Morrissey Posted October 8, 2019 Share Posted October 8, 2019 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 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SamuelBLupowitz Posted October 8, 2019 Share Posted October 8, 2019 I love this kind of thing, and have since we did harmonic analyses of pop songs in my high school theory class. Thanks for sharing! Quote Samuel B. Lupowitz Musician. Songwriter. Food Enthusiast. Bad Pun Aficionado. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MathOfInsects Posted October 8, 2019 Share Posted October 8, 2019 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. Quote Now out! "Mind the Gap," a 24-song album of new material. www.joshweinstein.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bill H. Posted October 9, 2019 Share Posted October 9, 2019 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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