pulsing heart of darkness. The heartbeat bass recasts the high-speed traffic as arterial blood. The heroic statues drown in darkness, in sync with the distant drums and trumpets — a bitter parody of patriotism.
By the time that heartbeat bass fades out at the end, the milk of human kindness sits curdled in the cat’s dish, the cat is dead, and Frank Underwood is talking about two kinds of pain.
And I’m ready.
That bass line stays the same from start to finish. It’s a technique called ground bass or basso ostinato — literally “stubborn bass” — a simple pattern in the bass that repeats over and over, creating a unified emotion, even as the rest of the music varies above it.
In the early 17th century, different ostinati were used to signal different specific emotions. The descending minor four-note bass figure in Monteverdi’s gorgeous Lamento della ninfa signaled sadness (36 sec):
Pachelbel’s Canon in D uses the same device, this time with an eight-note ostinato. You know the tune:
The bass in the House of Cards theme is also telegraphing an emotion — and it’s pretty much Frank Underwood’s initials, if ya feel me. The key of A minor is drilled home in the most elemental way it can, 1 to 3, A-C-A-C. Composer Jeff Beal referred to that bass as “the stubbornness of Frank,” underpinning everything and refusing to change course. The rest of the harmony is also in A minor at first. It breaks into a barely perceptible A major at 0:48, then back to minor at 0:58 before ending in that kind of heroic, operatic A major starting at 1:18.
Switching to major at the end of a minor piece is called a Picardy third — you bump the third note of the scale up a half step to major, and the sun breaks through the clouds. Here’s Bach at the end of a minor piece giving one of his clients a happy ending (26 sec):
But the “heroic, operatic A major” in House of Cards has a wee bit of poo stuck to it. Just as the Valkyrie comes in on that high A, and the strings are cranking away on the fast A major bugle call, that high violin falls through a descending melodic minor. And the wicked C in the bass is rubbing up against the happy C# in the strings. Bad touch, stranger danger!
As the major key tapers out, we’re left with Frank crapping on your happy ending (20 sec):
Then There’s the Mickeymousing
When I studied film scoring at UCLA, a few things were verboten. “Wallpapering” was one — that’s when the music never, ever shuts up. The composer feels the need to prime every emotional shift and even physical gestures. Very big in the 1930s-50s, not so much now.
Another no-no was “mickeymousing,” the word for music that closely mimics visual details in the scene. Steamboat Willie (1928) was the first to do it — hence the name — and Looney Tunes amped it up to 11 — think of the xylophone mimicking the Coyote tiptoeing away from the pile of Acme dynamite.
The House of Cards opening theme includes mickeymousing that actually works. It’s crisp and subtle, for one thing. Watch how the visuals are synched to the slightly jarring drum hits — sunlight flashes on the houses on the first drum stroke (at 0:11), cars halt on the second stroke (at 0:13):
But my favorite mickeymouse moment is also the best spot in the whole theme, establishing a harmony that haunts the whole series. As the train flashes by, a chord sounds, mimicking a train’s horn, synched to the visual right at 1:09:
Here’s that great chord:
That chord is why I took a detour to melodic minor in the last post. Remember the melodic minor scale, with the 6th and 7th raised going up and lowered again going down:
So G# and G-natural are both legal in A minor — the key of House of Cards. In this case, it uses those two clashing notes at the same time, producing a very cool dissonance that composer Jeff Beal inserts frequently in tense scenes throughout the series. Each time it’s an echo of that train, hurtling through the darkness.
More on that chord and other brilliant cues from House of Cards in a later post.
The Greatest Christmas Song, in Theory
At 52, surprise is one of the best gifts I can get anymore. Ten seconds into a song on the radio — heck, five seconds — I usually know how the whole damn thing is gonna go. Same with novels, movies, news stories, even human conversations. So few surprises left.
Not good.
Kurt Vonnegut captured this in a passage about his sister Alice, an artist:
Alice, who was six feet tall and a platinum blonde, asserted one time that she could roller-skate through a great museum like the Louvre, which she had never seen and which she wasn’t all that eager to see, and which she in fact would never see, and fully appreciate every painting she passed. She said that she would be hearing these words in her head above the whir and clack of her heels on the terrazzo: “Got it, got it, got it.”
