- #A complicated song weird al official music video full#
- #A complicated song weird al official music video plus#
“We thought, Well, we’ll just sing ‘all you need is love,’ because it’s a kind of subtle bit of PR for God, basically.” It remains one of popular music’s most universal, indelible sentiments, but “All You Need Is Love” was delivered in a quite unorthodox presentation: Though the chorus is like a campfire tune (“All together now!” “Everybody!”), the verses bulge with the tripping-over-your-feet gait of 7. “Because of the mood of the time, it seemed to be a great idea to do that song,” said George Harrison about “All You Need Is Love,” performed during the first live, global satellite program ever, broadcast while the world was recovering from the Six-Day War in the Middle East and navigating in the morass of Vietnam. The Beatles – “All You Need Is Love” (1967) King Crimson cofounder Robert Fripp actually met Belew at a Steve Reich concert in New York he attended with David Bowie.
Far from the pastoral prog of In The Court Of The Crimson King “Frame By Frame” emerged like Indonesian gamelan music or an art-rock rewrite of a Steve Reich phase experiment. That also meant bolstering the lineup with Talking Heads/Bowie collaborator Adrian Belew and Chapman Stick tapmaster Tony Levin.
#A complicated song weird al official music video plus#
The ne plus ultra of Sixties prog returned in the Eighties with a New Wave haircut. Here are the 17 best uses of the magnificent 7. So we’re celebrating a quarter-century of Superunknown and The Downward Spiral by ranking an odd number of songs using septuple meter.
That LP’s lead single, “March Of The Pigs,” was in 7 too. On the same day, Nine Inch Nails released their second album The Downward Spiral. And the LP was preceded by lead single “Spoonman,” whose main riff was, of course, in 7.
#A complicated song weird al official music video full#
The album was full of unusual time signatures (per Wikipedia: “‘Fell On Black Days’ is in 6/4, ‘Limo Wreck’ is played in 15/8, ‘My Wave’ alternates between 5/4 and 4/4, and ‘The Day I Tried to Live’ alternates between 7/8 and 4/4 sections”). It was 25 years ago today - Mathat Soundgarden released their fourth album, Superunknown. Modern art-indie bands like Battles (“Ddiamondd”) and Animal Collective (“What Would I Want? Sky”) keep the 7 banner flying, as well as all the math-rock, mathcore, progressive metal, and technical death metal bands that live on tricky turnarounds. The bands of the ’90s grunge boom grew up spinning those punks, but they also loved the lurch of Led Zeppelin (who used 7 in 1973’s “The Ocean”), a more likely influence for the mucky riffs of Alice In Chains, Soundgarden, and Nirvana (who flirted with 7 on Kill Rock Stars submission “Beeswax”). In the ’70s and ’80s, New Wave weirdos like Devo, Blondie, the Police, and the Pretenders imbued their songs with 7, adding an extra layer of off-kilter alienation. The Beatles did their own dabbling in 7 (“All You Need Is Love”) and prog rock’s barons of bloat naturally followed suit – Yes, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Gentle Giant. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, rock bands started imbuing their music with all the highfalutin trappings of classical and art music, including the shifting time signatures of Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, and Ravel. Emboldened by the epic ambitions of the Beatles’ 1967 landmark Sgt. Rock’s initial boom of 7 came very shortly after the moment when it became clear this greasy kid stuff wasn’t just for driving, dancing, and protesting.
When a band plays in 7/4 or 7/8 (for non-nerds, just count out “1-2-3-4-5-6-7,” or any mathematical combo like “1-2, 1-2, 1-2-3″) - it feels like a record needle stumbling over a piece of dust or ending a dance move with a rolled ankle. Ergo, lopping off a single beat from two bars of 4/4 is like a car with three and a half wheels: difficult to drive, full of uncomfortable bumps, a mix of the unexpected and the compelling. There’s a reason why all those Ramones songs start with “1-2-3-4!” - and also a reason why Captain Beefheart raged against the “big mama heartbeat.” For anyone growing up in America in the last century, 4/4 meter has been the core of popular music - rock, pop, rap, blues, gospel, all the way back to their origins in West Africa.
0 kommentar(er)
