Chord as (Other) World: Queens of the Stone Age, “A Song For The Dead” (2003)

It’s rare in popular music, but any bit of a song might abruptly shift you mentally to an unexpected and busy place, like when the special cookie unleashes a flood of remembrance in Proust. Would that necessarily be a personal, private event, or could it befall all of us together? I have an example where I suspect, or hope, it isn’t just me.

In “A Song For The Dead” by Queens of the Stone Age, the chorus contains a familiar rock four-chord sequence (especially if you’ve been listening to the Doors or Black Sabbath—it’s very sinister-portentous), except that something odd happens with the fourth chord. The first three are C, D-flat, and E-flat.[1]  We expect to finish with a B-flat minor, which would reinforce the D-flat feeling from chord #2 since a B-flat minor contains a D-flat note as its third. But what we hear is a B-flat major chord featuring a D instead of a D-flat, which gives us a sunny lift.

“Song For The Dead”

On paper it seems a subtle difference, but in the ear it’s startling. The B-flat major makes us feel we’re completing the four-chord sequence of a song with drastically different associations than those of the somber minor-chord sequence we thought we were in.

Part of the changed meaning is social. We’re shifting from an anguished contemplation of individual doom to a cherry-flavored plunge into flower-powered community, to a song that feels more like, oh, “Pictures Of Matchstick Men” or “Waitin’ For The Wind.”

What’s up thematically?  The song ostensibly offers “the study of dying/how to do it right.” We’re being carried through the clouds of fear and loss to the B-flat major rainbow of salvation. Can I really be dropped off at heaven at the end of a four-chord line, over and over? That’s hard to believe in! Are the Queens kidding? Probably. Maybe not.

The sequence of the first three chords is so strongly deterministic that the fourth chord’s different implication always comes as a shock; and the fourth chord and its associations are so strong that it always stands up against the force of the preceding three and pours its new meanings all over them. We hear this 12 times in the course of the track. The effect doesn’t weaken.

Because we feel a social charge in the B-flat major we have a heightened sense of the chordiness of this chord, the mutually supportive ringing of its notes, the active sharing of its aura. Possibly something bigger is being revealed to us. To teach us what makes a world, that incredibly rich composition, maybe a designated heaven needs a moment of our attention.

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[1] The D-flat chord is on a continuing C root, so with that second chord there’s an ambivalence about going upward; that temporary repression of progress toward the E-flat chord gives us a sense of bobbing up into it forcefully when it arrives, an extra energy that gets harvested by the surprising fourth chord.

The Greatest Bass Note: Nirvana, “Heart Shaped Box” (1993)

I trust you’ve heard Krist Novoselic’s wonderfully sour bass notes under Kurt Cobain’s exclamations “Hey!” “Wait!” in the chorus of “Heart Shaped Box” (starting at 0:49).

The sourness is the tone of the whole song and of Nirvana the band, not as stretched out in a darkly exuberant chord progression or random segues in the lyrics but darkly exuberant and random all at once, brought to a point, a supremely concentrated hook.

The two questions on this subject that nag at me are, What exactly are these two notes? (They’re so odd and misdirective that they’re hard to place on the musical scale.) And which of the two is the greatest bass note in rock? (Under the rules of this Hooks post it has to be one of them. Right now I can’t think of any other bass note that has so much impact in its moment.[1] Can you?)

The song is played in D (tuned low to D-flat, a nice depressive touch, but let’s treat it as D). The chords of each chorus line, same as the chords of the verse, are V-IIIb-I7, that is, A-F-D7. On the A chord, that bending-down bass note after the A is F-sharp to F; on the F chord, the counterpart is a bending-down C-sharp to C.

F-sharp and F are about as lost in space as any notes could be if your home ground is an A chord. In a bass part, the strongly relevant notes you should hear for A are A the first, E the fifth, C or C-sharp as the third—those are the notes that make an A chord—or, getting a little more slick, you might hear G or G-sharp as a passing tone to get to A, or D or E-flat to get to E, or B to get to a C. Thus F-sharp and F live in the largest out-of-bounds area in the normal A scale, and by making a pair of them, not sliding off of F-sharp to the more rock-wholesome G but sliding down to F as the very worst note possible (apart from B-flat, but let’s not even think about that), the bent bass note is confirmed in maximum weirdness.

