The Big Blog Of Music "Theory"

Sound is hard to write about. There's just no good literal approximation of what a sound is, which is why so many of our descriptive language surrounding sounds is onomatopoeic (like "screech" or "thump"). So really, trying to write about music theory is a little bit like trying to describe what water feels or pears taste like -- that is to say, you can only really do it through analogy.

Okay, here goes. Music theory is basically the study of all the different aspects of what makes music, music, and how people put those things together to form songs (how's that for a circular definition?). There doesn't seem to be any agreement on any common characteristics that music shares universally -- for example, some forms of non-Western music don't have a sense of rhythm in the sense that it lacks a basic beat, or "pulse," which is more or less a basic building block of most Western music. But it's more or less agreed that music has some or all of these traits:

• rhythm
• melody
• harmony
• structure
• timbre
• dynamics

...at least in the Western world. The less Anglo-centric categorization of musical aspects has four main traits:

• pitch (the frequency of a sound, or how high or low it is. Includes melody, harmony, tonality, tessitura, and tuning)
• timbre (this basically means the quality of a sound and includes words like fundamental, spectra, envelope, overtones, voices, tone color, articulation. I have no idea what most of this means)
• intensity (dynamics and stress. At least this one was easy)
• duration (anything having to do with the temporal traits of music, as John Cage would say. Includes pulse, beat, rhythm, rhythmic density, tempo, and meter)

...and some secondary traits, which include:

• structure (includes motive, phrase, period, section, exposition, repetition, variation, development)
• texture (the interaction of temporal and pitch elements, include homophony, polyphony, heterophony, and simultaneity)

Let's start with the canonical first lesson of music theory: The Circle of Fifths. And that means we have to talk about pitch.

Pitch

You'd think pitch would be fairly universal musical characteristic -- after all, all sounds have a frequency, right? Well...sort of. Actually, they have more than one frequency, and that all has to do with timbre and a lot of other things.

Pitch is definitely one of the three characteristics of any sound in general (the other two being intensity and timbre). It is basically how people map the tone of a sound they hear to a position on the musical scale, and it's based on the frequency, in Hz (and also, at really high or low Hz, on sound pressure, but I don't really care at this point). If you remember your physics, you will recall that frequency and wavelength are inverses of each other, so higher frequency (higher notes) means shorter wavelengths.

Some people have "perfect pitch," which means that they map tones really accurately (if you played a G on a guitar and assuming it was tuned in the "standard" way, they would recognize the note as a G) -- however, all heard or "perceived" pitch is more or less relative, because unless you're actually measuring the Hz of a sound, there are ways to throw off your innate perception of pitch. In particular, the overtones (more about this later, because it kind of deserves its own section, as it is really pretty interesting) of a sound may screw with the perception of pitch, however, in the case of well-made instruments and in most "normal" cases, perceived pitch is more or less pretty close to the "real" note.

There are exceptions; a famous example is the Shepard scale, which is basically a series of octaves that go up the scale but never seem to go higher, as a whole. There is a video of it here:



Most instruments that you think of as playing actual notes on a scale are said to have "definite pitch" (it also means they have "harmonic spectra", but we're going to cover that later in the overtones section). Things like percussion instruments don't have an easily discernible pitch, so they have "indefinite pitch." However, a sound with indefinite pitch can still sound higher or lower than other indefinite pitched sounds (the different drums in a drum set, for example), and that has to do with being comprised of higher frequencies.

The difference between two pitches is known as an "interval." An "octave" is an interval that corresponds to either doubling or halving the frequency. More about this in the scales part.

Historically the standard tuning of notes has changed a lot over time, but it has a lot to do with the physical medium and the physics of vibrations and tends to be not very interesting. Bach did a lot of work on this subject (see "The Well-Tempered Clavier)...etc, etc. Right now, the A above middle C is tuned to 440 Hz, and that's really all I care to say on the subject.

Scales and Modes

Here's the Circle of Fifths stuff. A scale is just a sequence of notes in ascending order (ascending meaning the frequency gets higher in some predictable way). There are a lot of different types of scales and we'll talk about three: chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic. In Western music, a 12-note scale makes up one octave. It's called the "chromatic scale" and each note goes up by one "half-step," or "semi-tone." The "tones" or "whole steps" are made of two half-steps (funny how that works). For example ... going from C to D takes two half steps -- C to C# and C# to D. Oh screw it -- here's a video.



Don't worry about the fingering, or anything after 0:45 seconds. It's just nice to see it on the piano because it's all laid out in front of you. If you're starting at C, a semi-tone or half-step is to the black key to the right of C (the C#/Db), another semi-tone takes you to D, and etc etc.

In the piano world, everything sort of revolves around middle C -- it's in the middle of the keyboard and you can play a C major scale without any black keys (on the piano, black keys represent sharps and flats). In other instruments, basing everything around C doesn't make as much sense. But it's what I use here because it's simple.

Anyway, the diatonic scale is the "7-tone scale." The major diatonic scale is the basic happy sounding scale and there are three minor scales: the harmonic, the natural, and the melodic, which are basically all different sad paths. The natural minor, if you write it out in a series of half and whole steps, looks exactly like the major scale with a different starting point. For example, if you start at C and play only white notes (no sharps or flats), you will play a C-major scale. If you start at A and play only white notes, you will play a natural A-minor (incidentally, moving from C down to A takes 3 half steps. To play a minor scale with the same number of sharps/flats as any major scale, go to the first note of the major scale and go down by 3 half steps. That's all in the Circle of Fifths). The harmonic minor has an augmented 7th note (the 7th note in the scale is sharp) -- it's found quite often in Arabic music. There are actually two melodic minors depending on whether you go up or down, and it's more complicated than I care to get into.

