More Music Nerdery: J-pop complexity

in OCD4 years ago (edited)

I decided to write out another session of me nerding out to music. I don't care that you don't care.

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One of the prevailing arguments in music has been, and has always been, that it's getting worse, and it now currently sucks. This has been the status quo for centuries.

This was, for the most part, a deliberate thing. Whenever music became too complex, too unnecessarily convoluted, the next generation would cut out the crap and purify. Over time, we developed single melody-focused music which we still tend to enjoy today.

The Classical period of western music was a rejection of the complexities and pure technical nature of Baroque. The Romantic period had a literal war between two factions: the progressives and conservatives, one of which wanted to push new and dirty boundaries. Impressionism was to do away with the grandiose complexities of the Romantic period, and minimalism was to squeeze out as much content using as little material as possible.

Yet somehow, we have actually ended up increasing complexity with our simultaneous drive toward dissonance. This is where Serialism came in and decided to jump to the logical conclusion, that all music would be totally dissonant: Atonal.

Not many people like atonality because it sounds like garbage to the untrained ear. Random notes. We humans like something we can cling on to and understand immediately. Something catchy and memorable, so the serialist movement never got particularly mainstream.

Minimalism, on the other hand, had the exact ingredients necessary for the human ear: repeat a nice-sounding thing hundreds of times with only slight variations. This paved the way for what billions around the world enjoy such as Techno, house, and all that garbage.

Then, we complain that we have garbage music? After a generation of actively trying to come to that conclusion, we spend the whole time whining about our own design? The hypocrisy!

But it's not actually all garbage

Back in the olden days, musicians, composers, were few and far between. That's why you can only name about 3 classical period composers, about 50 romantic period composers and about 7.5 billion modern musicians.

With that huge hoard of musical input comes an infinite range of diversity, and rather than having the limited choice of 'street folk ballads' for the commoners, 'restrictive church monophony' for the religious and 'regulated concerts' for the elite, we now have literally anything we want.

And if we don't like anything we find, we can just make our own with about 15 minutes of practice.

What is there to complain about??

The problem is, people either aren't looking, or aren't listening.

Let's fly over to Japan.

An old J-pop band called Perfume demonstrates how you're not listening. You assume all the music is simple, 4 chord things on repeat, but more than a fraction of music out there is littered with musical secrets and easter eggs of musical complexity derived from centuries of intellectual endeavour that most people simply don't understand to this day.

In Perfume's song 'Polyrhythm', they use something we call 'polyrhythms'. Essentially this is where two rhythmic beats are playing at the same time, independent of each other.

A good way to try this is by tapping with your right hand FOUR beats, while you tap THREE beats over the same duration in your left hand.

Many polyrhythms exist, such as 5:3 ratio, 5:4, 7:11 and so on and they lead to a quite nuanced feeling that may feel tense or unresolved. This is because it's not easy to hear the first beat.

In any typical pop song, you might hear 1, 2, 3, 4 in the kick drum, where the 1 is very obvious because you nod your head to it. This doesn't work very well with polyrhythms, and so when the polyrhythm finally comes to an end and everything lands on beat 1 after so much time feeling unrested, you get a mighty feeling of satisfaction.

This idea of tension and resolve has been treasured throughout musical history. Wagner famously used the now-infamous Tristan chord to play through a 4.5-hour opera without resolving to a resting point at all, until the very end, the final chord. 4 hours of feeling uncomfortable and waiting desperately for that resolution makes the final satisfying moment totally tear-jerking and powerful.

Tone this down a bit, apply it to J-pop, and you have the same general idea:

The polyrhythm begins at 1:36 and goes into overdrive around 1:52. Try to keep a beat in your head when listening.

So, what's going on here? It turns out, quite a lot.

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Here is the basic outline of the music. The top line is the vocals, the second is the background arpeggio, the next two lines are the bass, and then the drums at the bottom.

The vocals have a five-note melody which repeats over a 3/4 bar. This means there are 3 beats you nod your head to (1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3), but has a vocal melody of 5 smaller beats, which doesn't line up on that precious '1' that you land your nodding head on.

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Meanwhile, the arpeggio is groups into 6 smaller notes which you can probably see, don't match up with the '1' beat (the black vertical line is the start of the beat)

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While all this is going on, the bass is going wacky. Now we have groups of four equal notes in a bar of 3 beats. This is where you try the polyrhythm practice in your left and right hands: You have four beats in the bass playing on top of 3 beats in the drum's kick drum:

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All together, you have 3, 4, 5, and 6 beats all playing independently over the same duration, mixing and matching, dancing around each other to create this wonderful feeling of instability.

To make things even more awkward, the music then confuses you further by switching out that kick drum - practically the only thing keeping your brain firmly grounded - for more 4-grouped beats:

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Finally, after this intense breakdown, everything lands on BOOM, the first beat, and we rest our brains. Feels goooooood.

So yeah, from this little pop song, we can derive many lessons in things we may not have previously understood, and revive our appreciation for the art form.

Anyway, that's all I had in mind today.

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Nowadays it seems to be all about the sound distorting from one thing into another. Instruments are not exactly defined things, but effects instead are gradually filtered, layered, and mixed into something new as a song progresses.

The future of pop music nowadays is the most random variety of both recognizable, obscure, and provocative sound clips.

Rhythm I believe is the backbone of all music, and always will be. It drives the mysterious randomness as a song is introduced, as well as the resolution. Repetition returns everything into the grand rhythm loop again, and makes a song predictable in a way people seem to like.

Thanks for sharing @mobbs.

Though there are many examples of music without rhythm, such as this infamous piece:

in terms of pop music, I can't imagine a success without a predictable, repeating pattern. I'd love to see someone try and get rhythmless music popular though =D

Yeah, I was thinking about soundtracks and background music for tv and theater. It is a very different set of rules for music made to aid a visual story being told in the same parallel moment, vs. music being performed solely for musical entertainment.