Why doesn’t this ungodly F-sharp-to-F sound like a clam? Partly because it’s down in the bass line and you don’t hear the notes, even in this way-out-front bass voice, quite as distinctly as you would in a vocal or lead instrument part. Partly because the A-F-D7 pattern has already been strongly established by the verse, so you know you’re headed for an F chord next, so the F note might be an advance scout for the F chord, just as the F-sharp might represent the D7 chord that comes at the end. (I know . . . after all, no hook is an island.) Partly because starting a bent note on F-sharp would work out okay if it went up to G, which is the seventh note of an A7 chord, and going down to F instead sounds (in this song) like an aptly demonic inversion of that move.

Arriving with the F chord, the second sour note is similar but different. On its own F scale it’s a half-step lower: it goes from the sharped fifth to the fifth rather than from the sixth to the sharped fifth.  So there is a subtle feeling of contraction, of being reeled in closer to the normal dimensions of a chord, the better to appreciate the D7 chord at the end of the line. Also there is a bit of anchoring, since we are ending the halftone bend on a solid fifth this time. Most importantly, perhaps, by ending on C we’ve previewed the F-sharp to C sequence that will be the climactic melodic hook of the whole line on the D7 chord (the notes of “I got a new/complaint”).

Can we decide now which note is greatest? The first note is the craziest. It announces something, but you don’t know what. It brilliantly throws you off. (Actually it’s a bigger gesture with a wilder curve than the F-sharp-to-F analysis recognizes.) The later note is craftier, still sour but a little more solid in its harmonic space. It’s the earlier note’s slightly less dangerous brother, the one you’re better off trying to reason with. I’ll risk my sanity and go with the earlier note, because it sets everything up in that line, which is that song, and that band—a colossal Wrong Is Right.

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[1] Close: the low G at 1:26 in Jefferson Airplane’s “Other Side Of This Life” on Bless Its Pointed Little Head, like a bottomless dark pool you finally discover in the middle of a cave full of fantastic bass note stalactites and stalagmites.

The Rock Video Hook: The Rolling Stones, “Love Is Strong,” directed by David Fincher (1994)

Rock video hooks would seem to be a vast, rich subject, yet I don’t think of many moments in rock videos that I yearn to re-experience. In fact, it is so hard to think of such moments that I wonder whether there is something in the very nature of rock videos that militates against peak experience—something beyond the general deflation caused by lip-syncing skit shenanigans, since there are quite a few wonderful rock videos. (I love my Director’s Label DVDs.)[1] It’s just that I very rarely encounter any particular thing in the video experience that feels decisive in the way that peak musical moments do.

Part of the issue is that nothing else one could pick out as a rock video hook can compare with the physical presence of the star performers.  Beyoncé’s face is Mt. Everest (and her other parts are Himalayan slopes and valleys), and next to that anything like a cool shot composition is merely a pebble. You don’t need a Hook Analyst to tell you this. However, there is a strange hook effect here that I feel bound to remark. Precisely because Beyoncé is so dominantly interesting whenever she appears, she levels everything out: she makes it harder to feel any one moment as a peak experience.  (If you’ve got a minute to watch “Crazy In Love,” does it matter which minute you watch?)

This leads me to make a two-part prediction: the greatest rock video hooks will involve seeing some very interesting performer’s body photographically amplified (as a visual intensification of music’s amplifying of sound and speech), but will lift a peak moment up from the leveling effect by setting something against that body, unexpectedly checking it or framing it.

Wonder of wonders, the first rock video hook that rises to my mind confirms my hypothesis.