Here is a video on the minor scales, optimistically called "How to Play Piano." At about 3 minutes in he finally gets down to business, but then it's pretty good, and he explains the minors in terms of how they sound with the 7th note (the "leading seventh") which is supposed to sort of lead into the tone (the bottom note of the scale, but one octave higher) where you end, and a little bit of history surrounding the melodic minor, which is interesting if you happen to like that sort of thing:



The other really important scale is the pentatonic (5-note) scale, which is the basis of a huge amount of blues and hence, a lot of rock music. The very blatantly obvious example is the intro to the song "My Girl" by The Temptations.

If you built a song on the C-major scale (and that means C, the note the scale starts on, is your "tonic" or "tone" and has to do with harmonics and a bunch of stuff we'll discuss later), you say it's in the Key of C-major. Usually no one cares in the context of rock music what key you're in, but there are ways to determine what key any song is written in, along with if there are any modulations or key changes in the course of the song. What note something ends on (and to a lesser extend, the key it starts on) is generally a pretty good indication of the key. Also, sometimes the "dominant" or 5th note in a scale will tell the key, as it tends to be very prominent. Basically, if you want to figure out how to change the key of a song, you use the Circle of Fifths because it shows the relationships between all the notes on a chromatic scale and how by changing the key you're adding sharps or flats to your scale, etc. Here is a picture of the damn thing:



But instead of being in a key, you can also be in a mode. A "mode" is kind of confusing. Basically, if you take a C-major scale but instead of basing the song on the C note, you base it on a different note in the scale, only you still use the notes of the C scale, you're in a mode. There are a bunch of different names for different modes depending on which note from the tonic (bottom note of the scale) you start on (starting on the second note is called a Dorian mode, and so forth).

I'm not really sure, but I think the Radiohead song No Surprises is an example of an A modal Phrygian. That intro is using the notes of the F major scale but it's transposed to A.



Melody

So, having said all that, it's a lot easier to talk about melody (also called line or voice) now, because melodies are composed on the basis of scales and modes. Melodies are used in all sorts of ways: point and counterpoint (multiple melodic lines played at the same time -- again, Bach is the person to look at here, as he kind of wrote the manual on how to do counterpoint properly), verse-chorus (usually two different melodies around which sections are constructed), etc.

Melodies are generally built around several motifs, which are basically small musical ideas that are repeated and retain some kind of compositional importance -- they're easily recognized, the rest of the piece builds on them, or they represent a person or idea (a lietmotif). Basically, they're just a smaller unit of a musical phrase that is in itself a complete and well-formed idea.

I mention all this because a "riff" is a kind of motif that is a repeated musical phrase that forms the rhythmic basis of the composition -- like the riff of Ravel's Bolero or the intro to Black Sabbath's "Iron Man." The main thing about a riff is the rhythmic aspect -- and if it is a memorable enough rhythm, it can also be a hook. A "hook" is basically a catchy motif (although a hook doesn't have to be melodic, it can also be rhythmic), usually in the chorus, and melody in general is huge in all forms of pop music. Obligatory Youtube links to follow:

I think this song pretty well illustrates both concepts. The main theme/motif is actually in the keyboard section in the beginning, and then she goes into a bridge, and then in the chorus ("Keep me closer/I'm a lazy dancer/When you move I move with you"), you have that nice synth-pop hook, which echoes the musical ideas of the main motif (the descending line). Also, it's a good song.

Metric - Collect Call



Harmony

So you have a melody, which is one pitch based on a tone (bottom note in the scale). Once you start adding in other pitches at the same time, you form chords. That is the basis of harmony, the "vertical" aspect of song structure (if you consider melody to be the "horizontal").

In Western music, the chord is usually based on the interval of thirds, for example, a C major chord is CEG, where CE is a major third, and EG is a major third. This CEG thing is an example of a "major triad." Why does this sound good? Because apparently the three tones have frequencies in a nice harmonious 4:5:6 ratio.

Anyway, chords are important because they influence how "relaxed" or "tense" a piece is. Certain chords sound relaxed (like that major triad) and other chords give tension to the piece, which can be "built up" (led into by a succession of relaxed chords) and then "resolved" by going back into relaxed chords, thereby creating a sense of forward movement and catharsis in the music, giving it kind of a structural storyline and making it more interesting. In technical terms, the names for this relaxed and tense is "consonance" and "dissonance."

Hmm, what can I link for an example of complex harmony? How about some Pink Floyd?



Tessitura

This is an Italian term which refers to the range for a singer or a musical instrument. It's not terribly pertinent to rock music, but it becomes kind of interesting when you get people like Mariah Carey who has apparently a seven octave range.

Tonality

Tone/tonic -- we already went over this. The tonic is the bottom note in a scale, which controls which key something is in.

Timbre

At the most basic level, timbre refers to the "color" of a sound -- how the physical details of what the sound comes from imparts certain characteristics that allows you to distinguish between the sound a saxophone makes and the sound a guitar makes, for instance. And it depends on a whole bunch of fairly technical things you probably never thought about.

The five attributes of timbre are:

• difference between tones and noise
• spectral envelope
• time envelope
• changes in spectral envelope and fundamental frequency
• a sound's prefix

Yeah, I don't get it either.