It’s a source of some despair, this receding frontier of surprise. I’d planned on a lot more music listening and book reading and movie watching before Death, which — aside from timing and method — is the least surprising thing of all.
Fortunately there are compositions, books, and movies that can still give me that experience of the unexpected, even the hundredth time I hear or read or see them. Unconventional choices keep reaching me, and I can still feel the curve as it pulls away from the easy, mundane choices that could have been made. I still get the dopamine pellet.
Christmas is the death of pleasant surprise. I love the holiday itself, but oh gawd the clichés we hang on it. The boxes in the basement might just as well be labeled “THIS AGAIN.”
Even Christmas songs that used to move me get murdered by numbing annual repetition in commercials, as sonic wallpaper in stores — even in my own living room. I used to think Carol of the Bells was this great, original thing. Now, through no fault of its own, it makes me stabby.
There are exceptions, a very few Christmas songs so well made that no amount of repetition has been able to dull my fantods. (So far, anyway — check back when I’m 72 and mainlining Conlon Nancarrow to feel something.)
Oo — that got dark fast. Just kidding about the despair, Mom! But I do find the bar for genuine surprise gets higher as you age. Music theory is my particular thing, especially harmony, so that’s where I look for the hidden gems. Finding one in a desert as trackless as Christmas music is a special thrill, and one song is exactly that gift for me — “Christmastime is Here” by Vince Guaraldi. Here’s the first verse (28 sec):
Let’s walk through the first minute of this great, great song.
After a 6-bar intro (with hints of harmony to come), the kids come in with the melody. The melody in music is like the protagonist in a story. You identify with it, follow it through the landscape of the piece. You wish it well, but not too well. Nobody wants a story where the hero never leaves the hot tub.
So here’s the hero of “Christmastime is Here” (10 sec):
Just as simple as it could be on its own.
One of the main things that “happens” to the melody in a piece is the harmony. Nothing has a greater effect on the emotional contour of the music. There are a hundred different ways to set this particular tune harmonically, and each one creates a different emotional landscape for the melody to walk through.
The first chord is the usual one — the tonic triad, the chord on the key note. We’re in F major, so it’s an F major chord. The tonic triad is the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of the scale, F-A-C. But as much as anything, jazz is about extending traditional concepts in music. Phrases are longer or shorter than normal, beats are divided and grouped in unusual ways, the accent is thrown to beats that are usually not emphasized.
As for harmony, you don’t get too many simple triads in jazz. In addition to the scale notes 1-3-5, you’ll often get an added 7, sometimes 9, sometimes more. It makes a more complex sound:
When the melody comes in, Guaraldi puts the first measure (“Christmas time is”) over Fmaj7. That’s jazzy, but it also runs the risk of sounding hokey. A lot depends on the next chord (when the kids sing “here”). He could just keep the F chord — it fits with the melody just fine — then move to the usual suspects after 4 bars. After the F chord, C is the most likely chord you’ll hear (more on that in the next post). B-flat is next after that. These aren’t bad choices, just…predictable. Sometimes that’s what you’re going for: Silent Night in the key of F uses three chords: F, C, and B-flat.
Here’s what “Christmastime” could have sounded like if Guaraldi phoned it in:
It isn’t terrible, but it also has no surprise.
Guaraldi took the road less traveled. Not only does he not choose one of the usuals for the second chord, he doesn’t even choose a chord that’s in the flippin’ key. The chord he chose is a warm, luscious, unexpected Eb#11. It’s unexpected, but it isn’t wacky, and it’s as smooth as a baby’s bootay. The reason for that is something called voice-leading: The new chord is on another harmonic planet, but every note was arrived at by a single step from a note in the previous chord.
Here it is, stripped of drums and kids:
There’s so much more — for extra credit, you music theorists can find the B half-diminished 7th and Gb#11 (‽), both of them bootay-smooth from voice-leading — but Christmastime is here, so it’s time to close the computer.
Not you! First enjoy the whole thing without the adorably out-of-tune kids. Merry Christmas.
The (Actual) Evolution of Cool
- October 30, 2015
- By Dale McGowan
- In Ruined, Unweaving
- 0
Tower of Power was my band in high school. One reason was the insanely tight horn section, including SNL frontman Lenny Pickett. But another was the music itself.