I love the “Love Is Strong” video partly because of the risks it runs. Putting oversized human characters in Manhattan might look arbitrary and silly in the way photo tricks usually do; and even if were physically convincing, it might make the Rolling Stones look like Godzilla-type monsters or Macy’s parade balloons, which would rather dull their edge.  But somehow, in certain shots, the images aren’t silly at all, they capture something as deep as the feeling in the song, which seems to well up from something underneath music and sex. (Manhattan is the ideal site; in Manhattan you always know there’s something under you.) What they capture is a feeling of going about in the city with your own feelings and powers huge, because they are central to you, and yet still framed by the mighty works of mankind on a greater scale—framed in such a way that you’re both humbled and expanded. As by love.

I am dubious about this video for the whole first minute, but the song’s smoldering mood is working on me nonetheless—it’s a mysteriously simple, serious, archetypal I-IIIb-VIIb-I rock tune, a big low-hanging fruit that for some reason never got picked till now; and it’s been picked by The Rolling Stones, with whom we’ve already shared quite a lot of such fruit.  So I’m in. The experience solidifies when Mick Jagger and Keith Richard both go down the avenue in the chorus from 1:15 on (after a Cloverfield moment at 1:12 when the camera has a hard time tracking Keith). And now, here is my hook: just as the stabbing new lead guitar accents in the chorus are coming on, as if to say “Yeah! What you’re feeling here really is more than you can handle!”, the Jagger gesture of fanning his shirt out on his arms behind him—at once childishly sportive, adolescently desperate, and rock-star flamboyant—is overwhelming at 1:20. It converges with all my thematic suspicions to sell me on my budding interpretation.

*

If you don’t know it, you should CHECK OUT ALSO the wonderful “Scream” video Michael and Janet Jackson made with Mark Romanek around the same time (1995). There’s no one hook to single out here. The whole thing is a hit parade of violently surprising framings of bodies in a nightmare space yacht. It’s great fun to see Michael and Janet at war with their own fetishized personae.

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[1] I.e. collections of music videos directed by Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, Mark Romanek, Jonathan Glazer, Stéphane Sednaoui, and Anton Corbijn.

The Critic’s Hook: Greil Marcus (1975) on Sly & the Family Stone (1971)

The phrase “the critic’s hook” might make you think first of critical rejection, as in the hook that pulls the failed performer off the stage.  Erase that thought.  I have a better one.

The art of the rock critic—my favorite part of it, anyway—is to write so that an interpretive proposition makes intimate contact with a high point in music, gets entangled with it, draws energy from it and adds energy to it: a hook of discourse interhooking with a musical hook.

There are great rock critics who write with killer hooks of their own about what is going on in and around the music. I want to salute one of them, Greil Marcus, by citing a great interhooking moment in his immortal Mystery Train.  This passage impresses me not because it lights up an enjoyable element in music but because it convinces me I have to listen to music that’s not what I want to hear at all, and watch out! it might convince you too.

Marcus is discussing Sly Stone’s descent into malaise in the 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On.

This music defines the world of the [mythical figure of] Staggerlee who does not get away, and who finds hell as advertised. There is an enormous reality to the music: a slow, level sense of getting by. It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger; the essence of the rhythms James Brown has explored without the compensations of Brown’s showmanship or his badass lyrics. It is a reality of day-to-day sameness and an absence of variety—like prison—that requires, if one is to endure it, either a deadening of all the senses, or a preternatural sharpening of them, so that the smallest change of mood or event can be seized on as representing something novel or meaningful.

In this sense, and only at the farthest margin, the music is part of the way out of the disaster it affirms. If you listen, you get sharper, and you begin to hear what the band is hearing; every bass line or vocal nuance eventually takes on great force. The disaster gains an emotional complexity, and you enter it.[1]

Muzak with its finger on the trigger (“Africa Talks To You”)

This is a painful hooking. You’re warned that, if you didn’t know this already, you’re probably not going to cotton to the music. The only way you can appreciate it is by, in effect, going to prison. But you’re reminded that there’s a bigger situation. Not to listen would be not to look around at what’s happening with your fellow citizens, not to think about what happened to Staggerlee who still lives in the American mind, and (even more unavoidably) not to follow through with the examination of Sly and the Family Stone’s music that Marcus’s chapter has gotten you to invest in.

