Wire's "It's So Obvious" and other art joke song structures

What's A5? And B5? Etc?

Are there other songs that go up/down the guitar neck making every stop along the way?

"White Light / White Heat"? End of?

Also a Syd Barrett or two... maybe "Arnold Layne"?

What's A5? And B5? Etc?

They're root chords, really basic building block power chords. Standard rock guitar vocabulary.

As opposed to A, B, etc?

What's A5? And B5? Etc?

Power chords. A power chord is a diad, or a two-note chord, built from a root (the named note) and a fifth. The lack of a third makes a power chord ambiguous - it's neither major nor minor.

A = A major, which has a root, a major third, and a fifth.

You don't play the 3rd in A5 - just A & E

xpost

I suspected that, just never seen them described that way

Are there other songs that go up/down the guitar neck making every stop along the way?

This is kind of a basic of approx. 100,000,000 songs, surely

No

Always thought he's just describing the change in years, maybe anticipating Chairs Missing. But now I get that the chord changes are part of the joke, doing what the lyric describes.

i always thought the chord changes were a sort of joke on "78" as "rpm" (as the lyric goes), as they "speed up" a step, kind of like how if the song were the same chord changes the entire time, and you moved your turntable's speed from 33 to 45 to 78, etc. if that makes sense.

The Kinks' "Last of the Steam Powered Trains" does this too

Tom, the "surely" at the end of that sentence is mostly there for politeness

Let me re-phrase: it's a basic of approx. 100,000,000 songs

But it isn't!

Last of the Steam Powered Trains -- that's what I mean, and that's like a comment on the lyric too, at least to the extent it's like a train chugging.

Maybe I'm not describing the specific dumb trick I'm talking about too well. Like in the intro to Circle Sky, where Nesmith hits every bar chord from B to A# to A to G# to G to F# to F to E -- that's a very mathematical downward progression, not your standard variety I-IV-V. I feel a bit out of my depths talking anything remotely like music theory ...

i always thought the chord changes were a sort of joke on "78" as "rpm" (as the lyric goes), as they "speed up" a step, kind of like how if the song were the same chord changes the entire time, and you moved your turntable's speed from 33 to 45 to 78, etc. if that makes sense.

Nice!

Another one - The Jam, "A-Bomb in Wardour Street", end.

This is not an art-joke, but the chord progression in this one pretty much covers the entire spectrum.

THIS WHOLE WORLD by The Beach Boys

================

written by Brian Wilson

from the "Sunflower" album (1970)

chords by Piguinho (from Brazil)
C    Bb/C               C

I'm thinkin' 'bout this whole world.

C       F              Em7      G       Am         F

Late at night I think about the love of this whole world.

A       F#7       Bm7    E7   C#m

Lots of diff'rent people ev'rywhere.

C#   C#/C     F#/Bb  Ab7     Bbm         Bbm/Ab      F#maj7

And when I go anywhere I see love, I see love, I see love.
Bb                                Ebmaj7

When girls get mad at boys and go many times they're just putting on a show

Bb                            F    G

but when they leave you wait alone.
C       F               Em7        G    Am      F

You are there like ev'rywhere like ev'ryone you see.

A      F#7          Bm7    E7         C#m

Happy 'cause you're livin' and you're free.

C#   C#/C        F#/Bb    Ab7        Bbm   Bbm/Ab     F#maj7

Now, here comes another day for your love................
(No Chord)

Late at night I think about the love of this whole world

Umm dat didit......

I knew there was a Beach Boys one that did this - or at least the bassline does - but this wasn't the one I was thinking of

chords by Piguinho (from Brazil)

Look out, he's using Brazilian chords! Including the dreaded (No Chord)!

Didn't the Pistols do this on "Problems" (I think?)? Or at least the A to B to C to D joke?

<i>Are there other songs that go up/down the guitar neck making every stop along the way? (Offhand I can only think of Pere Ubu's Non-Alignment Pact and The Monkees' Circle Sky -- more artistes at work.) </i>

a couple i can think of:

-- the part right before the solo in 'quiet' by smashing pumpkins
-- the ending of 'rocket' by smashing pumpkins

<i>And is there some musicological term for this kind of so-obvious progression? </i>

chromatic movement, i would think

whoops. i arrowed when i should have bracketed

Tom D is nuts: the thing being discussed gets used in the intro, bridge, or some transition of like every 5th punk song and every 4th song by bands that only know power chords.

I only heard 8 songs during my commute to work (most of a Stereo Total record), and one of them had this in it; I wouldn't be surprised if one of the others did, too, and I just didn't really notice

So how come out of 100,000,000 songs, only 8 or sumthin' have been mentioned here? Are we talking about the same thing?!?!?

chromatic movement, i would think

*consults wikipedia*

Thanks! OK, so all I'd identified as a musical part of the joke was the specific chords plays (A5 up to F5), but for those of you more knowledgeable in these matters than me: does the change from a diatonic to a chromatic progression itself add something to the joke here?

