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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The Case Against the Star-Spangled Banner
- October 13, 2015
- By Dale McGowan
- In Ruined
- 0
It’s a waltz, for starters. Nobody else has a national anthem that’s a waltz. Okay, there’s “God Save the Queen,” but that’s it. The rest are proper marches or noble hymns, not prancy little dance ditties.
Lemme start over.
Every once in a while, someone in Congress introduces a bill to replace the current US national anthem, usually based on its militarism or unsingability.
The case against the Star-Spangled Banner starts there, but there’s much more wrong with our national song. By the end of this post, I hope you’ll join me in writing your representatives so the bill can be raised and defeated yet again.
Here are nine reasons to be all-done with The Star-Spangled Banner.
1. It’s militaristic.
Well it is. Why sing about rockets and bombs when we could celebrate spacious skies and amber waves? Not that I have any particular replacement in mind.
Granted, the militarism of the SSB pales in comparison to the most bloodthirsty national anthem on Earth, “La Marseillaise” (shudder). While it’s musically magnifique, the French anthem is a festival of rage and gore, including throat-cutting, watering the furrows of the Homeland with the impure blood of enemies, and the children of France yearning to join their ancestors in their coffins.
Ours celebrates surviving an assault, not slaughtering the foe, I’ll give it that. So it’s not as militaristic as La Marseillaise, which is like not being as rude as Stalin.
2. It’s unsingable.
The range is too wide – an octave and a fifth, from middle B-flat (on “say”) to very-high F (on “glare” and “free”). That’s why ballpark wise guys do a falsetto yodel up to double-high B-flat on “land of the freeee” – to give the impression that they really could have held that F without cracking, but they’re just, you know, messin’ around.
3. The War of 1812…Seriously?
Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” commemorates the siege of Fort McHenry during that most heart-poundingly memorable of our national military conflicts, the War of 1812. Who could ever forget the Chesapeake-Leopard incident, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the traitorous clamor of the Hartford Convention…
Look, it was an odd war. The British had been boarding our ships looking for deserters, and we asked them to stop. They wouldn’t, so we declared a war that ended three years later in a draw. Not really the stuff of anthems, in my humble. (And the 1812 Overture, by the way, our 4th of July favorite, doesn’t have anything to do with the War of 1812. It was written by a Russian to commemorate the forced retreat of Napoleon from Moscow. But that’s a separate facepalmer.)
4. It’s not militaristic enough.
If you’re going to write about an artillery bombardment, bring it. Instead, right when we’re singing about rockets and bombs, the band goes quiet and shifts to the woodwinds. Here’s the US Marine Band depicting a naval assault (16 sec):
The music here doesn’t fit the text. This spot is not technically the fault of the song itself, but it’s woven so deep into the arrangement tradition by now that I’ll sustain the objection.
5. “Bombs bursting” can hardly be said, much less sung.
Ever notice that the crisp dotted eighth-sixteenth of the first stanza (O-o say and By the dawn’s) gets ironed out to two eighth notes in the middle of the verse? Sometimes you still get the dotted rhythm for And the rock-, but no one has tried to sing The bombs burst- in a dotted rhythm since the mass lip-mangling incident at Game 3 of the 1937 World Series. You may have noticed that ambulances now attend every sporting event where the National Anthem is sung, just in case someone tries it again.
6. Did I mention it’s a waltz?
Music with beats in groups of two or four can be many things – moving (America the Beautiful); peaceful (Pachelbel’s Canon); stirring (The Marseillaise); sensuous (Girl from Ipanema); or even an electrifying thrill ride (The Macarena). But waltz time just goes oom-pa-pa.
7. The tune is English.
Who were we fighting in 1812? The hated Costa Ricans? The dreaded Laplanders? No, it was the English. So when we dug into our repertoire for a tune that matched the metrical structure of the poem Francis Scott Key had written commemorating our victory over the English, we chose “To Anacreon in Heaven” – an English drinking song.
