Rap or Microtonal Melody?

When I first started hearing about 'rap' music, I was puzzled - why would the element of melody be removed from music, and why would anyone want to listen to that?

I didn't really hear much of it (partly by choice) until I spent a day doing grunt location cleanup work at a movie location with a young (white) kid who told me at the beginning of the day that he liked to listen to hard-core rap while he worked and (with a challenging expression on his face) he hoped that wasn't going to be a problem. I heard a good deal of it that day, and although I understood the rebellious energy and the power of the rhythm, I had a great deal of trouble understanding most of the lyrics. I could get little snatches here and there, but it went by so fast and contained so much street slang I was lost most of the time.

For a long time I avoided rap, because every time I ran into it the song just seemed to be a celebration of bling, violence and macho chauvanism. The first time I heard a rap I actually liked was Tony M.'s contribution to a Prince song called "Live 4 Love," which I listened to over and over. I realized that a good rap could use the accented syllables to pull the rhythm of the song a little off the beaten path, and how pleasant that could be. I started listening for rap tunes that successfully did that.

And then Eminem started hitting the radio. His songs combined the offbeat rhythms with insistent rhymes that cascaded over one another like a prizefighter demolishing a weak opponent, hit after hit, rhyme after rhyme, each one coming earlier than expected. Somehow in all that technical artistry were passionate stories, and all shouted at a pace that I could still grasp as it went by, and no verses full of filler about bitches and n*****s. Oh, and when he had to sing on key, he could sing on key. That made me wonder about the pitch of the rap portion of the songs, and I realized that he was deliberately selecting a note a quarter tone away from the scale of the instrumentation to cue the listener that the part he was 'singing' was the rap. It brought a tension that a straight melody couldn't, and completely justified the enterprise to my ear.

Then he sealed the deal with this:

Let's put on a show!

There is a convention in musical movies, and now, musical TV shows, in which two or more of the performers decide to sing a song together. They jump up on the stage (there is usually a stage) and start singing, and a verse or two in, it becomes glaringly, embarrassingly apparent that this is no spur-of-the-moment performance. Without so much as a nod or a hand gesture, they trade lines back and forth, then break into perfect two or three-part harmony, to the delight of the assembled audience.

It always helps move the plot along, and we accept it as we watch, (in the same way we accept the dial-tone on the other end of the phone when the movie caller hangs up) but I've always found that it takes me out of the story. Does this happen to everyone, or just people who have experience performing music? Do non-musicians assume that real musicians are so talented they can just jam out a complex arrangement based on telepathy? Face it, the most realistic depiction of an impromptu vocal performance in the history of cinema is in "Spinal Tap" when the lads try to sing "Heartbreak Hotel" at Elvis' grave. And don't get me started on the band behind the singers...not only do they play every song in every key, they all know where that surprise modulation in the middle of the song is coming.

It happened in all the old musicals, you expected it when you saw Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby or Danny Kaye. But it persisted through The Sound Of Music, innumerable beach movies and right into the 90s, when musicals became almost exclusively the domain of animated children's fare, and the unacknowledged rehearsal ceased to be an issue. Now we have a slew of musical TV shows thanks to the technological breakthroughs that allow TV producers to bang off a half dozen professionally recorded and choreographed songs per episode, and the magically perfect improvs are back. (I'm going to excuse "Nashville" from this accusation, because outside of some over-perfect songwriting scenes, they've largely kept it pretty real)

So what would a real-life unpremeditated musical collaboration look like? A couple of weeks ago this circulated on social media, and we found the answer. There's no reason this couldn't happen, and it really looks like it probably did.

The Minority

There is a musical world out there that everyone knows about, but few frequent. In clubs with sparse, polite audiences, musicians of the highest calibre perform the most complex music. When one of the musicians steps into the spotlight and improvises for a verse or two, the audience applauds when the solo is over, even if the song is still going on.

