I’ve been trying to write good songs. To help with that, I’ve been thinking about what makes songs good or bad to me. You could say a song has three components — lyrics, core musical structure, and rendition (performance, arrangement, production etc.) — that come together to (hopefully) become greater than the sum of their parts. And they do have to function together: a particular style of lyrics or rendition might work better for one style of song than another, for instance. Ultimately, whether a song works or not is up to individual taste, and seeing as I’m me, I have my own taste which feels objectively correct... but that gives me all the more reason to interrogate it. Why do I like song X but think song Y is objectionable?
I feel like there’s two kinds of tastelessness. The first is tastelessness which goes against “good taste” and aesthetic norms, either incidentally through eccentricity or as its main objective through provocation; the no-budget trash-camp of John Waters is an example of great cinematic tastelessness. Then there’s tastelessness so normative that it becomes bland or sickly in flavour, going against my personal taste. I’ve chosen three songs which — to me — have a successful core musical structure in their songwriting, with some interesting harmony to boot, but through their lyrics and/or their rendition become tasteless in some way.
Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration” is total AOR cheese with the most cliché lyrics, but it’s undeniably catchy and has some fantastic harmonic twists, mostly via chromatic mediant relationships. The intro begins in A♭ but then modulates suddenly to B for the verse (E♭, the V of A♭, functions as the new III). The pre-chorus involves a quick succession of V-I changes that brings us to E♭ for the chorus; halfway through the chorus, the same modulation as the intro takes us to G♭. The end of the first chorus modulates back to B, in which we hear a transposition of the intro material before the second verse, and when the second chorus repeats for the first time, there’s a modulation from G♭ back to E♭ via D♭7sus4 and B♭7. Unfortunately, the final modulation to F is really inelegant compared to the others: a “tasteless” key change emblematic of the excesses for which 80s pop is often remembered. And all this from a band whose former lead guitarist's last words were "What do you think I'm gonna do? Blow my brains out?" while fooling around with his 9mm semi-automatic pistol. I have a fondness for this song, but I imagine it's more polarising among an older generation who were subjected to it daily on the airwaves forty years ago...
And speaking of impressively but tastelessly excessive, it’s time for me to badmouth Jacob Collier. There’s a sharp divide between those who adore his music and those who loathe it; most people I know are in the latter camp, which means we probably share some specific aesthetic values. I don’t hate Collier as a person at all; he’s a tremendously skilled musician and a clear communicator with a positive, inspiring attitude, all of which would make him a great music teacher… but I really don’t like the songs he makes in spite of all that. I also have a distaste for the image he presents in his music videos. Wearing mismatched primary-colour patterned outfits — which often include the safely affected eccentricity of a silly hat — and gazing around in slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder at the world, he looks like he’s on CBeebies, and his songs have an equivalent emotional depth. At my most uncharitable, I’d summarise his image as “mummy’s special boy”; more on that later.
Let’s look at his song “Little Blue”. If you strip away the nauseating lyrics and nauseating arrangement, and even get someone with more vocal personality to sing the tune, you could have quite a good song on your hands! The verses have a homely simplicity to them which I could imagine a band like Big Thief performing more convincingly. And then there’s the second pre-chorus, which has a very inventive quasi-reharmonisation of the first pre-chorus, enabled by transposing the vocal melody up a semitone at a crucial juncture, and then modulates back into the chorus with a ♭VI-iv6-I in E♭. The “Mahogany Sessions” version of the song even has a gorgeous chord substitution for E♭ at [3:08] which sounds like G/B(add♯5 add♭11), a dissonant chord that has both an augmented and major/minor feel to it. No one has ever denied that the lad has chops, and this is probably the best balance between straightfoward pop sensibility and harmonic adventurousness I’ve heard from him.
But the problem is that, when you add the lyrics and everything else, it becomes sickly sweet. Both “You’re the Inspiration” and “Little Blue” are platitudinous, precision-engineered feel-good songs, but I don’t mind the former so much because it has the humility to remain just another kitschy pop hit, while the latter has a cinematic scope and earnest “let’s heal the world through music” quality that makes my nose wrinkle. This unconditional comfort is perhaps what gets people to cry at his concerts or leave social media comments about how his music helped them through their surgery, illness, the death of their pet etc.