The first one seems fairly obvious at least. Although it probably warrants mentioning that music in general makes use of "noise" in fairly inventive ways, including making them be integral parts of certain pieces. I think you all could come up with an example of music that you personally consider to be noise. Although that's not really the same thing, is it.

Spectral Envelope and Overtones

Remember when I said that a sound doesn't just consist of a single pitch? When you play middle A on an instrument, you're not just producing a frequency of 440 Hz -- you're actually producing an entire range of frequencies, most of which you can't hear distinctly (and all those other frequencies make up the overtones). The pitch is usually determined by the lowest frequency, which is called the fundamental frequency. Harmonics are the frequencies that are produced that are integer multiples of the fundamental frequency, and partials are the non-integer frequencies. Most instruments that have definite pitches produces harmonics, and the other ones produce both partials and harmonics.

The different overtones usually decay at different speeds, so as the sound lasts longer, it is possible distinguish all these different frequencies in a single note (assuming you've been trained to hear them). That leads into a discussion of why sounds may sound different when played staccato or legato and all that sort of thing. For now, here's a video that pretty well demonstrates this whole business:



Cool, huh?

Time envelope

The timbre of a sound also depends on four variables called the ADSR - Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release, that together determine a sound's "loudness" over time. Basically, if you ever wondered at a really fine-grained physical level what distinguishes a loud note played on the piano from a soft note -- it's how fast you strike the key. Your finger knows this inherently, but it's not immediately obvious to the mind. ADSR is that concept, applied to all instruments.

Pretty basic stuff: attack is how quickly the sound reaches full volume after you initiate it. Decay is how quickly it reaches the sustain volume. Sustain is, of course, the constant volume the sound attains until you stop playing the note, and release is how quickly the sound fades away when you stop playing it.

Different instruments all have different ADSR envelopes, which is one of the ways you can tell different instruments from each other. Their "loudness over time" variable is one way in which different instruments' sounds are unique. For example, a plucked string note has a different ADSR than an organ note (plucked string notes are loudest at the instant closest to when you plucked them and then they fade away slowly, organ notes are mostly at constant volume until you take your hand off the key, and then they fade away very quickly). On a synthesizer, these variables are all configurable; that's how you make a synthesizer sound like certain instruments. Woodwind instruments and other instruments that you blow into also allow you to vary the loudness in the middle of a note, and that's another thing synthesizers allow you to control, sometimes.

I'm not going to discuss the other things in that list, because it seems to me that spectra and ADSR are the two most important timbre elements (and also, the most interesting).

Intensity and Stress

This refers to the volume of sounds, but as we already know, that leads into also how you articulate notes (staccato vs legato) and also how fast you play things. There's a lot of technical Italian names for all the relative volumes. Forte -- loud. Piano -- soft. Crescendo -- getting louder. Decrescendo -- getting softer.

Fun fact: the piano was originally called the "fortepiano" because the harpsichord, the older version of the piano, didn't allow you to play with any changes in volume. The interior mechanism actually plucked the strings instead of using a hammer to hit the strings, so you only got one loudness. The piano was therefore a big technological step up.

I only mention this because a lot of musicians today seem to forget that they are allowed to work with the entire spectrum of volume and not just, you know, a single volume set to "generically loud". Just saying. Also, having your producer fade the song out at the end does not count. In fact, I hate fading out. It's such a lazy way to end your song. /endrant

Pulse

Pulse is the basic beat of a song, which doesn't have to be explicit, but it's definitely there, and it definitely repeats (for an example of a song that doesn't have an explicit beat but still has a pulse, see Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek"). The tempo of a song is the tempo of the pulse. There is a natural tendency to group pulses into groups, such as strong-weak -- and if you have a pulse group that is distinct and repeats a lot, that's called a "meter." Like in poetry.

Beat

Beat is somewhat interchangeable with pulse but can also be applied in a wider sense to the basic unit of time in a song and also includes things like the speed of the song. It is usually divided into measures, which are indicated by the time signature, such as 4/4 time (4 beats to a measure, quarter note is one beat), 3/4 time (waltz time, three beats to a measure, quarter note is the one beat), etc. Some other definitions: "downbeat" is the impulse at the start of the bar. "Upbeat" is the something that leads into the downbeat.

Normally, our ear groups a series of beats into strong/weak pulses, no matter if they are actually stressed that way or not. In a measure of 4 beats, we tend to hear the first and third beats as stronger and the second and fourth as weaker. Those are called "onbeats" and "offbeats." If you frequently accent the offbeats or really anyplace where you wouldn't normally expect the stress, you use a lot of "syncopation." For example, in reggae music it is customary to stress the 2nd and 4th beats.

A "backbeat" is basically the accenting of the offbeat, which is usually done by the snare drum.

I guess everyone is familiar with what "rhythm" is. Wikipedia has a section on why human beings evolved to "appreciate" rhythm:

"In his series How Music Works, Howard Goodall presents theories that rhythm recalls how we walk and the heartbeat we heard in the womb. More likely is that a simple pulse or di-dah beat recalls the footsteps of another person. Our sympathetic urge to dance is designed to boost our energy levels in order to cope with someone, or some animal chasing us – a fight or flight response. From a less darwinist perspective, perceiving rhythm is the ability to master the otherwise invisible dimension, time. Rhythm is possibly also rooted in courtship ritual.^[1] Neurologist Oliver Sacks posits that human affinity for rhythm is fundamental, so much that a person's sense of rhythm cannot be lost in the way that music and language can (e.g. by stroke). In addition, he states that chimpanzees and other animals show no similar appreciation for rhythm."

