OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

xp I'm old-fashioned Doran. I don't believe in slamming a book for omissions until I've read the book and know what's actually in there.

NPR ILX is absolutely symbolic of a certain upper-middle-class aesthetic and weaksauce political liberalism.

― james franco tur(oll)ing test (Hurting 2), Wednesday, March 26, 2014 9:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I only know about the semiotics of "NPR listener" because of ILX but it seems to fit an analogy to UK shorthand use of "Guardian reader".

sounds about right

npr listeners are probably the reason the guardian has an auto-selecting 'us edition' now on their website

be the change you want to see in the world! - http://slate.me/1jYHqR7

Owen's good at this

wrong thread for owen's piece

holy shit, owen managed to get an almost unanimously positive comments section

thought i'd seen some kvetching about the song choice from boring rockist scum on there but ugh comments sections anyway. nice piece tho!

i just liked that he managed to w/ a pretty soft touch destroy the idiocy of the moody piece and counter the idiocy of the other 'music critics don't actually talk about music' piece and at the same time provide an actually pretty great of smart pop writing instead of just another inside baseball outrage du jour.

like this one better than the katy perry piece fo sho
mostly cuz i hate the kp song

not a katy perry fan (there are...aspects of her i like i guess) but 'teenage dream' is a classic

But the first chord of the progression isn’t A minor, it’s D minor. The song slides smoothly back to it each time (“I’m up all night to get some”). The insistence of the D minor creates the aural illusion that the song could in fact be in the minor mode of D Dorian—D E F G A B C. Note that the D Dorian scale contains all the same notes as A Aeolian, all the same keys on the piano. The only difference is what key you start on.

Um, no, the first chord is B minor. It goes B minor, D major, F# minor, E minor.

*N.B. this song is actually in F# Aeolian, not A Aeolian, but for casual readers, I stuck with the white keys. Also, I deliberately omitted mentions of added-7’s in my chord descriptions because of an inconsistency in notational unity between classiclers and jazzers, omitted also for irrelevance.

Maybe THIS is the worst piece of music journalism ever?

The new music recommendation services driven by music analytics and made possible by the wholesale migration of listeners into the cloud via streaming services, says Roberts, will encourage us to “explore new music.” Relying on the brute force of a search function to try to find good new stuff in a catalog of 25 million or more songs is hopeless. There’s no way to find the juicy stuff without the music industry taking an active stance. This is the surveillance state quid pro quo. The more we know about you, the better we can make your life. It’s a brave new world of new music.

oh yeah, just saw that, xp

I like the exercise of doing analysis of pop songs in music theory terms. My problem is when he veers into qualitative stuff. His explanation for why the song works could just as easily be my explanation for why I find the song so static and boring.

Also this:

Katy Perry may have captured the world’s attention with her enormous eyeballs, but as I argued earlier this week, the reason “Teenage Dream” went to No. 1 and remains in radio rotation is that it is a textbook example of the excellence and supremacy of the rules of Western music theory.

is kind of a misunderstanding of what music theory is and does

"The song that the key is in" is in fact the least interesting (and most easy to discern) aspect of musicological analysis, and I've deliberately been using the simplest possible keys to describe the chordal relationships, a) because it keeps it simple for casual listeners, and b) because it trolls people who care about meaningless bullshit

Thanks for the kind words, guys. I'm hoping that my hints that this whole line of analysis is white-people-pop-centric bullshit are not going over people's heads

i.e. "the supremacy of the rules of Western Music Theory"

I like the exercise of doing analysis of pop songs in music theory terms. My problem is when he veers into qualitative stuff. His explanation for why the song works could just as easily be my explanation for why I find the song so static and boring.

which is why musicological criticism only takes you so far. I can explain why the unstressed meter in a Marianne Moore verse creates suspense, but not why this same technique still produces what is to you a boring poem.

we've been primed by years of hongro

cool, I would actually even see if they can put that NB upfront next time because it just threw me off the whole first time I read your analysis. It would probably be interesting for me to try to figure out why the Get Lucky chord progression doesn't work for me. I think there's actually something that feels forced about some of the jumps from one chord to the next that prevents it from having that "fascinating endless circle" effect that some songs with repeating progressions have for me.