It was cool.
I was also a marching band guy, and I always liked me some Sousa marches, though not for the same reasons I liked Tower. Sousa has horns, and they might be tight, but nobody would call “Stars and Stripes Forever” cool. Strong maybe, proud, confident, celebratory — but cool doesn’t enter into it.
Doesn’t matter if you like a piece of music or not. I hate certain kinds of jazz, for example, while still recognizing that they exist in the wheelhouse of “cool.” And I’ve always wondered what accounts for that instantly recognizable quality.
Now I think I’ve found it.
A few posts ago I mentioned a hideously wrongheaded passage about dissonance from the book This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin. The rest of the book was entirely rightheaded — and one section in particular blew my mind.
I double-majored in music and physical anthropology, so any time I trip over a credible link between music and evolution, there is much rejoicing. In one chapter, Levitin explores a fascinating function of the cerebellum that crosses that very bridge: timekeeping.
The cerebellum is one of the oldest structures in the brain, so any adaptive features located there are likely to have deep evolutionary advantages. They are likely, in other words, to benefit not only humans, but the common ancestors we share with a whole lot of other creatures.
The cerebellum is mostly about coordinating movement, but researchers have also found it getting busy when we listen to music. Long story short, it seems to correlate to the pleasure (or lack) that we get from the rhythm in a song. As a Salon article a few years back put it,
When a song begins, Levitin says, the cerebellum, which keeps time in the brain, “synchronizes” itself to the beat. Part of the pleasure we find in music is the result of something like a guessing game that the brain then plays with itself as the beat continues. The cerebellum attempts to predict where beats will occur. Music sounds exciting when our brains guess the right beat, but a song becomes really interesting when it violates the expectation in some surprising way — what Levitin calls “a sort of musical joke that we’re all in on.” Music, Levitin writes, “breathes, speeds up, and slows down just as the real world does, and our cerebellum finds pleasure in adjusting itself to stay synchronized.”
That’s great. But why would this ability have evolved? Why does evolution care what music you like?
Honey…evolution doesn’t give a damn about you personally, much less what kind of music makes your weenie wiggle. But on the population and species level, it does tend to favor abilities that keep an organism alive a little longer. One of those is the ability to detect small changes in the environment, because change can indicate danger. Here’s Levitin:
Our visual system, while endowed with a capacity to see millions of colors and to see in the dark when illumination is as dim as one photon in a million, is most sensitive to sudden change….We’ve all had the experience of an insect landing on our neck and we instinctively slap it—our touch system noticed an extremely subtle change in pressure on our skin….But sounds typically trigger the greatest startle reactions. A sudden noise causes us to jump out of our seats, to turn out heads, to duck, or to cover our ears.
The auditory startle is the fastest and arguably the most important of our startle responses. This makes sense: In the world we live in, surrounded by a blanket of atmosphere, the sudden movement of an object—particularly a large one—causes an air disturbance. This movement of air molecules is perceived by us as sound….
Related to the startle reflex, and to the auditory system’s exquisite sensitivity to change, is the habituation circuit. If your refrigerator has a hum, you get so used to it that you no longer notice it—that is habituation. A rat sleeping in his hole in the ground hears a loud noise above. This could be the footstep of a predator, and he should rightly startle. But it could also be the sound of a branch blowing in the wind, hitting the ground above him more or less rhythmically. If, after one or two dozen taps of the branch against the roof of his house, he finds he is in no danger, he should ignore these sounds, realizing that they are no threat. If the intensity or frequency should change, this indicates that environmental conditions have changed and that he should start to notice….Habituation is an important and necessary process to separate the threatening from the nonthreatening. The cerebellum acts as something of a timekeeper.
Our cerebellar timekeeper determines how regular a sound is. If it stays predictable — dripping water, chirping crickets — we feel confident and secure. If it becomes less predictable or changes in intensity, we feel unsettled, possibly threatened.
Listen:
The Thunderer, John Philip Sousa
The beats are regular. Your cerebellum is tapping its foot, predicting every beat, right on the money. It makes you feel safe, confident, in control. It’s a great performance of a great march, but no one would call it cool.