You seem to be assuming that *Wire had more musical knowledge when they wrote the song than you do now - which I wouldn't be so sure of.

(*OK, Colin Newman)

Remember two of them had only just started playing

True, and maybe I'm getting carried away here with the diatonic/chromatic stuff, but songs where the chord changes allude to the lyrics seem to be a pretty rare bird, and since the other aspects (speeding up the tempo and zooming up the neck) fit with the lyrics so directly, in a way that most songs don't, it seems to me there was likely some authorial intent at play.

Hang on, A5, B5, C5, D5, E5, and F5 is purely diatonic, not chromatic, what? Chromatic would have to throw some accidentals in.

Knew I was out of my depths here ... OK, I'm using the wrong words to describe this little sequence, but isn't there something unusual about a progression that goes A5 B5 C5 D5 E5 F5? It's like something you'd play if you wanted to teach your guitar how to spell.

yeah it's called the key of c major.

Yes. Ouch.

Purely harmonically, I agree ABCDE etc is not a very obvious sequence, since the harmonical "alphabet" moves more in fifths. However, with the thirds omitted I guess this is less relevant (leading tones disappearing etc) and what remains is more of a melodic than a harmonic sequence, in which case it is as basic as it gets. (Maybe A minor rather than C major though?)

Umm guys they do the exact same thing in the "go under, go under" section of "Three-Girl Rhumba."

I think it's safe to say this has less to do with clever compositional ploys and more to do with how you can play this by just slowly moving your hand in a rightward direction.

It would take infinite monkeys to accidentally bang out Shakespeare, but I'm pretty sure you could get this out of just a couple hundred bonobos with Telecasters

Not that it isn't, like, awesome and everything.

It's just that the main chord-sequence decision going into the string listed above is doing the B5-C5, since B5-Db5 would be too poppy

Wow, this was a very neat reading of the song being clobbered to death.

Anyways, a good example of the ascending sequence thingy is near the end of the Dustdevils' (my favorite band, did I mention that) "Feet Head High" where in slow-mo the band basically climbs all the way up the neck. I don't think it comments on the lyrics, though, which I can't really understand anyway.

Did anyone mention Interstellar Overdrive? That does something similar, descending. Um, and The Dickies' "Attack of the Molemen" has this going on a bit. Boris The Spider? (Descending again, mostly.)

Hey wait a minute - I derailed my own thread! Chords are interesting and all, but mostly I was just hoping to find other examples of songs where the music makes some clever reference to the lyrics ... any thoughts?

YYZ is the IATA airport identification code for Toronto Pearson International Airport, of Rush's native area of Toronto. At the time the song was written, it was common practice (and still is) for air navigation aids to broadcast their 3-letter identifier code in Morse Code using VHF omnidirectional range (VOR). YYZ was the one for Toronto. A plane using VOR equipment would then always know its location relative to a the VOR navaid within range. A plane landing at Toronto would, for example, rely on the radio emanation of the letters YYZ (in Morse Code) as a homing beacon to locate and arrive at the Toronto airport. (Source: Wikipedia's article on VOR.) The song's introduction, played in a time signature of 10/8, repeatedly renders the letters "Y-Y-Z" in Morse Code using various musical arrangements.

"YYZ" rendered in Morse code
Y Y Z
- . - - - . - - - - . .

"YYZ" is structured in the following arrangement: A-B-C-B-A. The song starts with the YYZ Morse Code played by Peart on the crotales (A). The guitar and bass join this pattern, using the dissonant interval of the tritone to distinguish Morse Code dots and dashes. The guitar and bass render the code by playing the root note of C for the "dashes" and the tritone F# for the "dots". The synthesizer melody played over this arrangement is an example of the Locrian mode. In live performances, the synthesizer part is played by bassist/keyboardist Geddy Lee -- using a foot-pedal MIDI controller (Korg MPK-130 & Roland PK-5)[1] -- while he plays the bass part. After two cycles of the melody, the synth ceases, and the bass drops one octave, the introduction ending on the guitar, bass, and drummer making hits on only the "dashes". A brief rest follows, before the next section.
etc etc etc

Not a chordal thing, but there's the bit in "Prove It" by Television where the lyrics go

First you creep
Then you leap
Up about a hundred feet

and the drums respond with a little snare roll and cymbal crash, like the accompaniment to a tightrope walker. I'm sure there's a load more of these.

Although I guess that doesn't quite have the depth of the Wire one mentioned above

On my way to work today I heard this on the radio:
Variations on Glen Gould
It's a bunch of specially commissioned music pieces based around anagrams of "GLEN GOULD".