8. IT’S A DRINKING SONG.
“To Anacreon in Heaven” was written in London in the 1770s by members of the Anacreontic Society, an upper class men’s club that met at the Crown and Anchor Tavern to sing the praises of…well, let’s just see. Here’s the first verse of the lyrics – you know the tune:
To Anacreon, in Heav’n, where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be,
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian –Voice, fiddle and flute, no longer be mute,
I’ll lend ye my name, and inspire ye to boot…
And, besides, I’ll instruct ye, like me, to entwine,
The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.
So Anacreon, a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century BCE, approves the use of his name and instructs the “sons of harmony” to “entwine the myrtle of Venus” – the goddess of love – “with Bacchus’s vine” – the god of wine. He tells them, in short, to have drunken sex.
In subsequent verses, Zeus is made furious by the news of the proposed entwining, convinced that the goddesses will abandon Olympus in order to have sex with wasted mortals, and dispatches Apollo to stop it. But Apollo is laid low with diarrhea and, fleeing his citadel with his “nine fusty maids,” is rendered unable to countermand the order.
I couldn’t make this stuff up on my best day.
Yes, the tune had other lives in the intervening years. It was exported to the United States as early as 1798 and reset to various lyrics, including that old toe-tapper “Adams and Liberty.” But don’t you think the original setting kind of, I don’t know – adheres a bit? No matter how much time passes, I don’t expect “I Like Big Butts” to ever give rise to a hymn tune, no matter what other incarnations it has between now and then.
9. It’s not sacred. In fact, we did without a national anthem for over 150 years.
Though Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” was around from 1814 and even got the tune stuck to it shortly thereafter (as a spritely dance), it wasn’t adopted as the national anthem until 1931. This ancient, venerable tradition was born the same year as my dad. Prior to that it was just another national song, on par with “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Hey Nonnie Noo, I’m a Yankee Too!”, which doesn’t even exist. Before that, the United States of America had no official national anthem. Even Estonia beat the pants off us. They got their anthem in 1869 – and not from a barroom floor, I’ll bet.
So why not give an aggressive, unsingable, recently-adopted, ill-constructed waltz-time descendant of a raunchy bar ballad turned celebration of obscure military stalemate the heave-ho?
Because it’s tradition, silly.
Consonance is Nice. Dissonance is Delicious.
15 min
This is Your Brain on Music is a really good book about the neuroscience of music. There are about 4,000 good sentences in it. So it might seem petty to talk about the one sentence that made me sad, but that’s how sad it made me:
Musicians refer to pleasing-sounding chords and intervals as consonant and the unpleasing ones as dissonant.
Be a love: Take a Brillo pad and scrub that sentence from your monitor. If you have the book at home, scrub it out there as well. Page 62. I’ll wait.
[…]
By the end of this post, I hope you’ll see how tragically wrongheaded it is to call dissonance “unpleasing”. The really effective, moving moments in music almost always include dissonance, sometimes a lot of it, just as the really effective rollercoasters almost always include hills. These aren’t bugs–they are features.
I mean gah.
A flat rollercoaster and dissonance-free music are so off-point that they are given completely new names, like “light rail” and “Enya.” Good for getting you massaged and moving you from place to place, maybe, but not for moving you. The interplay of dissonance and consonance, tension and release, is one of the ingredients that makes Western music work. It’s a sliding scale defined by more or less complexity in the relationship of pitches.
Pitch combinations aren’t just “consonant” or “dissonant” — like everything we seem to talk about here, there’s a spectrum. So please keep your arms inside the car as we head into that spectrum.
Some Quick Terms
The distance between two pitches is an interval. If it’s one note following another like a melody, it’s a melodic interval. Two notes at the same time is a harmonic interval. That’s where the real emotional juice is.
Intervals are named by the distance between the notes. From any note up to the very next note name is called a second. Skip one and it’s a third. Skip two names and it’s a fourth, and so on. So in the scale below…
…C→D, E→F, and A→B are all seconds. C→E is a third. C→F is a fourth. C→A is a sixth.