Dictionary.com defines jazz as: "music originating in New Orleans around the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently developing through various increasingly complex styles, generally marked by intricate, propulsive rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, improvisatory, virtuousic solos, melodic freedom, and a harmonic idiom ranging from simple diatonicism through chromaticism to atonality." 

As definitions go, that's a start, but there are a couple of problems: not only is it a weak description of most slow jazz styles, it also could apply equally well to some kinds of rock, latin and even certain modern classical music. So what makes jazz different from those? I guess we know it when we hear it; there are some jazz traditions of substitution chords, and chords with remote bass notes, some instrumental cliches on piano, bass and sax, and some peculiarly 'jazzy' vocal styles. The definition gets even harder to nail down when you add in fusion styles, hyphenating jazz- primarily with rock, but also with latin and other world music elements.

I'm going to admit that I don't reach for jazz albums first when I decide to put on some music, and it's a world that, like most people, I haven't spent much time in. There was l little window, however, back in the mid-seventies when Jeff Beck put out back-to-back albums ("Blow By Blow" and "Wired") of instrumental jazz fusion and won over a huge audience of blue-jeaned rock fans, and I was one of them. (I would never have dreamed at the time that within the next few years I would be playing in a band that was opening for him)

Here's Jeff Beck playing a Mingus piece, a lovely example of the reasons jazz fans love it when it's good; the melody is seductive, the changes are emotional, and the playing is very, very superior. 
(I was amused that one commenter on YT claims that after hearing this song he threw his guitar out the window and never played again)

Psycho Lyricists

There are thousands of perfectly beautiful and valid sentiments expressed in song lyrics, and some have even inspired people to do great things.

A lot of the most heartfelt lyrics, however, tell darker stories and express human passions of the less pleasant or admirable sort. The lyrics to "Walk On By" or "Crying" depict a songwriter who is experiencing the temporary insanity of a breakup, and "Paint It Black" takes it further with a more permanent end to the relationship. We don't envy these characters, but we do empathize: I clearly remember welling up while listening to Macy Gray's "I Try" and the first time I listened to "She's Leaving Home" I almost broke down at the top of the stairs myself.

But there are some songs which sound innocuous enough as lyrics, but if they were expressed as prose could be cause for calling a psychiatrist, or even the police. The first group are the victim lyrics: songs where the story is told from the point of view of someone who has lost all self-respect. Some of these songs just sounded like nice tunes until you looked closer: in "Maggie May" Rod Stewart is apparently the helpless (and possibly underaged) boy-toy of an older woman; in "Chain of Fools" Aretha admits to her inability to leave a man who treats her badly, and Bonnie Raitt consciously embraces denial and gives herself anyway even though "I Can't Make You Love Me."

The second group are the ones that I find most insidious, though: cheerful little pop songs which turn out to be the dark thoughts of sociopaths and criminals. The groundwork for the misogyny of modern rap music was laid long ago with "That's What You Get For Loving Me" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright." We all forgave John Lennon for his disaffected apathy in "Norwegian Wood," but if you think about it, the girl in question didn't really seem to deserve having her house burned down, did she?

I believe it's a form of lyric populism, where the lyricist appeals to the thoughts and feelings we may think, but dare not express. It's comforting to be allowed to imagine deflowering a virgin a la "Tonight's The Night" or carrying out a revenge fantasy like Carrie Underwood's "Before He Cheats."

But I think my favourite for blatant creepiness that apparently went largely unnoticed by the music-buying public is still this one, a controlling stalker singing to a woman who should, by rights, be terrified, disguised as a love song:

Major Minor

While I'm willing to concede that many of my readers are trained musicians and are therefore completely conversant with the difference between major and minor keys, indulge me a little. Isn't it fascinating how we innately understand the difference? How even when we were very small children we could 'feel' how a particular piece of music sounded happy or sad, and how the dichotomy is between happy and sad instead of, say, loving and hating or some other emotional split.

For non-musicians who are unfamiliar with the meaning, the technical difference between a major and a minor chord is a semitone, which is the smallest difference between two notes in western music. It's a small change, a half-step of the scale, but it makes as much difference to the sound of the music as playing it on an organ instead of a harp would.