After you think this over, you may reject the whole deal. But it was quite a deal. You were on the hook. You may still be.

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[1] Greil Marcus, Mystery Train. Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, ^4th ed. (New York:  Plume, 1997), pp. 73-74.

The Stammering Triplets: Midnight Oil, “Only The Strong” (1982)

Rocking is your solution, whatever your problem might be. Just start up the band, or the track, and the iffiness of your conflicted, confused, and/or dull normal life will be relieved. But an individually memorable rock piece provides more than the general panacea of rocking; it shapes a specific (yet relatable) problem and welds it together with a specific rocking solution. Of course this happens all the time on the level of the lyrics—what do we ever do but talk about our problems?!—but it’s really something when it’s done in the musical structure. Like the way “Black Dog” starts and stops and tangles up the grooving of the guy who’s afflicted by his object of desire, just in its riffage.

Another great problem-and-solution shaping in a rock track, slammingly simple yet cleverly developed, is Midnight Oil’s “Only The Strong.” Enjoy this 1985 performance in Sydney harbor:

The song launches in a fairly conventional way at 0:55 after a cymbals-and-guitars prelude that only implied a pulse. Right then we hear the triplets (3 beats grouped over 2 beats of the main rhythm) that are going to be tremendous later, now sounding deceptively ordinary:  “When I’m locked in my room/ I just want to scream.” But at 1:05 everything stops. What seems to be the problem? Ah. 1:10:  “One more day of eating and sleeping.” Whose tedium is this? A prisoner? A teenager? Is that tone complaining or mocking? We stew on this for 14 seconds!

At 1:24 our patience is rewarded with a supercrisp riff, a piece of forward momentum that the singer tries to ride to some can’t-take-it-for-granted basic communicative success–”Speak/Speak to me/I’m not spoken for . . .”  At 1:53 it sounds like we’re going to a big chorus, but that was just a feint, we’re back in the same riff, starting to feel like it might be a trap . . . part of the Big Problem . . .

Until 2:12:  now we’re breaking out! And at 2:24 we get to the great stammering triplets—“_When I’m  locked in my  room/ _ _ I  just want to  shout,” the notes registering more deeply in their dumb out-of-order insistence as the “but but but but but but” of a guy who’s not allowed to speak, until this moment when he is, and then he can’t, or not properly. And now the mixture of constraint and drive is explosive. I am jumping up and punching the air at this point, converting tension into kinetics (shouldn’t Peter Garrett do more?).

Compare the classic snare drum triplets in “I Fought The Law,” a delightful pun on the six-gun but also an eloquently clogged figure for the young loser’s frustration.

“I Fought The Law” (The Clash version)

At 2:37 “Only The Strong” slaps us with a series of short stops, each sizzling with the energy that’s been summoned, and then for the next couple of minutes it rolls on like a normal great rock song, though still flaunting its structural quirks.

All right. This song has captivated me with its problem and its solution. But now the outro starting around 4:26 raises a new problem of a different kind. Is this additional minute’s worth too gentle in spirit? Did we need to take the edge off to this extent? I’m not sure, but I’ll exercise my option to make my uncertainty part of the tension of the song. That seems fitting, since the song has already conquered.

Oozing Restraint: Irma Thomas, “Ruler Of My Heart” (1963)

There was once a quaint notion that women could be volcanoes of sexual interest in a completely enclosed way.  An indirect glance here, a strategic non-reply there, and you would feel the hottest heat there is.  But you wouldn’t call that woman “hot” or “sexy” any more than you would dream of turning her body inside out: that would ruin everything.

Irma Thomas, the New Orleans Queen of Soul, is no demure damsel of yore, but she hooks us with a version of that restraint—an amazingly intense restraint—in “Ruler Of My Heart.”

