I'm going to limit my comment about this piece from today's Guardian, but I'd love to know what all of you think about it, dear readers. Here you go: Charles Hazlewood talks to journo about a new series on TV (BBC4, which is meant to be the Beeb's cultural gesture) explaining how pop songs use the same techniques as classical music, or some such. Read it here.
Sample: "What's so clever is it starts with an absolute deluge of F sharp minor. Then finally when Alex Turner comes in it's actually on a C sharp major chord, which is what's known as the dominant chord in music theory. Then you're made to wait to get that big deluge of that tonic chord again until the chorus which is a brilliant way of building your expectation, holding you back like an elastic band and then letting you ping."
Now, does this say anything more to you than 'this pop song includes two whole chords'? Is this an appropriate way for the Beeb to spend our TV licence fee? Over to you, people.
7 comments:
I'm picturing Charles Hazelwood driving his young daughter to nursery with Dizzee Rascal's Paranoid playing loudly on the car radio. I count the word 'fuck' 6 times in 30 second itunes sample! Wow, he's one progressive father!
Maybe I should watch the program before I make comments. Judging the article alone it sounds like an unnecessary program.
"The very idea that if you like drum and bass you won't like Wagner and if you like Wagner you won't like Aphex Twin is bollocks."
I own Aphex Twin and Wagner recordings and have an emotional and musical relationship with both so I agree with the statement. But when you start to analyse Amy Winehouse, Radiohead, Artic Monkeys et al for their harmonic content, deconstucting it like "classical"music is pretty worthless. Most "pop" music relies on performance, groove and artistic statement.
Reading Hazelwood's comments made me wince. He try's to sound hip throughout the article but ends up focussing on the wrong elements of a tune. Take the Dizzee tune. It's not a ground bass Charles! It's a 1 bar harmonically static loop that is pretty boring. What makes it better is the beat, the production and most importantly what he is rhyming about.
I'm preparing to watch the program and moan all the way through it.
Reading the article, I'm inclined to say, so what. I think he's trying to prove that some pop songs follow the traditions of Western Classical musical, and therefore are of merit to people who understand the traditions of Western Classical music.
It's probably at least forty years since anyone has seriously contended otherwise. But that doesn't mean that all pop music has artistic merit and should therefore be due lasting reverence. Some pop music is great, some is crap, most is somewhere in between. It's hardly breaking news.
Gert
http://www.madmusingsof.me.uk/weblog/
Yikes, it's the whole "Academics go all giddy about The Beatles using French 6th chords and the dissonant opening to Hard Days Night" all over again, isn't it?
There *is* a genre of pop music that is harmonically adventurous in a "Western Classical tradition" way and that's early 70's prog rock. Bands like ELP, King Crimson, pre-pop hits Genesis and Yes, Van Der Graaf Generator and especially Gentle Giant have a bunch of very harmonically interesting songs.
But they were just dirty hippies from a thoroughly discredited (in England, anyways) subgenre, so they don't count.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.....
Still doesn't mean we have to like pop music, though, does it? Would not want to spent time watching this programme.
I like pop music, I really do but all Mr Hazelwood seems to be pointing out in this article is that it uses the same elements that classical music does. While this is true, I'm still scratching my head to work out why this is a) news and b) worth making a programme about.
As other commenters have pointed out, harmony is rarely the most important element in a pop song. It seems strange to devote time to this and not rhythm, text, texture or melody.
If anyone knows about the mechanics of a hit song, it's a producer at the top of his/her game. Why didn't they interview someone like that instead?
The paradox is that the article moans about the Establishment maligning pop music but then goes on to use the language of said Establishment to legitimize it.
If you want some really heavy duty analysis of a pop song try this:
http://tinyurl.com/2btcdx
I have watched Hazlewood's programme and concluded that he should stick to classical music. The one done by Paul Morley, which I mention later, was better. Hazlewood's examples sung at the piano sounded very square and his attempts to analyse songs seemed misguided. A few examples from the show:
Abba's "Knowing me, knowing you" doesn't have a minor-key feel at the beginning just because it uses some minor chords. It starts on D major, and the following E and B minor chords are part of the normal major scale in any case, with or without 7ths.
He compared Jamie-T's quasi-rap song "Salvador" with 18th century opera recitative, because the vocal line is over one constant chord. Eat your heart out, Mozart! Did Mr T really think he was "effectively assuming the role of Don Quixote" in this opus?
To say that the operatic aria is an "inner psychological road-map" is just polysyllabic rubbish.
Guy Chambers: "..the world hasn't got time to listen to a four-minute song."
Does it really show "courage" to abandon the usual verse-chorus-bridge structure of the three-minute single and build a whole song out of four chords repeated many times? It apparently gives a "glorious drudging inevitability" to Amy Winehouse's "Back to Black".
Simplicity is essential, apparently, and when the lyrics become too much to take in, you can always sing nonsense if the melody is good. Thus "Gitchi Gitchi Ya Ya Da Da / Mocha Chocolata Ya Ya". [It was amusing to watch these programmes with subtitles]
Paul Morley is a proper enthusiast for pop music and was able to draw on many more useful examples. He built his programme around six "great" songs and looked in a more helpful way at lyrics, arrangements, videos etc. All the same, the programme could not avoid some pretentious statements, or the banality of so many songs, even among his six greats.
Tahita Blumer of the New Young Pony Club (I'm not making this up) mentioned the "self-referential" aspect of aspect of Madonna in "Like a Prayer" - presumably because her name is Madonna.
The first "great" song was the Kylie one that goes "La la la, la la la-la la". Another was "lo lo lo lo Lola" by the Kinks. For contrast, the Flying Pickets had "Ba da da da". Profound stuff.
His last example was "Freak like me" by the Sugababes. This combines a 20-year old accompaniment from Gary Numan's "Are friends electric?" with the vocal from Anita Howard's "Freak like me". I know Bach and Handel recycled their own and others' material, but really..!
At least one speaker apologised for being perhaps pretentious when she said that both symphonies and pop singles had a structure.
The programmes which look at "classic albums" have been more informative, because the producers in the recording studio have been able to give some interesting points about how the tracks were built up, and the musicians from Queen and Fleetwood Mac were relatively articulate.
Conclusion: we didn't go quite as far as William Mann's "pandiatonic clusters" when reviewing the Beatles in the Times, or Tony Palmer's claim that they were the greatest song-writers since Schubert. But I don't think that pop songs bear much serious analysis. I hope that BBC4 might go into classical music in as much depth one of these days.
In the meantime, look out for Prof. David Howard's BBC4 programme about the science of the voice this March. I heard him lecture about it recently and it should be excellent
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