Over the past 20 years, I’ve thought quite a bit about rock music melodies. Every so often I get a flash of clarity, where generalities spanning years and genres make perfect sense. But unfortunately, I rarely hold on to these ideas long enough to write them down. The following attempt was written in great haste to try to capture whatever it was flashed for me. I’ve since been too lazy to edit it properly, remove the theoretical jargon, etc. I don’t blame you if you give up, but I believe there are a couple of worthwhile nuggets in there. Holler at me if you actually make it through and see what I’m getting at.

 

Lately I’ve been listening to indie-rock bands from the last decade, maybe because I’m feeling old and trying to get a handle on the 2000s (it’s ending soon). I’ve made room in my life, therefore, for “bands” that I just stumbled on and/or missed when they were hot (for a split-second; tastes change so quickly now; blame the internet, of course… but it also raises the possibility in my mind that music theory, musicology, analysis, etc. as DISCIPLINES, are geared to respond to music way too slowly; musical trends happen ten times the speed they did even a couple of decades ago, not to mention hundreds of years… and that begs the question: how are these disciplines going to respond? Are they going to lag even further behind the musical times? If music is created, consumed, and one-upped faster than ever, shouldn’t we be doing hastier analyses and getting them out there? Who even has the time to read a 40-page article in Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, or Nineteenth-Century Music? Who cares anymore? Naturally the answer is, “Well, careful analysis takes hours, weeks, months, etc… and I get that. I get that.) like Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes (too much reverb for my taste), Arcade Fire, Bright Eyes, Girl Talk (altogether a different topic), Decemberists, on and on. I’ve also read quite a bit of music journalism talking about how current indie-rock sounds “African.” I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking about it, and I’m driving, and thoughts are churning, and I’m trying to make sense of why that is, or even how that is, i.e. what are the actual musical devices being used that sound “African?” (Besides, naturally, polyrhythm… )

I balance this with thinking about current indie-rock music in general, how I hear it, what it sounds like to me, and what are the overarching features of the music itself. There’s no freaking way anyone can generalize about the whole of it, so I’m obviously not attempting THAT. What I DO hear clearly, though, are certain trends organized over extremely broad periods of time. What I come up with is strictly my own interpretation, but (foolishly) I’ve come to trust my ears and instincts on such matters.

There’s one metaphor that I see crystal clear for the time being, so here goes trying to document it. It roughly has to do with the difference between three melodic tendencies stretching back to, say, 1963 and ending with today. I am NOT trying to be all inclusive, because there are infinite variations on these patterns. Some songs, in fact, use more than one pattern. And, of course, left out of these groups are the standard major (C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C) or minor (natural minor, usually, or i.e. A – B – C – D – E – F# – G# – A ascending; G-natural and F-natural descending) mode melodies. Also, this says NOTHING about rhythmic features of melodies and only tangentially takes into account melodic contours (step vs. leap, etc.), both of which affect how a melody strikes us.

I’ll take a second to describe these in turn and give an example of each.  

1) bluesy, major/minor scale melodies; these shift back and forth between the major or minor third scale degree AND the major and minor seventh scale degree (i.e. C – D – either E-flat or E natural – F – G – A – either B-flat or B natural – C);

This is found in your typical, early Beatles song, particularly those written by Paul McCartney, where the fluctuation between 3rd and flat-3rd in the major mode mirrors the usage commonly found in the blues idiom. The fluctuation occurs regardless of what type of third appears in the accompanying harmony, though it usually happens in songs with more tonic-seventh (you know, those “bluesy” sounding chords that are stable, but not so much…). “I Saw Her Standing There,” from the Please Please Me album is chronologically the first to exhibit this trait, along with later chestnuts (I hate that term) “Drive My Car,” “I’m Looking Through You,” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

The Beatles, “I Saw Her Standing There” (circa 1964)

Perhaps the song that BEST illustrates this tendency is “Got to Get You Into My Life” off of the Revolver album. The verse uses the major 3rd (B natural) in the melody while the chorus uses the flat-3 (B-flat). The “outro,” interestingly, uses the lyrics of the verse (“I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there”), which exhibited the major 3rd, and places them in the context of the chorus, with the B-flat, thereby creating a world in which both the verse and chorus exist.

The Beatles, “Got To Get You Into My Life” (1966)

I’d say that most of the poppier Hair Band music of the late 70s and all of the 80s, because it was mostly revved-up, distorted, classic rock and roll, drew upon this “bluesy” collection for its melodic content.

Guns N’ Roses, “Welcome To The Jungle” (1987)

All that changed with GRUNGE, which brings me to category 2.