Listen, in the first verse she can’t even decide whether she’s going to allow herself to sing; her notes are dropping almost out of musical pitches and into plain talk. At the peak of the song’s argument, she hums. Hear how she sings “Where can you be? I wait patiently” with the opposite of bombast at 0:31-0:36, and “Heed my cry, ease my pain” at 1:01-1:07. Hear how she diminishes volume at the end of the bridge:  “Come back, come back, come back—I’ve had enough” at 0:45-0:52.  Hear how many times she chooses a naturally minimized ending of a word (“the going gets rough”).  And yet by the end there are enough little flare-ups of belting that no one can doubt her power.

Allen Toussaint’s arrangement is a model of restraint as well. To some extent the band is responsible for stoking the fires that the damsel keeps hidden. But the band has to be on her wavelength too. Note a ragged sparseness approaching indecision in that halting first verse, and the wonderful clear-out from 0:31 to 0:36.

Every music track tells a story on a purely musical level. Usually it’s Statement of Theme and then Dilate and Amplify, squeezed along by contrasts of solo/tutti and quiet/loud. It’s something to write home about whenever there’s a different story than this, and I think “Ruler Of My Heart” does have a different one.  It’s

1. Conventional prelude to Statement of Theme

2. Question: Is there a stateable theme? (Can she come out?)

3. Sketch the Possible Theme several times, moving repeatedly from relative boldness to near-reluctance

4. Take it back (inside herself).  Hum.

The Drop and The Lift: Mitch Easter, “1 1/2 Way Street” (2007) and Pearl Jam, “Brain Of J” (1998)

[I know, I said I would stop posting, but I was bowled over again last week by two favorite tracks and fell off the wagon. What can I do? It’s love. This time it’s another case of loving Adventures in Displacement.]

There’s what sets your toe to tapping or your hips to swinging, but then there’s what suddenly relocates your whole body and gives you visionary help living in your new state.

For the greatest effect, you have to be set up to expect something different from what you get. The way Mitch Easter’s “1 ½ Way Street” is going, you expect to start the chorus with a IV or V chord on the first beat of the first measure, preparatory to dropping back to I in the second measure. Or (but this is less likely) the chorus might start with a IIIb or VIIb.

In the event, which comes at 0:38 in this clip, it will be both a IIIb and VIIb.

“1 1/2 Way Street”

What happens is that the move to the first chorus chord is launched one and a half beats early with a chick-chick on a IIIb (the song is in F sharp, so IIIb is an A) and then the strong, ringing new chord is struck on the four-and, that is, still a half-beat ahead of the one you were waiting on, knocking you off balance . . . but you’re instantly caught and held one step below the tonic on this VIIb (an E) intriguingly flavored by an A note from the IIIb, which gives you a rich feeling like plopping down on some darkly beautiful satin-covered bean bag instead of the usual beige vinyl chair. Surprising but simple and pure.[1]

I love the Wild West expression “He got the drop on you,” yet I’ve never known why having your gun out first means having a “drop.” There could be a clue to an answer in my experience of “1 ½ Way Street,” since I feel sure that in some important way Mitch Easter got the drop on me. He started pulling out his hook early but sneakily (on beat 3-and—compare how much less sneaky it would be to start it on beat 3), chopped me with it early (on beat 4-and), and dropped me down to a lower place so that I have to spend energy climbing back up—this feels like my task for that whole first chorus measure, as I gradually recover from the drop—and my effort winds the song tighter. I’ve been cunningly commandeered.

And there’s more sneakiness still. Mitch misdirected me at the very beginning of the track (listen again) with a pattern of chick-chick-chick-CHORD that’s a chick longer than the hook at 0:38.  He was making sure that when the time came I’d be slower to the draw than him.

In contrast with Mitch Easter’s drop, Pearl Jam’s “Brain of J” hoists me up on its shoulders with a fabulous unexpected lift from B, the home key established by the song’s ferocious main riff, to C in the chorus (at 0:22 in the clip), and the energy it enlists from me is that of wondering what in the world I’m going to do up here on this raised platform with its different view of everything.