Then there’s this…hold me…
“Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky
In addition to intense dissonance, it’s jerky and angular, with completely unpredictable rhythms and sudden changes in intensity — the musical embodiment of anxiety and terror. And it bloody well should be — a sacrificial virgin is dancing herself to death on a fire, for God’s sake. Your cerebellum is freaked out by the utter inability to predict the next note. The music is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, but you wouldn’t call it cool.
The music we usually identify as cool splits the difference, combining a steady predictable beat with unpredictable departures from that beat. It’s flirting with the remote sense of danger without actually endangering you. Once again, a rollercoaster analogy works perfectly: the feeling of being tossed around without actually getting killed can be thrilling.
If music establishes a beat, then throws you around a bit — backbeat accents, unexpected hits around the beat, changing patterns — it gives a little thrill to your cerebellar timekeeper, tickling that part of you that listens for the irregular sounds of danger, then pulling you back to the safety of a steady beat before dangling you over the cliff again.
Let’s all agree that “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder is cool. Listen to how the drums set a metronome-steady beat for the first 10 seconds. Then that funky clavinet comes in, a mix of on-beat and jerky staccato syncopations. By the time the horns are in, we have layers of offbeat counterpoint dancing around the steady beat, this complicated tapestry of sound:
In the end, the proof is in the ruining. If you want to strip all of the cool out of a cool song, make it safe. Take every unpredictable syncopation and put it on the beat, like every middle school arrangement of every popular song:
Dude. Not cool.
Bonus cool: My favorite song in high school
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Isn’t It Iconic?
A University of London researcher has found something we didn’t even know we were looking for: the most iconic song ever written. After announcing his choice, he was moved to an undisclosed location.
If the comment sections are any indication, a lot of the complaints are due to a misunderstanding about the researcher’s claim. He didn’t claim to have found the best song, or the most powerful, moving, or effective one. Dr. Mick Grierson was looking for the most iconic.
To qualify as iconic, he says, a song has to be well-known and distinctive. If it’s famous but very similar to a lot of others, it isn’t distinctive, so it can’t really be iconic. And a very distinctive song still isn’t iconic if few people have ever heard it. It might be to you, but not to the culture at large.
Even understanding that, I was mystified by the result — until I discovered something hiding in plain sight.
Grierson created a credible list of the 50 best-known songs using lists from magazines like Rolling Stone. To assess “distinctiveness,” he used computer software to analyze some elements of the music itself. Of the 50 songs:
- 80% are in a major key (mostly A, E, C and G)
- Average tempo is 125 beats per minute, a brisk walking tempo
- Average length is 4 minutes on the nose
- Average number of different chords is 6-8
He also looked at something he called “spectral flux,” which he said is “how the power of a note from one to the next varies.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but I’m guessing it has to do with variation in tone color and intensity.
Another variable called “tonic dissonance” apparently refers to the use of pitches outside of the key, i.e. non-harmonic tones.
So what he wanted was a song that was famous but departed from the norm in a number of these quantifiable ways. A minor key would count as departure, as would unusual tempo or length, or greater than average number of chord changes, or frequent changes of timbre, or a lot of pitches outside of the key.
So what song did he and his computer decide is the most iconic of all time? Nirvana’s 1991 hit Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I…wut.
I’m not one to howl when the particular headbanger anthem that got me through puberty doesn’t make somebody’s Top Ten list. I’m on the side of truth and justice for this one, no skin in the game. In fact, I really like Teen Spirit, especially the way the melody leans into unexpected pitches, and that contrast between quiet lethargy and full-throated entitlement. More emblematic of a generational moment than most songs making that claim. I can even see it in the top 50 iconics, why not. But by the study’s own stated variables — not just my preferences — I couldn’t understand how it qualified as Most Iconic.
Let’s compare Teen Spirit to two other songs that were lower on the list.
#1. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana (1991)
Most of the top 50 are in a major key, and Teen Spirit is minor. One point for iconic.
The tempo is 116 beats a minute, close to the average of 125. The length is 4:35, just over the average of 4:00. Two points for typical.
Harmonic diversity is slim. Aside from the kind of silly 4-bar bridges at 1:23 and 2:38, the whole song appears to be the same four chords in the same order: F minor, Bb, Ab, and Db.