Western music has fairly simple rhythms in comparison with the rest of the world. Most of our music is grouped into measures that are divisible by 3 or 4 (really, also 2, but a measure of 2 is kind of awkward to work with). If it's divisible by 3, it's complex, if by 4 (or 2) it is simple. But African music makes use of a lot of "poly-rhythms," which are two or more rhythms playing at once (like a triplet played against a series of two), and lots of other types of music use more complex measure structure like 7 or 13.

Structure

The most basic units of structure are the beat and the motif, and above that, the phrase (which is just a higher level of organization of the two preceding things, whereby if you break it down any further, it looses its uniqueness). The main things to note when talking about structure are repetition and variation -- those are the bases upon which structure is composed.


Timbre

We've already been over this.

Dynamics

Not rocket science, except that apparently some musicians forget that other dynamics exist aside from "fucking loud." Not that I have anything against fucking loud, there's just...you know...all the other variances in volume in the world to play with, and hardly anyone does. Just saying.

20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 8: Covers, Remixes, Samples

Now that the history lesson is over, it's time to have some fun. This section will feature remixes and covers with an emphasis on genre-crossing examples.

"Come Together" and "Closer," Beatles and Nine Inch Nails. Apparently this mashup is so popular that it's now dubbed "Come Closer Together" on the interwebs.



Dirt off Your Wonderwall, Jay-Z and Oasis. This one's not that hard to conceptualize, actually. Isn't this what rap basically does all the time anyway?



KT Tunstall - Get Your Freak On (Missy Elliot cover)



White Rabbit - by Living Legends



Stairway to Heaven - Dolly Parton covers Led Zeppelin



Matthew Good - Moon Over Marin (Dead Kennedys cover)



Thriller - Imogen Heap covers Michael Jackson



Newton Faulkner covers Teardrop (Massive Attack)



Apocalyptica - Nothing Else Matters (this is a cello band that does classical covers of Metallica songs)



And finally, because every party should end with this song, here is Sparklehorse covering Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here."

20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 7: 2000s

Now, unfortunately, we get to the 2000s. I know I promised not to do this, but I really can't help remarking on how patently awful most of the popular music of this decade is. I mean, seriously. What happened?

Oh, well. Only time will tell.

Post-Grunge

Even as rock and alternative are becoming increasingly less popular as hip hop/R&B/rap take over airwaves, the post-grunge genre keeps chugging along with bands like Creed and Nickleback. The good news was that Creed disbanded in 2004. The bad news is that they're supposedly back together. Nickleback (actually a Canadian band, and named for some reason after the amount of change you get back after ordering a coffee from Starbucks, which is probably the most un-grunge like concept for a band name that I can think of) is probably the most successful post-grunge act thus far, with 40 million sales. The Foo Fighters, formed by former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, is technically also a post-grunge act; the difference being that they are actually...good. Here is a Foo Fighters song from The Colour and the Shape, which is actually from the 90s.

Foo Fighters - Everlong



Metal

There is a renewed interest in metal during this period, and older acts like Slayer and Metallica are popular again, along with a slew of new ones such as Killswitch Engage and Lamb of God. Also, metalcore, a fusion of metal and hardcore punk, becomes popular.

Killswitch Engage - My Last Serenade



British Invasion

Coldplay's single "Yellow" comes out in 2000. They head the popularity of British bands during the decade -- other bands include Radiohead and Muse.

Muse - Hysteria



Pop Punk

Pop Punk remains popular. Fall Out Boy's "Sugar We're Going Down" came out in 2005.

Sorry, couldn't resist.


Numetal

Numetal (a fusion of metal with hip hop) bands enjoy a slew of hit singles. Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory came out in 2000, and they are credited with being one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Other artists from this trend are Evanescence and Staind.

Linkin Park - In the End



Emo

Emo isn't really a musical style; it's more of a term that describes the people that listen to the bands rather than the bands themselves. Popular "emo" bands include Dashboard Confessional and My Chemical Romance, even though they themselves repudiate the term.

Dashboard Confessional - Vindicated



New New Wave/synthpop/post punk

There is a renewed interest in synthesizer music and 1980s music during this time, as bands such as The Killers become popular as numetal fades away in the later part of the decade.

The Killers - Human



Indie

With the increased commercialization of alternative music, the indie music scene burgeons, helped considerably by technology that enables better advertising and distribution for bands not signed to major labels. There isn't really a particular style of indie music, it has been associated with a huge variety of different sounds and aesthetics, including lo-fi, post-rock (rock instrumentation, like Mogwai), sadcore, C86, math rock (featuring complex rhythms, like Dillinger Escape Plan), shoegaze/dream pop (My Bloody Valentine), indie pop, noise rock, noise pop, riot grrrl, post-hardcore, twee pop, alt-country, post-punk revival, garage rock revival, dance-punk, indie folk, baroque pop (classical music elements brought to rock, like Arcade Fire), and indietronica.

Arcade Fire - Wake Up (with David Bowie)




New Pornographers - Challengers




The Decemberists - We Both Go Down Together




Death Cab for Cutie - Soul Meets Body




The Strokes - Reptilia




Teen Pop Rock

Boy bands fade out of popularity by the middle of the decade and a new slew of pop artists targeting a tween audience achieve success, like Avril Lavigne and Miley Cyrus.