A composer who wants a piece to be serious and maybe tragic would never consider writing it in a major key, and if he wanted a light piece, say, to celebrate a wedding, he would avoid a minor key in the same way. However, for an ambiguous, wry sound, it's possible to bend the third note of the scale from minor to major as part of the setting, and we hear that used in some blues music; the result is music that sounds like it's making fun of a miserable situation.

A couple of years ago I read about a new technology invented by an engineer at Celemony called Direct Note Access which would allow an audio engineer to go into an existing arrangement of multiple instruments and adjust a single note in a chord. It occurred to me that every album ever recorded might be fodder for manipulation, that well-known recordings could be modified so the singer changed the melody or the guitar solo played different notes. It did NOT occur to me that a whole song could be changed from minor to major or vice versa, but apparently it did occur to someone else. As an illustration of the importance of choosing whether to write in a major or minor key, I can not think of a better example. Here's The Doors' "Riders On The Storm" converted to a major key - remember, this is not a cover version, this is the original recording with the scale altered!



Major Scaled #3 : The Doors - " Riders On The Rainbow" from major scaled on Vimeo.

Bespoke Music

For centuries, music composers have laboured to produce music that moves them, sometimes just for the sheer joy of creation, but more often to earn a living from some wealthy benefactor who gives them what they need to live on in exchange for the compositions. For a long time it was The Church for western composers, and that gave way to affluent bluebloods and merchants trying to buy royal court respectability.

In modern popular music, the impetus for songwriting has, to a certain extent, reverted back to the idea that the composer should be composing for themselves, and if they do a great job their works will be so popular they'll earn huge benefits from them. Once they do, however, the modern bluebloods and merchants come out of the woodwork looking to commission their own customized popular songs. All the time I was growing up, songwriting for hire was considered 'selling out' and was frowned upon enormously. Pop songs written for products were few and far between; the only example that springs easily to mind is "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing." This song was inspired when an ad agency guy was stuck in an airport with some songwriters and it began life as a song that failed to achieve significant radio play, but became a hit when it was released following its use in the Coca Cola TV ad "Hilltop."

I've spent quite some time now working in the ad business and periodically get the brief that the soundtrack for a commercial should 'sound like a hit song on the radio.' I'd like to mention that achieving this is not as easy as it sounds, although we have a good record for it so far. Also, the stigma associated with having one's song used in a commercial has done a 180, and now it's considered a mark of success to be invited to sell out in this fashion. Is this another symptom of The Corporatization Of Everything? I invite opinions...

The exception to the 'sellout' rule, of course, was movie soundtracks; but it takes a certain kind of mindset to switch over from writing for yourself to writing a custom song, often with title already a requirement. Probably the best example of this over the years has been the James Bond movie franchise; the popular songwriters of the day were commissioned to write the title track for the current movie, and elements from John Barry's original arrangement of the Monty Norman motif were sometimes incorporated into the new song's arrangement. There have been some successes, "Goldfinger" was a Top Ten hit, and after Paul McCartney opened up the tradition to encompass composers other than film score specialists there were a handful of Bond hits for Macca, Carly Simon, Sheena Easton, Duran Duran and Adele, among others. But the one that stands out for me in its loopy 60s glory is John Barry's masterpiece, "You Only Live Twice," which,  period warts and all, suits the Bond style more perfectly than any of them:

Is it the song or the singer?

Some songs are so good it doesn't matter if the singer phones in their performance. (No, I'm not talking about Flash & The Pan) When a crowd of drunks belts out "Hey Jude" it can be almost as effective as the original recording due to the strength and originality of the lyrics and the melody. A so-so singer can rock out a karaoke performance of "Satisfaction" if all they do is sing loud and stay on beat because the accompaniment is so ballsy.

