songs and bands that sound like other songs and bands
While I keep music running in the background almost every waking hour of my private and/or ear-budded life, I know close to nothing about it. On a technical level, at least. Something I feel very self conscious about is the fact that I never learned to read music. I can’t play a musical instrument with particular finesse, and I struggle with memorizing chord progressions. I’ll strum a few chords here and there, boom bap on a drum on the rare occasion I come across one that’s vacant and that for some reason I’m allowed to play. But I have no idea how any of it works - mechanically, mathematically.
What I trust maybe more than anything else on my body, though, are my ears. I feel very lucky that I was born a hearing person, and that I continue living with this function - cranked up to maximum sensitivity and alertness. I may walk around with otherwise numbed senses, but still in my pouty young adult body my ears turn out like the BFG’s trumpets and really take in the music around me. I tune in. I don’t know exactly what’s going on but I can FEEL it in me and it says,
“You really work. I like you.”
I take that line with me everywhere I go as I try to build some sort of career in music production and curation. There’s a lot of content out there, have you noticed? No one’s really gotta organize and monetize it, but someone’s gonna sure as hell try. Why not me? I think things really work, and I like them.
A couple weeks ago while I was working at a place where people make music to throw behind commercials, I learned about a four chord progression, notationally “I–V–vi–IV,” that basically forms the skeleton of every pop song ever. Around the same day, I heard a completely reductive (read: stupid and infuriating) theory floating around that hip hop became popular simply because it samples already popular music, as if the work and creativity were already all taken care of and just repackaged in different gift wrap. It reminded me of the “Christmas Candle” SNL skit, although I might just be going there because I am alone and writing this on thee Christmas.
“It’s a candle, Glade peach candle, it’s been sitting by a bike pump for a year. She takes the candle, dusts off the candle, then wraps it up for Jen and just says, ‘here.’ ”
Surely it’s more complex than that. And at the same time, maybe we’re all recycling the same stuff because we’re creatures of habit, innately obsessed with and attracted to pattern. Music is math and math is beautiful and when something clicks it clicks so good and when something doesn’t click it gets phased out or sometimes lauded for its peculiarity. Yum yum yum!
A few weeks after that work thing, I was preparing for an interview when I came across Pandora’s “music genome.” That thing purports to have constructed the genome for song … which is a bold claim, but also convincing. I made an account to see what else this could mean and then learned that I’m obsessed with something called the “vamping harmonic” - static chord progressions that travel through composed harmonies. That could explain why I spent 23 hours of 2018 listening to Beach House, according to a leading music streaming competitor.
Anyway, music is fulla patterns and everything’s derivative and generative. So out with the old, in with the new old.
This playlist was basically just an exercise in making that point. It’s songs and bands that remind me of other songs and bands. At first I lined up samples and remakes. Instead of DeBarge’s “I Like It,” I originally had “Stay With Me.” If you’re hovering somewhere in your early flirty thirties, perhaps you also immediately recognize Ashanti in there.
But I felt that playlist quickly grew too boring. So instead, like I just said several seconds ago, I just did the similarity thing. I love similarity. I love patterns. I love repeating myself.
I wanted the whole thing to evolve seamlessly, like a gradient, but that proved to be too difficult. I earnestly think I could work on that for the rest of my life. Too ambitious! Instead, I organized songs in pairings, the first of each pair predating the second.
Nelly’s “Ride Wit Me” actually samples lyrics from DeBarge. But Nelly says he likes the way someone “brushes” their hair, rather than “combs” it. Interesting!
Is that why my ears told me there was a connection at first listen? Or was it because there’s something there musically, mathematically, that can’t be put into words? At least not without getting into technicalities.
I don’t know, but I think it’s fun.