Dance Music

Dance music is becoming the dominant force on the radio. Along with dance music comes Auto-Tune. See Black Eyed Peas.

Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (I could swear he's actually just saying Boom Boom Boom but whatever)


Ethnic Music (what a terrible genre name)

World music in general enjoys more widespread success. Shakira and MIA achieve mainstream popularity.

MIA - Paper Planes (theme is actually a Clash song)



Hip Hop/R&B/Rap

This decade pretty much belongs to this kind of music. Eninem is considered the best-selling artist of the decade. This is the era of Kanye West, Destiny's Child, and Beyonce.

Eninem - Forget About Dre



Country

Country music is becoming increasingly popular also in this decade. Carrie Underwood became the first American Idol winner to go into country instead of pop. Taylor Swift ushers in the popularity of country pop.

Taylor Swift - You Belong With Me



Changes in the Music Industry

Whereas before, the major entertainment networks used to hold the reins of distribution and fame, changes in technology are making it increasingly possible for musicians to control distribution themselves. With the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the music industry is fighting a losing war against the increased piracy of music, despite studies that have shown that people who pirate the most music also tend to buy the most music. The response from the musicians has been mixed, some are extremely against piracy and others have come to terms with the 21st century. Radiohead released In Rainbows on a "pay for it if you like it" basis, Nine Inch Nails released their latest album for free on their website, and many artists are releasing material directly in MP3 format (such as on a flash drive). My personal opinion is that the music industry in general needs to come to grips with this new paradigm instead of fighting it. People also need to realize that most listeners are perfectly willing to pay for music, as long as it's actually good.

And we'll end with this, for good measure:

Video Killed the Radio Star

20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 6: 1990s

And now, we come to a decade of music that I actually remember personally.

Every decade has an event which can be seen to begin or end an era, like the Disco Demolition, and the Day the Music Died. If I had to pick an event that ushered in the 90s, it would be the release of Nirvana's Nevermind in 1991, which soon unseated Michael Jackson's Dangerous on the charts and ushered in the grunge era. But before we get there...


Teenpop Continues

This is the era of Britney Spears, the Spice Girls, and boy bands like the Backstreet Boys. Do I really need to link videos? Fine, I'll just do one, to make an example.

As pop acts go, the Spice Girls are not actually that egregiously bad. There, I said it. I mean, they weren't good, but they weren't unlistenable, and I find them somewhat less vapid than most of the pop acts going on today, which, admittedly, is not saying that much.

The Spice Girls - Say You'll Be There. From the Spice World movie. The lip-syncing is hilariously off on this track, but making fun of that would be like kicking a dead horse in the head, so....



Hip Hop/Rap/R&B

Hip hop and rap are also gaining in popularity during this decade. This is the decade of Usher and R Kelly. We can thank this era for giving us the ridiculous baggy pants and oversized shirt look. And for guys in white middle class suburbia trying to be all gangsta. Like that was ever attractive. But you're in high school, and you don't know any better -- and neither do the girls you're trying to impress. So I guess it worked out all right.

Usher - My Way (1997)



Hip hop in particular becomes really takes off during the 90s. As a movement, it first developed in the Bronx as a "response to oppressive social conditions." According to Wikipedia: When hip hop music began to emerge, it was based around disc jockeys who created rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, which is now more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rapping" (a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry more formally in 16 bar measures or time frames) and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip hop DJs.

It became increasingly commercialized as the decade wore on and rappers gained a huge level of superstardom and success.

In 1993, Puff Daddy formed Bad Boy Records with the Notorious BIG as his headlining act. They quickly became adversarial with Death Row Records, which was founded in 1991 by Dr. Dre and Suge Knight and featured a lot of big West Coast rap names like Tupac and Snoop Dogg. The Notorious BIG and Tupac would both be shot later on in the decade. Puff Daddy would have a hit song commemorating Biggy that sampled a Police/Sting song from the 80s. It would become one of the most played and most overplayed songs of the decade, even though it is neither a particularly good rap song (Puff Daddy has had much better songs) nor even very representative of the genre as a whole. It is also ridiculous to try to dance to at clubs, and I do not know why DJs insist on trying to play it as part of a dance mix. Time and place, man...

Pandora helpfully explains the difference between East Coast and West Coast rap:

"East Coast rap roots" refers to music that references East Coast style rap. East Coast rap may be characterized by the heavy use of samples (often R&B), occasional use of swung 16th notes, light or sparse bass lines, and a vocal aesthetic originating from New England and the Middle Atlantic USA. The lyrical delivery of East Coast rap is exemplified by a varied vocal delivery, highly developed rhyme structure, an East Coast urban accent, etc.

"West Coast rap roots" refers to music that references West Coast rap. West Coast rap may be exemplified by use of funk samples, heavy funk influence, prominent bass lines, beats made for dancing, and heavy backbeats. The lyrical delivery of West Coast rap is exemplified by traditional rhyme structures, simpler rhythms, prominent use of hype men [a performer responsible for backup rapping to emphasize certain parts of the rhyme] and backing vocalists, and a West Coast (L.A./Bay Area/Latino) accent.

