Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Music scholars say that repetition is the key to Western music. Nowadays, repetition is the bane of popular music. Pop and rock songs get longer and longer, mainly because the artists or producers decided to repeat a chorus one too many times. The Stereophonic's Dakota is good, for the first three minutes. Edie Brickell doesn't need to be nattering on about what she is for five minutes, and Finger Eleven should have cut its One Thing song down to the core fifteen seconds. No one gave a rat's ass about what would've happened if he traded it all, so why would they care the ninth or tenth time they regurgitate the question?

It's not even that hard to disguise your repetition. Change a couple notes here and there. Pull an Avril Lavigne and turn a duple phrase into a triplet phrase in the last chorus. I think the reason I could never be a successful pop music composer is that I just can't see the sense in having an exact musical mimeograph played more than once or twice in a row.

UPOP on XM regularly touts their uncut version of U2's Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own, which runs over five minutes long, as a coup, since "the regular radio stations forced them to edit it down to three minutes". That's not artist oppression, that's just good editing. Unless you're writing an 80s rock overture for Kansas, Queen, or Guns n' Roses, all your pop music should be under the five minute mark. (Honestly though, U2 could have saved everyone some time and money by just not recording the song, and playing With or Without You and Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For in different keys instead. Would anyone really know the difference?)

Lions save girl
Oh no, someone said Mofo

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