2) major scale melodies with a flatted 7th scale degree, sometimes known as the “mixolydian” collection; these emphasize very strongly the tri-tone relationship between the flatted seventh and the normal, diatonic third scale degree (i.e. C – D – E – F – G – A – B-flat – C; emphasis on the E and the B-flat);

The mixolydian collection was used all through the 60s as well, usually to achieve that “exotic” feeling of otherworldliness. Even the Beatles used this pitch collection a lot. Llisten to “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for example; it’s mostly a major scale, even pentatonic-based melody (“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream”) until you get hit with the flatted seventh in the second half (“It is not DY-ing… It is not DY-ing”). The most important melodic notes, the ones that are given the greatest emphasis, are the third (“Turn off your mind”) and flatted-seventh (“dying… dying”) scale degrees.

When Grunge showed up, groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam must’ve perceived this pitch collection as a way of distinguishing themselves from the Hair Band dinosaurs (this is a HUGE, presumptuous, unsupportable statement, I know, but it’s convenient). Think of Pearl Jam’s “Evenflow” off of their popular debut album, Ten. The first two notes of the melody are the third and flatted-seventh scale degrees. That’s the song’s HOOK.

“FREE – ZIN’…. Rests his head on a pillow made of concrete…”
”FEE – LIN’ … maybe he’ll see a little better set of days….”

ETC.

Pearl Jam, “Evenflow” (1991)

A much craftier melody is found Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” which I think, in a way, anticipates the third category I’m going to get into (perhaps because it’s “late grunge?”). The first half (“What else should I be?”) steps up from the third scale degree to the fifth. The second half (“All apologies”) begins with a leap up to the octave third scale degree, followed by a step down to the tonic and ultimately the flatted-seventh scale degree before getting back to the fifth (previously heard at “be”). All of this takes place over a stable, tonic harmony (i.e. the chord never changes, and it sounds like “home”).

The twist, however, comes with what can be considered the song’s Refrain:

In the sun / In the sun I feel as one / In the sun / In the sun / Married! / Buried!

The harmony changes to the subdominant (IV) chord. The opening melodic fragment (“In the sun”) transposes the beginning of the verse (“What else should I be”) up to begin on the fourth scale degree, and like the verse, the melody eventually reaches the high third scale degree (at “in the sun, in the SUN”) before stepping back down through the tonic, flatted-seventh, and fifth scale degrees (“I feel as one”). This sounds REALLY exotic because it occurs all over that subdominant harmony, and scale degrees 3 (“SUN”) and 5 (“ONE”) don’t belong there. It’s a great effect that turns the subdominant harmony into a Major Seventh Chord (basically the tonic triad plus a normal, diatonic seventh scale degree). So, what I’m saying is that Nirvana creates a Grunge-y melody that also busts out of it’s constraints a little to use other interesting harmonic colors like the major seventh chord. (Pearl Jam was always one step away from being a Hair Band anyway, in my opinion, not that they aren’t good.)

Nirvana, “All Apologies” (1993)

All this leads me to what I hear being used in a lot of the “Africanized” indie-rock of today.

3) the pentatonic pitch collection (i.e. C – D – E – G – A) used primarily in a major mode setting, with that caveat that if a seventh scale degree is needed, the diatonic, leading-tone version is used (i.e. B-natural).

Again, a total exaggeration, but I hear a great deal of major mode pentatonicism in Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes, and other “folky” indie rock bands.  Why is this African? I couldn’t tell you. And that’s not to say that’s all these groups use. I’ll tell you what I read into it, though…

The primary melody of “My Girls,” an irony-free song as far as I can tell, is pentatonic. Only in the second part (“I don’t mean to seem like I care about material things…” etc.) do we get a seventh scale degree (on “I don’t MEAN..”).

I don’t particularly hear much irony in indie-rock anymore. I think that went out with the 90s. I’ve come to the conclusion that you can “hear” irony in musical terms. Sometimes I hear it in the mixolydian, Grunge-era melodic collection, yes, but not always. At the risk of sounding entirely too teleological here, I hear those melodies as self-consciously striving to break free of what came (immediately) before by drawing on previous models of “exotic” melodies, i.e. that “Tomorrow Never Knows,” Age of Aquarius – type stuff. And I think, to a degree, it worked. There’s no confusing the sound of Nirvana with Guns ‘N’ Roses. But hidden in all that self-conscious striving (an ironic concept in itself, since Grunge was supposed to not care, right? OOOO… I’m going to get in trouble for this…), I hear walls put up for protection, a desire to protect the inner sanctum. There’s plenty of effort put into sounding different. These new bands are much more forthcoming with their emotions, and in that I hear a musical metaphor: pitch collection 3 rather than 2 or 1, although things are so postmodern these days that I’m not surprised to hear any one of them used, occasionally in rapid-fire succession.

Anyway, I’ll try to clean this up and make better sense of it someday. Feel free to share your thoughts, if you followed.

Album Info: Merriweather Post Pavillion (2009)

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