Certain lyrics really annoy me. “Be my darkness, be my danger / Be the strings on my guitar” is infuriating, not just because of the clichés, but also because there’s not an ounce of darkness or danger to be found in his music. The opening lines — “Little blue, be my shelter / Be my cradle, be my womb” — have a kind of regressive, return-to-infanthood vibe which plays into the image of “mummy’s special boy”. Having recently completed some academic work on Messiaen, it’s impossible not to compare the two musical prodigies, who both notably expressed a foundational connection to their mothers in interview; Messiaen’s musical vision, however, encompassed the breadth of emotional experience — passion, peace, terror, grief, joy — with an innovative musical language, while Collier seems content to express the emotions of “pretty jazzed to be here” and "don't worry, it's ok" while cycling through the most commercially palatable versions of different genres (but with some extra harmonic and rhythmic complexity under the hood).
Why am I being so harsh towards Jacob Collier, a guy who loves music and wants to share his passion and knowledge with the world in a positive way? I’m not totally discounting resentment as a contributing factor. But it’s frustrating seeing skillfulness “wasted” on “tasteless” music. It’s why I hate Polyphia and Dream Theater. This form of tastelessness is something I associate with music that’s too conventional, unchallenging, lifeless, cliché, emotionally disingenuous, and/or pretentious for me in some way, going against my personal taste rather than established public taste.
Oh, and before I forget, did you know a young Jacob Collier played Tiny Tim in a 2004 TV-movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol starring Kelsey Grammer as Scrooge, Jason Alexander as Jacob Marley, and Jane Krakowski as the Ghost of Christmas Past?
I wrote all of the above when I was in a particularly jaded and self-righteous mood. Now the clouds have parted, I can talk about a wonderfully tasteless band of musical clowns: Cardiacs. The UK press hated them; plenty of musicians — including Blur — loved them, but when they brought Cardiacs on tour as a support act, their fans usually weren’t so enthusiastic. Frontman Tim Smith described Cardiacs as “a kind of music that apparently makes people hate us with a terrifying vengeance, or love us so dearly and passionately that it becomes a worry. No in-betweens. But to us it’s just tunes. Lovely tunes.” According to the official history of the band, Tim’s “cruel idea” was to play “unpalatable ‘music’ that no one in their right minds would enjoy very much.” I happen to think they’re great, not in spite of, but because of their tastelessness, which comes from being both highly eccentric and good-naturedly confrontational.
The song that sold me on Cardiacs was “Dog-Like Sparky”. At first my skin crawled at this demented funhouse-mirror Madness, with its brash MIDI horns, whimsical synth flourishes, group singalong choruses (with some octave up-pitching?), and Tim Smith’s abrasive barking. The more I listened, I couldn’t deny that it’s simply exceptional, and the unrestrained, ridiculous sound complements the unrestrained, ridiculous, but tight songwriting powering it all. I had never heard chord changes so daring in pop music — despite their only using triads (most of them major at that) — but yet still firmly undergirding irresistible, acrobatic melodies. The tonal centre shifts around mercurially through chromatic mediant relationships, stabilising just for a moment with tonic-dominant (I-V) gestures, like harmonic non-Newtonian fluid. The chorus’ harmonic sequence goes like this: C {I-V] G {tone up-shift} A {chromatic mediant} D♭ {I-V} A♭ {chromatic mediant} B {chromatic mediant} E♭ {I-V} B♭ {tone up-shift} back to C; the “tone up-shifts” here hark back to the verses’ simple pivoting between A and B major. The post-choruses and bridge are just as harmonically disorienting at times, shifting up and down by semitones (like the B-C shift from verse to chorus) in the former, and by tritones in the latter; the most outrageous movement is the chromatic mediant change from D♭ to Am (all three notes of a D♭ triad only need a semitone's nudge to produce an A minor triad). The overall effect is of being on one of those fairground rides that spin you two ways, each elevated carriage spinning anti-clockwise on a clockwise-spinning arm that wonkily tilts up and down on its base… you know the ones? The blood rushes to your head, the candyfloss rushes up from your stomach, you’re surrounded by flashing rainbow lights and circus music, and the bracingly cold night air blows through you. At times, the gleeful, colourful queasiness reminds the indie kid in me of Animal Collective; the vocal effects, organ sounds, and chaotic ending wouldn't be out of place on Strawberry Jam or Centipede Hz. Also of note is Claire Lemmon's delightful Kate Bush impression on the post-choruses. The core musical structure, with its totally unconventional harmonic movement, is tasteless; the rendition, in all its clownish ugliness, is tasteless; the lyrics (including the immortal line “put your hand on the Holy Bible and scream WANK”) are tasteless. You might hate it, but I love it.
I’d like to write more about Cardiacs, because they have so many fantastic songs, and much less about Jacob Collier. But unfortunately, my personal investigation into what makes “good” songs has brought me to Taylor Swift of all people… so that might be the next blog post: how “good” songs “distinguish” themselves. Hope you enjoyed this alternately mean-spirited and full-hearted post.