Are there other songs that go up/down the guitar neck making every stop along the way?

You're right: there aren't relatively that many. (100,000 surely, but not 100,000,000.) The Styrenes' "Social Whirlpool" begins with a little 7-note figure played way up high on the guitar neck and doubled by a keyboard, which is then immediately repeated a fret lower, then lower again and again and again until the end of the guitar's neck is reached, after which they reverse direction and go back up again all the way, and then the song ends after 1:23. Every fourth (I think) bar they go up/down a full step rather than just half, and at one point the instruments go out of sync in a fugue-like manner that makes further analysis impossible for a relative ignoramus like me.

one of the fellas i was in a band with used to play this little song he called "BE A FAG". chord progression was (you guessed it) B-E-A-F-A-G

There's James Brown in "Sex Machine" where he yells about "taking it to the bridge", which refers a section of the song. Of course, if you don't happen to know that, he just sounds deranged.

I don't think playing a partial (there's no seventh) ascending scale with power chords is very singular or rare. Lots of songs are built from that kind of scalar-root movement.

Purely harmonically, I agree ABCDE etc is not a very obvious sequence, since the harmonical "alphabet" moves more in fifths.

You're right inasmuch as that kind of progression is not very big-C Classical, but there is no "harmonical alphabet" that moves in fifths, and it is a very obvious sequence.

B-A-C-H

There's a band called Owada, easily googled, whose songs are about nothing, except the songs themselves. They have titles like "short G", "up and down", and "1234", and the music does what the title suggests. (It ends up sounding pretty Pink Flag-ish.) Is there a name for this artistic strategy? It keeps reminding me of early Frank Stella paintings.

You're right inasmuch as that kind of progression is not very big-C Classical, but there is no "harmonical alphabet" that moves in fifths

"Alphabet" only as in "common sequence", not "source of entire vocabulary" or anything -- just a simple analogy ("easy as ABC"::"easy as ii-V-I").

Apart from that, I'm certainly not going to try to outargue you about harmonic theory. :)

I had that Owada CD. I got it for a pound and binned it, it's shit.

Is the song structure of ABACAB ABACAB? Oh, wait, Wikipedia explains...it was ABACAB at one time.

Cool story about YYZ. What an awesome song.

"Alphabet" only as in "common sequence", not "source of entire vocabulary" or anything -- just a simple analogy ("easy as ABC"::"easy as ii-V-I").

Yeah, I see what you mean. And like I alluded to, root movement by fourths and fifths (as opposed to movement by thirds in Renaissance music) was an important characteristic of Classical harmony.

"second verse, same as the first"

isn't there a prince line about "sexy like a D minor 7th" or something like that?

"Threw some chords together -- a combination D-E-F".

Sadly, the bit two lines later,
"I tried to focus my attention -- but I feel so A-D-D"
doesn't follow up properly.

Bb Bbsus4 Gm11 D-5 Am Am/e
Jazz police I hear you calling
Bb Bb-5 C11 E Emaj7
Jazz police I feel so blue

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" has lyrical references to the chords being played.

Am/e I RITE?

Sloan's "G Turns To D" is about teaching a girl how to play her guitar, and the lines
"then I could show my mother
that you can go from one chord to another,
G...will turn to D... You'll turn to me..."

mirror the chord changes.

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" has lyrical references to the chords being played.

That's right, "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift..."

(While he playes I IV V vi IV)

Back to Wire. The song "Former Airline" is so called because the chords are B-E-A (British European Airways, which joined with BOAC to form British Airways in the mid-70s)

"106 beats that" was called that because they attempted to keep the song within 106 beats.

Also there's some story Colin Newman tells about the chord structure on "106 Beats That" having something to do with the train stations on the journey between Watford and, errrrr, somewhere else.

This, obv.

Nevertheless, the craftiness of Ma fin is quite unusual and would perhaps be lost on the lay listener were it not for the clue provided by the composer, who was also an esteemed poet, in the opening lines. The text of the refrain states that "My end is my beginning, and my beginning my end." In the lowest voice, or tenor, this text refers to the palindromic nature of the musical line, which, whether read forward from the beginning or backwards from the ending, articulates the exact same sequence of notes and durations. In fact, Machaut originally provided the singer with the first half of the line only, and instructed him simply to sing it forward then backward.

http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/from-major-to-minor/

Jump to verse two, whole different chord structure - "well, it's alright, listen - can't wait for 78." Always thought he's just describing the change in years, maybe anticipating Chairs Missing. But now I get that the chord changes are part of the joke, doing what the lyric describes.

surely a reference to the wasps song, or at least voicing a phrase in common use at the time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESfotzVZev8

This one's pretty obvious, but the part in "Rock Lobster" when Fred yells "Down! Down!" and the guitar and keys both descend and slow down.