Events
Something very unusual happened to me over Memorial Day weekend… I heard the radio. Despite the lengthy period of time since I last heard the radio for longer than a few seconds, I actually recognized quite a few songs. Some of that has to do with the radio playing in various public places, but this is mostly because there were a few covers being played. I thought it was particularly funny hearing Ozzy Ozzbourne cover… Ozzy Ozzbourne (technically a Black Sabbath cover I suppose). Aside from the plethora of covers/sampling on the radio, I had a more profound observation. This is perhaps the root of what separates mainstream from what I’d like to call quality music; and that is song structure.
You can get the same effect by going into iTunes, searching for any mainstream band, and perusing the “Listeners also bought”. You’ll hear the same things over and over. What I heard over the holiday weekend was pieces of bands I’ve been listening to for years, mutilated and forced into some kind of radio friendly algorithm. This isn’t exactly a revelation. So many of us hear this already. But I noticed something slightly different. Many of the subtle details that defined the hardcore punk and heavy metal genres are being used frequently in mainstream rock. I heard more lead-ins and a sense of spontaneity in at least one of the band members from time to time. I heard faster riffs and more obscure sound effects. I even heard snippets of songs that actually take talent to play. Effectively, what I heard was actually a good seed for music. The reason it was mainstream was that it had a very simple song structure; the usual verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus routine. But as Dana Carvey once said, “You cannot pee in a Mr. Coffee and get Taster’s Choice.”
A big gripe with mainstream music is originality. I actually think that argument is moot. I’m not entirely sure how to quantify the originality of music (unless of course you rip off “…the same rhythm, tempo, melody, and key”). Perhaps I’m a purist, but I think difference between mainstream music and quality music is the creative process behind the music. It seems anyone can come up with a couple riffs, play them one after another, repeat, and maybe play one of the riffs softer. There is an art in writing good music, not a filtration system. A telltale sign that an artist realizes this is the variation in song lengths. An album of tracks all roughly 3 - 4 minutes probably lacks some structural creativity. If you allow the music to write itself, you simply won’t have a 3 - 4 minute song every time.
It doesn’t make sense to force two parts of a song together that don’t necessarily fit. Sometimes it needs additional work to make an appropriate transition and sometimes the pieces just aren’t meant to be in the same song. The real heart of this argument applies to more than just music; it even applies to literature, movies, etc. For example, doesn’t it irk you when you watch a movie and it doesn’t explain how one character has unlimited ammunition, and no one else does? Or how about when Daniel Faraday knew how to calculate the bearing to get to The Island before he even got there which cured his drifting mind (Damn you J.J. Abrams!). It’s the same thing in music. You’ve got to explain how you got from point A to point B. On the same token, you don’t want everything completely spelled out for you. That said, it’s nice to have enough faith that the answers to your questions are there whether you catch them the first time or not. This is exactly the same for music. I despise Law & Order because it’s entirely predictable, and I loathe mainstream music for the same reason. By the way, Robot Chicken did a spoof that brilliantly depicts how nearly every episode goes (embedded at the bottom of this article).
For the sake of being explicit, I feel song structure is as important as sonic development and maybe even the music itself. I’m also not saying that the more complicated of a song structure the better. For example, one of my favorite bands, Demians, has a song called Shine. This song effectively only has two parts… and the first is not played again after the second. A song that simply goes from A to B and nowhere else. It’s so simple that this may seem obvious to someone who has never written music. But it’s easy to get in a mind set of having to repeat pieces of your song because nearly every other song does that. Another example, the seventh track, Empire, from that same album has a few measure loop playing over and over throughout the entire song… even through the verse, chorus, peaks, and quite moments. What makes it so amazing, in my opinion, is that it’s subtle. You could have heard that song a hundred times and not noticed because it all fits. So it’s not that song structures need to be complicated, the writer just needs to be creative and let the music breathe a little. And the moral of the story, I might be more inclined to tune into the radio again if the mainstream rock artists picked up on this.
Music all too often falls into the same trap as Law & Order… using the same formula over and over.
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