And then the reverse is true too: some singers are so adept that they can bring a transcendence to truly average material. There are some great songs on "21" but there's some filler too; if anyone but Adele was singing it, "Lovesong" would be completely forgettable. And what kind of impact would "What'd I Say" have on popular music if it had been a lesser singer than Ray Charles improvising it on stage? There is certainly a long list of novelty songs that stick in our heads in spite of their conspicuously banal quality, songs like "Hey Mickey" and "The Monster Mash,"  and they often owe any semblance of success to the capability of the lead vocalist, which might not be great singing, but is always great performance. 

And then there are the songs which are elegantly constructed, carefully edited, beautifully arranged and exquisitely sung. Those are the ones that really get stuck in our heads, and when they do we actually don't mind, don't curse them as 'earworms' and try to drive them out. For me, this is that song for this week, and this is the performance I first heard of it; it's so refreshing to hear a singer who obviously doesn't depend on studio tricks to sound good. As someone said on a comment thread, he won The Voice that night despite not being a contestant...

It's the emotion, stupid

I was going to write today's entry about Frank Sinatra. About how my father had Sinatra records and when I was quite young I heard them over and over and didn't really like them - they sounded old-fashioned; a grown-up man in a suit singing with a conspicuously American accent. I meant to write about how my admiration for Sinatra grew as I got older, how I realized what a fantastic instrument he had, and how four years of trumpet study in high school led me to appreciate the bold intricacies of Nelson Riddle's arrangements. I wanted to illustrate this column with a definitive example of what an amazing singer Frank was, so I started listening over to all his hits, one by one on YouTube.

That's when I ran into a bit of trouble.

While it is true that I have come to admire Sinatra's phenomenal voice, his distinctive style and his brilliant showmanship, I realized that I've never put on his music to listen to just for my own enjoyment, and listening to all those hits made me realize why: even with that unbelievable voice, Frank Sinatra was awkward about getting too emotional in his songs.

Ah, I hear a chorus of angry denials. But I also hear those jazz licks, the finger snaps, the signature 'scoop' down to the note that became the signature of so many bad lounge singers, as parodied by Bill Murray on SNL. As a child, I instinctively recognized those vocal licks as 'tricks' to avoid getting too close to the emotion of the material, ways to keep the music intellectual instead of heartfelt.

I'm going to put it down to the fashion of the day. Vocal music was changing from traditions of religious music, opera and music hall comedy songs, and Frank was at the forefront of what would be considered at that time a more emotional style of singing - for a white guy. The overtly emotional vocal was the domain of Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole, of Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne. Frank was unknowingly breaking ground for white rock singers, even though he himself loathed rock and roll.

But in the end, happily, I was able to find a great example of Sinatra singing a gorgeous song with a lovely arrangement and actually allowing himself to get wrapped up in it. Must have let his guard down that day...

Surprise!

It feels like it used to happen much more often: I would be listening, to the radio, to the TV, and Surprise!..something would catch my ear and hold on, would stick in my head and become my New Favourite Song for at least a week. Maybe it was because it was back in the days of polymusical radio, before corporations took over the creation of content for commercial radio.

I know that musicians have continued to slave away, learning their craft while playing to half-houses with no cover until they have mastered whatever style they aspire to and appear, apparently suddenly fully-formed to the greater public. Once in a while their talent is so great that they manage to break onto the world stage without having to conform to some corporate ideal of what music ought to be, but more often they have to soldier through a commercial phase, either to disappear again when corporate support is withdrawn, or to arrive at a place where fans love them so much they can do whatever they want.

All I'm saying is that as the road got harder, the Surprise!s became fewer and further between. I'm also aware that this has to do with me aging, that I'm more attached to artistic lightweights from my adolescence than I am to serious talents who appeared when I was in my 30s, but I do still have those Surprise! moments, even now. They just don't happen very often.

So what a treat it was to click on a link a friend recommended and find this, a genuine old-fashioned band of skilled players with great songs and great vocals. This song was my first exposure, but I bought the album and found so many other songs that have become my New Favourite Song for a week or three each. Enjoy!