What about flats and sharps? C→D♭ is still called a second because it’s going from one pitch name to the next. But it’s a minor second (or half step), the Jaws interval, duh-dump. C→D is a major second (or whole step), the Chopsticks interval, which is less dissonant than the minor (depending on the child and the piano, I guess). And C to G♭ is still a fifth, but a diminished fifth, a.k.a. a tritone, a.k.a. “the devil in music,” about which more below.
If this were my theory class, we’d now drill intervals for two weeks. You’d learn how to identify and spell minor, major, perfect, augmented, and diminished intervals starting on every pitch. You’d bite back your tears, determined to meet the interval on its own terms, driven by grudging respect for my lunatic quest for perfection.
But we’re doing Just Enough Theory here, so we’ll skim lightly over the cool surface, emphasizing dissonance, with the Devil as our special guest.
Consonance and Dissonance
The technical explanation of consonance and dissonance is the ratio of vibrations of the two pitches.
The ultimate consonance is a unison. It’s not harmony — just one note playing with itself, which is sinful. The ratio is 1:1. Add another pitch and you get intervals.
Octaves, fifths, fourths, and thirds are very consonant. They sound like this:
Simple vibration ratios are consonant, in part because there’s a lot of matching and little close conflict in their overtones. The [tippy title=”octave”](‘Some-where’ [over the rainbow])[/tippy] is the most consonant (besides the unison). The top note vibrates twice as fast as the bottom, a simple ratio of 1:2. A fifth is a ratio of 2:3, and a fourth is 3:4, etc.
That’s the technical explanation. But the most important thing is that you can hear it. Here’s some [tippy title=”real consonance at work”]Aaron Copland, Fanfare for the Common Man[/tippy]:
Hear how open, relaxed, stable, and confident everything is? That’s because there’s little conflict between the pitches, no complex vibrations.
Now let’s get dissonant:
These are more tense, less stable. You can hear a lot of conflict between the pitches, which makes these relatively dissonant. They “want” to resolve to a more consonant interval, which drives the drama in music. And the ratios are getting complex — 8:15, 8:9, and a wickedly cool √2:1, respectively.
That last one is especially interesting. It’s a tritone, an internal three whole steps across (hence the name). It divides the octave exactly in half, so you’d think it would be consonant. But when you can’t even express the ratio without resorting to irrational numbers, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore.
Sure enough, the extreme dissonance and instability of the tritone has been recognized for a thousand years at least. Monk and music theorist Guido d’Arezzo called it Diabolus in musica, “the Devil in music.” The tritone loved that and immediately had it tattooed on its lower note, at which point it was banned from church music for several centuries (true dat).
But before we make the leap from “tense and unstable” to “unpleasing,” let’s put them in context. Here’s a minor 2nd, first alone, then in context:
And here’s a tritone in two very different settings — one romantic, one funny:
See? Of course the tritone CAN be damned unpleasant when it needs to be. Turn it up to freak out your dog:
And here’s one you’ll recognize from childhood:
The brass start with a tritone, then the Witch’s Guards come in singing a fifth — yo ee oh…yohhh, oh, or whatever. The combination is confident power (5th) + sinister threat (tritone).
But back to dissonance being amazing. Here are four short excerpts with nearly continuous dissonance. These are some of my favorite passages on the planet, so if you skip it, don’t tell me (under 3 min):
2. Bartok MSPC, mvt. II
3. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
4. Charles Mingus, Don’t Be Afraid, the Clown’s Afraid Too
And dissonance goes way beyond that. Epitaph for Moonlight by the Canadian composer Murray Shafer pushes pitch just about as far as it can go, and he does it with the human voice. Follow the pencil (4:38):
I know that’s not everyone’s cup, but boy is it mine.
Music without dissonance…well, just imagine a drama, or even a comedy, entirely devoid of conflict. That would be unpleasant. It might make for nice lunch conversation, but it doesn’t make for good theatre. In addition to being rich and beautiful on its own terms, we need dissonance to give consonance its raison d’être. Sliding the level of tension up and down the continuum of consonance and dissonance by combining pitches, intervals, and chords is one of the critical emotional tools of the composer.
And even if your tastes don’t run as dissonant as mine, believe me — you wouldn’t want to do without it.
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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