Tupac - Me Against the World


I love the sampling technique but sometimes I think rap music is a bit of a tease because of it. I mean, I turn on the radio, and I hear something that sounds like the opening bars of "White Rabbit" and I think, "All right, they're playing some Jefferson Airplane!" But then the breakbeat kicks in and I realize it's actually a rap song featuring a 9-second sample from Jefferson Airplane song. Goddammit. And then there's all the classical music samples (hey, no copyright infringement to worry about!), and really, the whole experience confuses me a bit. It's the same way I feel about people trying to make techno remixes of "Carmina Burana." Speaking of which...

Electronic Music

Elsewhere in the world, trance had developed as a genre out of house and techno music. From Wikipedia: Trance music is generally characterized by a tempo of between 130 and 155 BPM, short melodic synthesizer phrases, and a musical form that builds up and down throughout a track. Trance is basically a more melodic and less chaotic form of techno and house.

DJ Tiesto - some party mix



Trip hop, otherwise known as the Bristol sound, arose as an experimental genre in the first part of the 1990s from artists such as Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. Massive Attack's Blue Lines (1991) is seen as the blueprint of the genre. It is basically a brand of downtempo electronic music that is a fusion of hip hop and house until neither influence is recognizable. It also features a reliance on breakbeats and a moody, sample heavy sound. I could write a lot more about it because I happen to like it a lot, but that would probably be very disporportionate for this article and so we'll leave it at that.

Massive Attack - Angel (from Mezzanine, 1997. Mezzanine is probably their most commercial album. "Angel" was used in the movie Snatch, "Teardrop" is now the theme song for the show House and "Dissolved Girl" was used in the Matrix movie in the scene at the beginning where Neo is asleep at his computer and music is playing on his headphones. The album itself is less hip hop and has more of a goth/post-punk, largely a result of Del Naja's influence).




Singer/Songwriter

There is a bit of a fem singer-songwriter revival in this period, mostly attributed to the Lilith Fair. This produced artists like Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos.



Alternative

Alternative music continues to enjoy success. I'm using this section to talk about bands that were concurrent with the grunge movement but that aren't really part of the Seattle grunge movement per se.

In 1997 Our Lady Peace releases Clumsy. They had a good deal of success in the States during the 90s, but they were huge, really huge, in Canada.

Our Lady Peace - Superman's Dead (Clumsy, featuring Raine Maida's insane vocal acrobatics)



In the same year, Smashing Pumpkins releases Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Being Canadian, Our Lady Peace escaped being lumped in with the grunge movement, but Smashing Pumpkins were associated with it for a long time, which is something that Billy Corgan probably didn't like that much. This particular song became somewhat iconic for the 90s.

Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings




Grunge

Grunge is a loose subcategory of alternative music that sprung up around the Seattle music scene in the early years of the decade and that had its roots in heavy metal, punk, and indie/hard rock. It usually features angsty lyrics and a simplistic aesthetic tone that repudiates theatrics and flashiness. Kurt Cobain was famously too lazy to wash his hair and a sort of unkempt appearance became the hallmark of this genre. Like "alternative" in general, it is not so much a style of music as a general attitude of disillusionment and fuck-the-establishmentarianism.

Also, grunge gives us the t-shirt and shorts look of the 90s. And both should ideally be unwashed.

With the release of Nevermind in 1991, it exploded into popularity and brought groups such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains to the attention of the world. It is a short-lived movement, more or less ending in 1994 with Cobain's death, but it had a lasting impact on the music that was to follow. Soundgarden has since disbanded, but Pearl Jam is still around and making music today, and Alice in Chains recently reformed with a different singer after Layne Staley OD-ed in 2002.

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nevermind, 1991)



Pearl Jam - Jeremy (Ten, 1991)




Post Grunge and Pop Punk

In the later half of the decade, grunge becomes post-grunge with bands like Bush and Silverchair. Post-Grunge is essentially a more commercial form of grunge and is still popular today.

Pop Punk also emerged during this time with bands like Greenday and Third Eye Blind. Pop punk is basically exactly what it sounds like.

Greenday - Long View


Britpop

Britpop emerges as a reaction to America's grunge influence, with British bands drawing upon themes common to British youth and drawing upon the cultural history of British sounds. Blur and Oasis are two of the more commercially successful of the genre.

Oasis - Wonderwall (1995)



Indie Rock

Indie rock has a bajillion offshoots and doesn't describe any unified sound. It basically just means groups that are not signed to major record labels, even though some indie bands join major labels eventually. With the rise of the internet and the MP3, indie bands find it easier to distribute music themselves through their own channels, and indie music begins to find mainstream success in this decade.

The Pixies' Surfer Rosa was released in 1988. The song "Where Is My Mind" was featured in Fight Club, which helped the Pixies' rise to fame.

The Pixies - Where Is My Mind?



The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin came out in 1999 and was a big underground success.
Three years later they would release Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.

In 2000 Modest Mouse would release The Moon and Antarctica.

Modest Mouse - 3rd Planet




Industrial and Shock Rock

In 1994 Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral from Trent Reznor's vanity label, Nothing Records. A combination of metal and futuristic, synthetic influences balanced by surprisingly accessible hooks, melodic lines, and pop sensibility, it was a major success despite its dark and controversial themes and thrust industrial music into the spotlight. It was also one of the first multi-platinum records from what is essentially an indie label.

Nine Inch Nails - Reptile
In many ways, this song is not a particularly good example of the album as a whole, even though it's still a great song, but the other hit single from TDS is even less representative. "Closer" has the line "I want to fuck you like an animal," but despite its B&D/S&M overtones, features a basic disco beat with a distorted disco bassline. Maybe that's why it really gets under your blood -- it sounds familiar, but you don't really know why unless you think about it a little.