“Brain Of J”

As with the fabulous drop, this is not just a replacement of one expected chord by another that you could quickly get used to; it’s an always intriguing (and, in the lyric, anxiety-generating) new place to be. Raising the key just a half-step is highly unusual, and the melody repeatedly going up to the high falsetto Bb, which again is weirdly one half-step off from our baseline B, helps to make this whole section feel like it’s in a different dimension. Your time there is precious because there’s no guarantee you can stay.

Just twelve notes are crowded together in the musical scale. There’s barely room for a composer to turn around in. Yet we keep discovering how even the shortest steps in the scale—like F sharp to E, or B to C—can become momentous journeys.

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[1] The rhythm part of this hook might be named “I can’t hide” because we can all remember hearing it at that point in “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” But the Beatle chords rise instead of drop. What’s a good old classic example of going to a lower chord in this pattern?

Outro: Rock Aesthetics, or, What I’ve Learned So Far

Looking back over the questions I’ve raised about great elements in rock and pop pieces and the interpretive moves I was able to make, I see I have a main idea:

Music is most compelling when it convenes different orders.  (For a simple model of superimposed orders, think of an intersection of straight lines centered in the lower left quadrant of a Mondrian painting—thus, two grids, one in the picture’s lines and one superimposed by the frame.)

The audience has a challenge, and a choice, and work to do in ordering those orders.

Combining orders is compelling business because we’re all members of gloriously and menacingly different orders.  Fitting our lives together is a huge Problem and Opportunity.  We’re bound to wonder, What is the most lively collective we can have?  We wonder and we try fun little gambits of fresh ordering like I tried with Mondrian just now, in the dimension of expressed form, and with you, in the dimension of communicating.  I find happiness when a metaphor occurs to me that lights up and confirms an implied relationship between orders—this music is a sprouting nurse log, that music is a landslide.

That’s my big idea.  Maybe I have another.  I find that music always addresses my stumbling hopeful bodily existence, and good music pulls my fractious guts into some working shape.  To learn how to live I must learn how to move and how to receive movement.  I always have a sense of touching bottom in hook analysis when I find a strong kinesthetic model for what seems to be happening.

Wait, I have a third idea—unless this one was already in the idea of the lively collective.  It’s that the adventures of music prove we’re willing and able to be led into a wild Whatever, so long as it’s programmed in some way.  We’re willing to risk sanity to foster possibility and enjoy liberty.  Incredibly willing.

(Am I talking about rock here?  Or just music?  Or just interesting experience?  I’m talking about  mentally vivid and vividly sharable, kinesthetically intense and crazy fun experience to the max.  Add that up and what do you get?)

*

A significant point of procedure emerged:   I was usually able to write a whole essay without listening freshly to the subject matter, letting memory furnish the data.  I was on a honeymoon with some attractive notion or other.  When I did listen to the music again I was almost always surprised and often had to make changes not only in the descriptive detail of an essay but at main idea level.  This learning cycle, often humbling, was always worthwhile.  Anything you love or hate, I urge you to formulate an analytical thesis about it—flush out what you’re actually thinking or assuming, what you like to think—and then go back to check the evidence.

Need I say also that you should compare notes with your peers?  When I issued my new insights I found over and over that my most respected friends disagreed with me.  To put the best face on this awful crisis of competence and authority, I’ve concluded that my work is a fragment representing a much larger conversation, and that its topics are of a peculiarly interesting sort such that you and I will almost inevitably think differently about them.

But complementarily—right?

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Reader Advisory: An End Is Near

Kind reader:

I have gotten to the end of my Hooks essays, for now.  Not by coincidence was my last post on Ways of Ending.  Next I will post an outro, “What I’ve Learned So Far,” to note a few general points that have emerged for me in this exercise.  The site will stay up for whoever would like to file further comments or essays.

Meanwhile, you might have another look at The Max, or, The Milton Babbitt Hook, because I did come up with some examples of a rock Max (and, as always, am still looking for more).

