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Semi OT: "Fragile Tonics... in Pop and Rock Songs"


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Based on some lively threads here about the key of Lou Rawls "Natural Man" -- I thought this group might enjoy this music theory article I happened upon:

 

"Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs"

 

http://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.17.23.2/mto.17.23.2.spicer.html

 

 

What key is Get Lucky (Daft Punk)? She's Gone (Hall & Oates)? Raspberry Beret (Prince)? Jane Says (Jane's Addition)? There's something for everybody!

 

I learned some new vocabulary, like "melodic-harmonic divorce"

 

[13] Let us consider two such examples. Example 6a shows a transcription of the opening of Jane"s Addiction"s 1988 alternative rock classic 'Jane Says,' a track built entirely on a repeating two-chord guitar riff of G majorâA major. Above Dave Navarro"s incessant guitar riff, Perry Farrell"s vocal melody insistently outlines the tonic triad of D major, and seems to be at odds with the oscillating chords below; indeed, this is an excellent example of what David Temperley (2007) and more recently Drew Nobile (2015), following Allan Moore (1995), have termed the 'melodic-harmonic divorce' in rock. To my ears, this divorce between the melody and harmony causes the whole song to sound like an ever-repeating IVâV that is searching for its tonic but never resolves

 

 

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I really love this kind of discussion. I hadn"t really reflected on 'Rock With You.' I think it"s probably in 'both' keys, but am unlikely to have come to Db as a legit contender for an absent tonic on my own.

 

I can hear Get Lucky solidly in A.

 

I wish he"d reversed the equation and focused on more recent pop, citing older songs in a single paragraph, instead of relegating the last 40 years of music to a sentence or two.

 

Also, funny that he goes to Fleetwood Mac and Prince without mentioning 'Dreams' or 'I Wanna Be Your Lover.' Or did he and I just missed it? But overall really fun essay.

Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material.
www.joshweinstein.com

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It's very common in contemporary pop and hip-hop - where the melody exists as a harmonically related but detached object from the underlying chord structure. I think it has a lot to do with how these things are put together - where an artist will provide lyrics and maybe a germ of a melody, and then a production team will cast that against a variety of loops until they come up with something interesting.

 

Here's a huge recent hit - with Khalid the artist and Disclosure the production team:

 

[video:youtube]

 

That said, the biggest hit singles this year (Old Town Road, Bad Guy, Truth Hurts) have all had traditional verse - chorus structures and solid key signatures.

 

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