Reznor's label also spawned Marilyn Manson, whose 1996 album Antichrist Superstar caused a lot of controversy because of its openly anti-religious themes and the shock appeal of much of its subject matter. The band's sound changed quite a bit over the years, but back then it was more or less a heavy metal/hard rock band that drew quite a bit on a sort of decayed glam rock sensibility. I remember disliking the music but thinking the lyrics were pretty good at the time it came out. After a few years and some maturing, I've really come to like this album. It's funny because a lot of people assume Marilyn Manson is automatically "slash your wrists" music, even today (in the era of Dashboard Confessional and the like), but there's an element of dark humor about the message that maybe isn't so obvious at first blush.

Marilyn Manson - The Beautiful People



This kind of shock appeal might have been controversial for the 90s, but the entire nation underwent a huge crisis of conservativity when 9/11 happened and suddenly this sort of thing wasn't really cool anymore. I think 9/11 is a good event with which to close out the 90s and launch into the 2000s.

20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 6: 1980s

New Wave/Synthpop

The 80s are the era of MTV, and if I had to pick the defining moment when the 80s kicked in, it would be the launch of MTV in 1981, even though it didn't really take off until a year or so later.

At the time of MTV's first airing, the American music scene was in a bit of a creative slump, and videos did not exist for a lot of American acts. In contrast, British television had been used to music videos for many years now and English bands were already very aware of the music video as an idiom, so MTV started showing lots of videos by English artists. This helped spawn the second New Wave, where British artists were extremely popular in America. "New Wave/New Music" became a blanket term for "young, androgynous, technology oriented British artists," many of whom had begun their careers during the punk era and had evolved out of the post-punk movement. There wasn't a unified sound to this group per se, they were instead characterized by a general risk-taking attitude. MTV would mostly air New Wave until later in the decade when they switched to metal and rock. Here is a Duran Duran video.

Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf



The second New Wave is also associated with synthpop. A lot of New Wave acts used synthesizers heavily.

Gary Numan - Metal (from The Pleasure Principle - 1979)



Many contemporary indie artists, such as The Strokes, Interpol, and the Killers, are influenced by the New Wave acts of this period.


Arena Rock

Arena Rock is basically rock with an emphasis on large anthemic hooks and choruses. It is best typified by Journey, who released Escape in 1981.

Journey - Don't Stop Believing



Alternative Rock

This is basically a blanket term to describe any kind of rock music that owes a debt to the punk aesthetic and ethos. It consists of many subgenres, including grunge, Britpop, indie rock, etc.

It rose to national attention during the 80s with a few acts like R.E.M. and U2, although it wouldn't really take off until grunge kicks in. R.E.M. releases Murmur in 1983, a commercial success.

R.E.M. - Radio Free Europe



By the middle of the decade, alternative was moving away from a punk sound to a more melodic line, as typified by bands such as Husker Du. At the end of the decade, it had already branched out into many various forms, including alternative pop like They Might be Giants to industrial pop/metal like Nine Inch Nails. It feels really weird to be even talking about those two in the same sentence.

They Might be Giants - Istanbul (1990)



Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole (Pretty Hate Machine - 1989)




Metal (Glam Metal/Thrash Metal)

In the wake of Van Halen's success, a hair metal/glam metal scene sprung up around LA's Sunset Strip, with bands like Motley Crue. They took the makeuped look of glam rock acts like KISS to a new level. The music was heavy shredding metal with a pop influence.

Motley Crue - Girls Girls Girls



Many metal bands gained wide exposure by being featured on MTV and metal began to capture a wider audience than just young white males. Here is Def Leppard's video for Rock of Ages from Pyromania (1983).



In 1987 Guns n Roses released Appetite for Destruction.

Guns n Roses - Sweet Child of Mine



Thrash metal also developed around this time and is mostly associated with 4 bands: Metallica, Slayer, Anthrax, and Megadeath. Metallica released Master of Puppets in 1986, in the same year Slayer released Reign in Blood, which is described as "the heaviest album of all time." It also provoked allegations of Nazism because of the themes in the music and the artwork, which the band denied. Slayer's music also spawned a whole slew of submetal acts such as death metal, etc, which I do not have time to get into.

Metallica - Battery (Master of Puppets)



Slayer - Angel of Death (Reign in Blood)



Teenpop is Born (or revived, or whatever)

This is also the age of Madonna and Whitney Houston. Pop takes on a new sound as orchestra-heavy disco is replaced by a lighter synthpop as the new bubblegum music.

Madonna - Like a Virgin (1984)



In 1982 Michael Jackson released Thriller, which is still the best selling album of all time.

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean (from Thriller)



Hip Hop

The 80s are when Hip Hop's Golden Age (1986-1994, when the genre exploded onto the national scene and stopped becoming underground) kicked off, and its inception is usually attributed to Run DMC's album Raising Hell.

Run DMC - Raising Hell



Another notable name from the period is Grandmaster Flash, who is basically the guy who invented modern DJing techniques. He is now "immortalized" as a character in DJ Hero.

20th Century Music Audio Timeline Part 5: 1970s

Glam Rock

Largely a British phenomena, glam rock is typically characterized by a deliberate shunning of the peace and love generation's aesthetic, with performers wearing a very artificial style including lots of glitter, makeup, outrageous outfits, and platform boots. They typically cultivated an androgynous, bisexual image and courted lots of spacey futuristic themes in their clothing and lyrics. A really good representation of the aesthetic of this movement can be seen in the movie Velvet Goldmine.