Hey wait a sec: they aren’t even chords. Chords have at least three pitches. These are something guitarists call “power chords,” a rock staple (i.e. “not iconic”) that removes the third from every chord. So instead of F-Ab-C, it’s just F-C, and so on. It’s a really powerful, raw sound, but it reduces the already poor pitch diversity even further.
If we take out the little 4-bar bridges — a total of 16 seconds — Teen Spirit doesn’t have even one pitch outside of the key, which is pretty low tonic dissonance. Include the bridges and it has just two such pitches.
Variation in timbre is there, but moderate. An effective toggle of atmospheres between the mumble and shout sections, but it’s still drums and guitars from start to finish.
I love the song, and it’s Top 50 iconic. But not #1.
#15. Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin (1971)
Play a minute or two as you read:
Despite a minor key, a distinctive harmonic language, a rhapsodic structure, and an 8-minute duration (for which I and all other teenage slow-dancers of the 70s and 80s are grateful), this iconic rock song came in 15th.
Within seven seconds, Stairway has already exceeded Teen Spirit in harmonic variety. It starts with a progression of five different chords over that (yes) iconic chromatic bassline, including an augmented triad and a major-major 7th chord on VI.
Tempo structure is also unique. It starts at 76 beats a minute, way off the average. When the drums enter for the first time at 4:19…well, first of all you say, “No drums for four minutes and 19 seconds! How iconic!” Then the tempo picks up a click to 84. Around 6 minutes, it goes up to 96. It’s a nice effect, a slight acceleration over time that helps sustain the long form.
As for tone color, dynamics, and other “spectral” aspects, Stairway moves through multiple sections, from acoustic guitar and a consort of recorders (iconic!) to electric guitars and a shout chorus before ending in a quiet solo a cappella.
Finally: Did the researcher even try making out to Smells Like Teen Spirit? You’d end up on a pile of bloody teeth. Stairway for the win.
#5. Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen (1975)
Play a minute or two as you read:
For pure iconic differentness, it’s Bohemian Rhapsody in a walk. A six-part rhapsody form moves from a cappella ballad to Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to hard rock and back to ballad, changing key at every gate.
But we don’t even have to look that far to beat Teen Spirit. In the introduction alone, Rhapsody has nine different chords, including an added sixth chord (0:05), a secondary dominant 7th (0:09), chromatic neighbor chords (0:37), and a fully-diminished secondary leading tone 7th chord (0:47). AND it changes key after just 25 seconds.
Talk about awesome tonic dissonance –all that, and all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, and we’re less than one minute in.
The pretty obvious thing I missed about Teen Spirit
But wait a minute.
There’s another chord in Teen Spirit. It doesn’t show up in the chord charts, and it has always slipped right past my ear. It’s a chromatic passing chord, the very last thing you hear at the end of the first bar (4 sec):
Tiny detail, right? It is to us humans. But here’s the thing: We’re in F minor, so both of those notes (E and A) are outside of the key. And it appears not once, but about fifty times, in alternating bars for most of the song! To you and me, it slides on by. But a computer analyzing for pitch variety will hear a song positively soaking in “tonic dissonance.”
Still, that’s only eight notes out of 12. We’re still missing Gb, G, B and D.
But wait! What about those two ugly notes in the bridge? (3 sec)
Dude, no weh! It’s Gb and B. Add the excellent G Kurt is always leaning on
and Smells Like Teen Spirit has 11 of the 12 chromatic pitches, including a constant saturation of those two pitches outside of the key.
But here’s the thing: Except for the vocal G, they just aren’t significant. Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, for example, the unusual pitches are mostly incidental — a passing tone on a weak beat. No matter how often it happens, it isn’t significant enough to raise a song to iconic status. Our brains can sort between significant pitches and incidental ones. But to a computer counting the frequency of frequencies, it’s all the same.
That’s why Smells Like Teen Spirit is the #1 most iconic song among Dell Inspirons.