If you care to know, the five most-visited posts on Hooks since June 2009 are

1.  By far, Andrew Goodwin’s post on “Black Dog”—there’s the charisma of the Professor of Pop, and then there are people every day who want to know more about BD’s time structure:

Killer Changes of Time Signature, Syncopation, Pulse & Tempo in Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” (1971)

2. The count for the “Big Time Sensuality” post was elevated by a passing craze for “Bjork naked” searches:

The Naked: Björk, “Big Time Sensuality” (Fluke remix) (1993)

3. It appears that many searchers click on the “seven nation army meaning” option at the bottom of the first Google page:

Is Rock Kidding? The White Stripes, “Seven Nation Army” (2003)

4.  Never underestimate interest in Led Zeppelin:

Killer Tempo: Led Zeppelin, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” (1970)

5.  Or in odd meter:

Odd Meter: Pink Floyd, “Money” (1973)

SS

The Happy Last Chance: The Assemblers, “Media Mind” (2002)

Ending is a difficult subject to take up in the Hooks context because popular music is against the whole idea of ending.  It wants to be an inexhaustible fountain of joy.  The aesthetically lame but amazingly prevalent device of the fade-out gives the effect of music coming from a truck headed toward the next neighborhood, like the ice cream man on his rounds.  We can accept that the actual music experience ends in a few minutes but we can’t accept that the source of the experience has any limits.

This desire of ours is counter-artistic in a way.  Art is about the Idea, the Work.  In poetry and narrative art, the drive is toward the strong ending, “the world was all before them” of Paradise Lost, the “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” of Keats’ ode.  What’s like that in rock?  Well, the chord at the end of “A Day In The Life” is very summative and final—but it’s a fade-out, too.[1]

Indulge me, please, as just this once I address a major question in rock aesthetics with primary reference to a work I was directly involved in making, “Media Mind” by The Assemblers (on The Other Right Place, 2002).  My justification is that I know from assembling the track how one great ending was intended by the musicians (Bruce Golden and I) and how a different great ending (though I say so myself) was achieved in spite of the plan.

Let’s review the available strategies.  They include (a) fading out, which really denies ending; (b) a shapely cadence or coda for proper finality; (c) a shift to a new section, sort of changing the subject (as in “Hello Goodbye” and “Hey Jude”), or an outro (but then how will that end?); (d) a run-up to a big crash, which dramatizes trying to get something improbable and good to happen, and then it does; and (e) an eccentric, abrupt breaking-off (like the end of Abbey Road).

“Media Mind” goes for (c) and (d).  It shifts after its last normal verse to something new both in the notes and in the performance modality:  I start yipping “nih nih nih nih nih nih nih” at a high pitch by way of an alternate melody, and Bruce pipes up in occasional counterpoint sounding like some previously unknown cousin of Speedy Gonzalez.

“Media Mind” 1

Then we’re going to end by running up to a climactic crash.  In performances by the Assemblers this run-up was usually a comedy, as I was never very good at coordinating my strikes with Bruce’s.  We just kept trying until we luckily hit it close enough or lost patience with the process and switched to something else.  In the studio I thought we had pulled off a run-up cadence pretty well.  When it came to mixing the track, we were prepared to fade out or nip off whatever might have been recorded following our last joint hit.  But we discovered on the tape that a big succeeding hit by Bruce following my last hit (that’s right—Bruce had not stopped when he should have, or rather I stopped before I should have) sounded not like a hangnail that needing trimming off but more like a solid closing statement:  it was in time in the right way and sonically rich, well able to stand on its own.

“Media Mind” 2

By leaving in Bruce’s last hit, we created an unexpected-yet-logical ending unlike any other in the history of recorded music (unless you know of one).  Best of all for us, we proved (again!) we could come up with a great new move anytime, anywhere.  In such an ending lie a thousand further beginnings.

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[1] Unfortunately the fade-out is spoiled on the 1987 CD release by studio chatter included at the end of the track.