I do like Owen but going all Geir in your first paragraph is a real turn-off.

in that it's such an inaccurate and lazy assumption that it brings the entirety of the rest of the piece into question.

Like something about the voice leading maybe doesn't work for me but I can't nail down what it is. xp

I totally get that this is tongue-in-cheek, but it really is incredibly interesting, so I can't work out if you're sort of failing, or if the modulation b/w "of course this is bullshit" and "here's a genuinely helpful music primer" is included in the point.

I deliberately omitted mentions of added-7’s in my chord descriptions because of an inconsistency in notational unity between classiclers and jazzers, omitted also for irrelevance.

I mean actually, most chord progressions don't fall entirely along a single mode, maybe it's the fact that does that bothers me.

i kinda think you should get a shouts and murmurs page with one of these just to make it clear what the deeper intent is

I mean actually, most chord progressions don't fall entirely along a single mode, maybe it's the fact that does that bothers me.

But then when somebody called "Giant Steps" and counted it off, well...

Another thing I really dislike about Get Lucky is the way the "We've come too far to give up who we are" hits the same degree of each of the four chords (the third), i.e. parallel motion/voice-leading. This is a really boring way to write a melody, especially where each third lands squarely on the first beat of the bar.

are you competing for the worst piece of music writing?

@ Marcello, yes, I thought I was being sufficiently tongue-in-cheek with "supremacy" to tip people off that though this is fun, and I hope instructional, it's not meant to form any basis of criticism. I'm going whole-hog next week so people aren't mislead

@ Hurting 2 that "parallel movement with the third in the upper voice" trick is the basis of a hundred Zimmer / Horner / Newton Howard scores, "The Thin Red Line" immediately springs to mind. People really like the sound of it, esp. in that brand of 00s indie music (whatever is the first song on Sufjan's "Illinoise" but also every other Sufjan song, The National "England", every Joanna Newsom song).

these are p great

As a black person, whenever I see someone taking about music theory in terms of race I get unreasonably angry.

the one Miranda July cd i heard was decidedly un-twee...super harrowing scary stuff not for nighttime listening.

DJP me too

I really like Miranda July for the record - the films I've seen and her short story collection. It's a shame she's lumped in with all that Little Miss Sunshine stuff.

which is why musicological criticism only takes you so far.

What is the *place* you're referring to that musicology cannot attain (and that, presumably, something else can)?

place: flavor town
something else: donkey sauce

i fear the troll is too subtle. also i think i mentioned elsewhere, its u&k when talking about teenage dream to talk about Bonnie McKee.

but otoh these articles are great!

Thanks s.clover. I'm not experienced enough of a writer to trust myself, and so far the troll-signifiers have just been pissing off people who think I'm taking digs at "academic writing as a whole" which is, y'know, unfortunate. I'm writing an explain about "why all Gaga's songs sound the same (and why this is a good thing) and why Bad Romance will be a longtime radio staple" but after that I think I'm gonna get out while I'm ahead

Owen, I love these two articles. I think there is a place for academic analysis of pop culture (it's sort of why I joined ILX in the first place). Wished more people were going that way instead of down the Buzzfeed style route.

was going to post those owen reviews here; glad there's discussion about them. they are great. i don't get why there aren't more like it. sports fans crave hyper-complex analysis about offensive formations in football; defensive strategies in basketball; the nuances of pitchers' approaches to particular batters. i don't see why music fans wouldn't want similarly hyper-complex analysis of new records. plus, it's good to learn things, and these reviews are good teaching tools. anyway, they are great to read, and i hope there will be more.

srsly.

Yeah I really like musical analysis and enjoy the pieces overall. Even if you can't explain why a piece is good or not good or why one person loves it and another is bored by it, it's still interesting to examine what the song is doing and how.

people complained that the steely dan 33.3 was too dry - which it was - but they attributed that dryness to how it focused mainly on what was going on musically, which was a breath of fresh air for me