The 50 most iconic songs, according to a computer
1. “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana
2. “Imagine,” John Lennon
3. “One,” U2
4. “Billie Jean,” Michael Jackson
5. “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Queen
6. “Hey Jude,” The Beatles
7. “Like A Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan
8. “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” Rolling Stones
9. “God Save The Queen,” Sex Pistols
10. “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” Guns N’ Roses
11. “London Calling,” The Clash
12. “Waterloo Sunset,” The Kinks
13. “Hotel California,” The Eagles
14. “Your Song,” Elton John
15. “Stairway To Heaven,” Led Zeppelin
16. “The Twist,” Chubby Checker
17. “Live Forever,” Oasis
18. “I Will Always Love You,” Whitney Houston
19. “Life On Mars?” David Bowie
20. “Heartbreak Hotel,” Elvis Presley
21. “Over The Rainbow,” Judy Garland
22. “What’s Goin’ On,” Marvin Gaye
23. “Born To Run,” Bruce Springsteen
24. “Be My Baby,” The Ronettes
25. “Creep,” Radiohead
26. “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” Simon & Garfunkel
27. “Respect,” Aretha Franklin
28. “Family Affair,” Sly And The Family Stone
29. “Dancing Queen,” ABBA
30. “Good Vibrations,” The Beach Boys
31. “Purple Haze,” Jimi Hendrix
32. “Yesterday,” The Beatles
33. “Jonny B Goode,” Chuck Berry
34. “No Woman No Cry,” Bob Marley
35. “Hallelujah,” Jeff Buckley
36. “Every Breath You Take,” The Police
37. “A Day In The Life,” The Beatles
38. “Stand By Me,” Ben E King
39. “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag,” James Brown
40. “Gimme Shelter,” The Rolling Stones
41. “What’d I Say,” Ray Charles
42. “Sultans Of Swing,” Dire Straits
43. “God Only Knows,” The Beach Boys
44. “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” The Righteous Brothers
45. “My Generation,” The Who
46. “Dancing In The Street,” Martha Reeves and the Vandellas
47. “When Doves Cry,” Prince
48. “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke
49. “River Deep Mountain High,” Ike and Tina Turner
50. “Best Of My Love,” The Emotions
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The Greatest Mashup Ever: Why it Works
I love transformation, taking an existing thing and making something new out of it. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes it adds nothing to the original, and sometimes it’s a freakish horror that should never have seen the light of day.
But when it works, it can be gorgeous. Earth Wind and Fire’s “Got to Get You Into My Life.” Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven.
Mashups take it to another level as two or more existing songs are slammed together. And again, the results vary from terrible to pointless to good to THE GREATEST THING I HAVE EVER EXPERIENCED EVER OMG.
Let’s look at that one.
The Greatest Mashup Ever Created, End of Conversation™ brings two hideously different songs together: Taylor Swift’s caffeinated pop-tart “Shake It Off,” and the gothic shadow-world of “The Perfect Drug” by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails.
First the originals. For maximum appreciation of the mash, I suggest watching both of them first, but I am not the boss of you.
And now…Taylor Swift vs. Nine Inch Nails, by mashup artist Isosine.
Why It Works
The Lucky Coincidence
The two originals are not only close in tempo and key, but “Drug” is both a little slower than “Shake” (150 vs. 160 beats per minute) and a little lower in key (F major vs. G major). So by slightly speeding up “Drug” and slightly slowing down “Shake,” he brings both tempo and pitch into sync. The mashup is right smack in the middle of the two, 155 bpm and F# major. If they were further apart in pitch or tempo, at least one of the originals would have to be sped up or slowed down too far to work as well.
The New Story
The most common comment on the mashup is, “This shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.” There is no somehow. The opposition is a big part of why it works. There’s nothing new about contrasting light and dark, happy and grim. But this mashup combines the moods and themes of the two songs to create a third scenario. “Perfect Drug” is about an unnamed second-person obsession — You are the perfect drug. In the mashup, Swift becomes the “you,” the subject. The resulting narrative is instantly recognizable: She is the pretty, popular girl, the center of a cloud of beautiful people who move and dress and exist effortlessly at the top of the social pyramid. He’s the brooding obsessive loner, his attention fixed solely on her. She sings and dances, oblivious to his fixation, and his frustration grows.