The protean David Bowie and his space-age alter ego Ziggy Stardust is probably the best and most commercially successful in this genre. The album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) is heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange.

David Bowie - Space Oddity


Punk

Punk developed around the mid 1970s in the UK and the US out of the garage band tradition of the 1960s. The previous generation had seen the likes of Jimi Hendrix and virtuosic guitar solos; the aesthetic of punk was against the excesses of mainstream rock music and featured usually stripped down, "no bullshit" instrumentals with few solos. Other characteristics of the style include fast and short songs, hard edged music featuring lots of distorted power chords to create a "buzz saw drone", and shouted lyrics without much variance in pitch and tone usually about politics and social issues.

Production value is typically low because the DIY attitude was prized in this genre. Many musicians produced and distributed themselves through underground channels. The famous three-chord paradigm is kind of a joke, but also typifies the attitude of the movement, which is "Here is a chord, here is another chord, here is a third chord -- now go make a band." Meaning: you may not be a terribly good musician but you can still express yourself through music. The accompanying visual aesthetic was simple: safety pins, leather jacket, ripped shirt, jeans. Later it would become Mohawks and piercings.

The Who is somewhat associated with this movement, more in terms of attitude than anything else. Other influential bands were the Ramones, whose debut album in 1976 was integral to the movement, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols.

Ramones: Blitzkrieg Pop



The Clash: Should I Stay or Should I Go



Sex Pistols: God Save the Queen



New Wave

New Wave is a late 1970s movement that used to be synonymous with punk rock before branching off to become its own category and overtaking punk as the spearhead of the underground English movement. Sometimes punk acts were referred to as New Wave. By the latter half of the decade, New Wave came to be those acts associated with the punk scene that didn't play punk music, in that their music was more lyrically complex or their songs were more polished or they tended to experiment more with a sort of synthpop sound. In America, it was used as a term to describe acts that played CBGB, such as the Talking Heads. Sometimes it is used as a catchall term for new music out of Britain.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer


From Wikipedia: "According to music journalist Simon Reynolds the music had a twitchy agitated feel to it. New Wave musicians who often played choppy rhythm guitars with fast tempos. Keyboards were common as was stop and start song structures and melodies."

Power Pop became associated also with this movement. See Cheap Trick.

Cheap Trick - Hello There


Later still, "post-punk," which is a darker less pop-influenced kind of punk, came to describe music by Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, and Joy Division. The Cure in particular became very dark and helped influence the goth movement.

The Cure - Boys Don't Cry



Hard Rock

Hard Rock developed out of the blues rock, psychedelic, and garage band tradition and uses the blues pentatonic scale with heavy distorted sounding electrical instrumentation. Jimi Hendrix was one of the first to experiment with guitar effects like distortion and phasing, a tradition that was later taken up by people like Pete Townshend and Dave Davies of the Kinks. Some of the first hard rock albums are Led Zeppelin's first album and The Who's Live at Leeds and Who's Next.

Roll call:

Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin IV, 1971)



The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again (Who's Next, 1971)



Alice Cooper - School's Out (1972)



Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (A Night at the Opera, 1975)



Aerosmith - Walk This Way (Toys in the Attic, 1975)



Van Halen - Eruption (Van Halen, 1978)



AC/DC - Highway to Hell (1979)



Country Rock

I don't really have much to say about this category because it's mostly an excuse to include the Eagles and Hotel California (1976). The Eagles are credited with popularizing the Southern California country rock style.

The Eagles - Hotel California (Hell Freezes Over version)


Metal

Metal also formed out of the blues rock/psychedelic rock trend but later on shed much of its blues influence. Metal is characterized by "thick, massive sound, characterized by highly amplified distortion, extended guitar solos, emphatic beats, and overall loudness." The sonic power of the amplified guitar is one of the mainstays of metal music, with the bass guitar also very prominent in making the sound "heavy." Heavy metal drumming requires a lot of endurance and precision because there are usually lots of intricate patterns.

Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin II, 1969)



Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Paranoid, 1970). It is said that Tommy Iommi, the guitarist, had an accident that affected his hand, and he had to tune down his guitar so he could play power chords with easier fretting. That particular sound became iconic.



Judas Priest - Rocka Rolla (1974). This is pre-leather and studs Judas Priest. They are credited with helping metal shed much of its blues influence.



Motorhead - Overkill (1979). This band is credited with being the first group to span the metal/punk divide.



Disco

This is also the era of disco. It was originally a type of dance music for black gays but was picked up by the mainstream by the end of the decade and became the dancehall staple. According to Wikipedia: "Musical influences include funk and soul music. The disco sound has soaring, often reverberated vocals over a steady "four-on-the-floor" beat, an eighth note (quaver) or sixteenth note (semi-quaver) hi-hat pattern with an open hi-hat on the off-beat, and a prominent, syncopated electric bass line sometimes consisting of octaves." Four on the floor is just your basic 4/4 steady beat.

The Bee Gees recorded Staying Alive for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in 1977.



By 1979 the disco backlash was well under way as Disco Demolition Night would prove. Tt did give rise to the "dance pop" of the 80s, which uses the disco beat.

Reggae

This type of music, which developed in Jamaica following ska and rocksteady, is characterized by the stress on the offbeat. Obligatory Bob Marley link to follow:



Hip Hop

Hip hop is born in 1979 with Rapper's Delight by the Sugarhill Gang.