At one point (1:15) she maddeningly seems to dance to his music as he sings The arrow goes straight to my heart/Without you everything just falls apart. At another, Swift’s trademark look of shocked surprise (1:37) is no longer about the row of jiggling butts behind her, but about his repeated line, And I want you. And yes, in this narrative, the icicle-dagger at 1:44 is especially creepy.
(As an antidote, there’s a nice comic touch when she sings “the fella over there with the hella good hair” (2:40) and it flashes to a greasy, glum Reznor.)
The Music
“Perfect Drug” is conveniently non-tonal for long stretches — it doesn’t get a tonal center at all for the first 50 seconds as he chants lyrics tunelessly against that cool, unsettling microtonal string thing. That allows Isosine to lay it over the Swift without worrying about pitch for about the first minute.
But they connect in other ways. Compare the rhythm in Reznor’s lyric to the rhythm in Swift’s bari sax (7 sec):
For the first 30 seconds of the mash, those two insanely well-matched rhythmic motives knit the two songs together musically, sounding as if they were made to be together.
With a slight nudge of the fader, Isosine creates another jigsaw fit in the next 12 seconds: Swift’s melody lays in the first and third bars of each phrase, while Reznor’s lyrics are in the second and fourth bars, reiterating his obsession four times with increasing intensity (13 sec):
And when “Perfect Drug” finally does go tonal in the refrain You are the perfect drug, the perfect drug, it works seamlessly with the bass and harmony of the Swift.
There’s more — there’s always more — but I’ll turn it over to you.
Trivia Bonus: The music videos for “Perfect Drug” and “Shake It Off” were (oddly) both directed by the same guy — filmmaker Mark Romanek.
Thanks to Paul Fidalgo, who first brought this mashup to my attention on his excellent blog iMortal.
Radiohead: What IS that note?
Years ago, when I taught music theory, I’d ask students to bring in recordings of music they loved. We’d play a minute of something, then talk for a few more minutes about what was going on there. Applied theory, always my favorite part of the class.
One day, a student in the class gave me one of the best musical gifts I’ve ever received. She introduced me to Radiohead.
The song was Paranoid Android, and I knew within the first minute that we wouldn’t do anything else that day. But this post isn’t about Paranoid Android. It’s about another Radiohead song, one that uses the ideas in the post about scales, the fact that octaves can be broken up an infinite number of ways, including exotic sequences of steps producing unique emotional palettes that are different from the major and minor we’re used to hearing. There are even microtonal pitches that would fall in the cracks of a piano keyboard if they were foolish enough to wander onto one. It’s the atmospheric masterpiece How To Disappear Completely.
Listen first (5:56):
Damn.
There are a hundred things to talk about in there, like that cool, quiet walking bass that starts around 0:21, cutting across the guitar in a laid-back polyrhythm. But let’s look at what he’s doing with pitch, especially the scale and the use of microtones.
The song is in F# not-quite-minor. Six of the seven steps in the scale got the memo for F# minor — F#, A, B, C#, D, E — but the second note, which should be G#, is G-natural instead, just a half step above the key note. That’s one of the things that made the Byzantine scale sound exotic. But this time the scale is F# [tippy title=”Phrygian”]More about Phrygian later, when we get to modes.[/tippy], which has this nice dark quality. When he sings In a little while, I’ll be gone, listen to the note on I’ll. That’s the lowered second, that G-natural (excerpt 19 sec):
He really leans into it later on as the whole chord, not just one note, is on G (excerpt 36 sec):
The microtonality happens mostly in the sliding mush of strings later on. I especially love the moment when he has you whirling in a microtonal cloud of strings, then suddenly POP — the cloud disperses and you’re back in the clear tonally (excerpt 24 sec):
Just a stunning effect. But my favorite thing about this amazing song is one note — that high siren in the distance at the start. It’s a note to haunt your dreams. What the hell is up with that note? (excerpt 23 sec)
It took me a long time to realize why that pitch sounded so otherworldly: It’s not even a pitch in the scale. It’s a microtone, a pitch in the crack between A and A#.
But even before I figured that out, it worked. And that distant, haunting siren is still a big part of what makes this astonishing piece work for me.
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Thom Yorke portrait by John LeMasney via Flickr | CC A-SA 2.0 Generic
Jonny Greenwood thumbnail by angela n. via Flickr | CC BY 2.0