[Can you take me higher? Today, the Overthinkers enter the Think Tank to tackle the greatest key change in popular music. Read the four entries and vote for your favorite at the end. —Ed.]
Fenzel, The Thong Song
Pop songs often lie, and that’s fine. There’s something aspirational about pop music — it’s escapist, and it hopes for a world much different from our own. In this world, Britney is a Slave 4 U, everybody gets to be immortal with the Oasis Brothers, and Whitney Houston will always love Kevin Costner. It’s liberating, sort of. At the very least, it relieves us a bit of the mundanity of the real world.
But Sisqo gives us a special sort of delusion. At the peak of a mounting cascade of modulations that wails to the heavens with a fury and pathos no undergarment ever deserved, Sisqo belts out the greatest counterfactual in all of music.
“I don’t think you heard me!”
That’s right. After expounding deliberately, loudly, enthusiastically and shrouded in only the most halfhearted simile about his enthusiasm for “that thong” — after doing so in front of a full orchestra in a song with multiple choruses and verses piling layer upon layer (much like the multithonged women in the video) into a full oratorio of thong worship, Sisqo still thinks that you either literally can’t hear him or figuratively don’t understand what he’s talking about.
This is impossible.
I love the behemoth key change in the Thong song because it is a world-killer, because it makes John Williams look like Phillip Glass (or John”ny” Cage), because it has all the sublime glory of Icarus ascending to the heavens just before his brief record career melts in the heat of a bethonged sun and crashes into the Adriatic Sea (or, for Sisqo, the Chesapeake Bay).
But I think it’s the greatest key change ever because it does more than any other of its kind what all over-the-top pop song key changes aspire to do — it forces emotional significance on moments and lyrics that cannot bear it otherwise.
In that one key change, Sisqo demands, like Superman at his most absurd, that the world spin backwards. For a split second atop the tip top of what used to be the top of his shattered lungs and discarded dignity, I can feel it shudder a little.
Belinkie, Build Me Up Buttercup
The key change in this song comes right smack at the end. And when I say right smack, I mean right smack. The fade-out begins immediately after the new key is locked in with “I need you,” and the song’s completely done five seconds later. In total, there’s less than four measures of the new key. Check it out yourself in the end credits of There’s Something About Mary. I’ve cued it up to the spot for you:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjzSIGt74T0&start=160
This feels like a mistake at first. Like, maybe the group wanted there to be one more chorus in the new key, but some record producer decided the track needed to come in under three minutes. But I think something more subtle is at play here.
My friend Jeremy Taylor understands music a lot better than I will probably understand anything, with the exception of Mario Kart. I once asked him why pop songs often ended with a fade-out at the end. After all, the fade-out is something that can’t be recreated in live performance, so it seems like a very strange way to go. And Jeremy theorized that maybe the reason why humans have such an innate love of music is that they allow us to experience the sense of time passing, and know that the rest of the group was experiencing it the same way. The Beat connects us, and we get pleasure from knowing that everyone feels it. We are synchronized.
The appeal of the fade out, in Jeremy’s view, is that it allows our internal metronomes to persist. It creates the illusion that the song continues, thus prolonging the connection we feel to other listeners.
If this is true, then maybe a strong key change right at the end doubles the effect. “Build Me Up Buttercup” gives us the strong sense of being unfinished. The key change has just happened when it starts to fade away, and we aren’t ready for it to end. Combine that with the fade-out, and you see the genius of The Foundations. They’re cutting us loose right at the piece’s climax, knowing that our brains are going to keep the song going with or without them.
Stokes, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?
While I’m sure that my fellow OTIketeers have mentioned some wonderful songs, I’m willing to be that there’s actually only one chord progression under discussion here, the classic “Cheese” or “Truck-Driver” modulation [update: It turns out I was mostly right. Kudos to Bonnie Tyler for being original, and to Sisqo and The Foundations for supporting my argument]. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t there’s a great description of it in this 1897 review of Also Sprach Zarathustra
“…At the end of the work, there is a modulation from the key of B to the key of C, that is unique, for the Gordian knot is cut by the simple process of going there and going back again. If such modulations are possible, then the harmony books may as well be burnt at once.” — Louis Elson, Boston Daily Adviser, quoted in Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective
And they basically were burnt, as far as pop music is concerned, except for a few glorious exceptions, of which the Motown songbook is one. When it moves from the verse to the chorus, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted goes from Bb Major to C Major, which is as cheesy a modulation as you could hope for. But damn if the songwriters don’t work for it.
The basic structure of the verse is ingenious enough to begin with: I->iii->vi->IV->V->I. (Notice how much time it spends hanging out on the minor chords of iii and vi. This is one of the saddest songs ever written in a major key.) As it moves towards the chorus, the pattern changes ever so slightly. After landing on vi, instead of going down a third to the subdominant, the harmony just reverses course and moves back to iii. This is a totally orthodox harmonic move – root motion by a fifth is pretty much always allowed – but it destabilizes the harmony enough for the new key in the chorus to seem like an arrival, and not merely an extravagance.
Just listen to it. Smooth as silk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zCz8SKmGek
I guess I haven’t actually talked about the modulation itself… for what it’s worth, iii of Bb is ii of C, so all they need to do is patch in a ii->V->I (or II->V substitution->I as the case may be). But then, getting into a new key is always pretty trivial. The hard thing is getting out of the old key convincingly.
Lee, Total Eclipse of the Heart
[Apologies for those unfamiliar with music theory. There’s really no other way to explain the genius of this without resorting to a lot of roman numerals.]
This song has dozens of key changes, but I’m focusing on the epic transition from the verse to the chorus: E major to A flat major.
The chord progression through the first verse is a little unconventional, but with each “turn around,” nothing feels too jarring. That’s because the song moves through its key changes using somewhat conventional methods: the flat VII chord functions as the dominant of the upcoming key, so each new key has a harmonic relationship with the previous key.
All fine and dandy until the verse transitions to the chorus. The preparation for the key change (the last line of the verse: “Turn around, bright eyes”) uses a conventional chord progression: E to A major 7, or I to IV. So far so good. But then comes the transition to the chorus: “Every now and then I fall a-PART.” WHAM! The song transition from E major to A flat major in the most unusual way: from an A major seventh chord, the IV (subdominant) of the previous progression, to A flat major chord, the I (tonic) chord, of the new key.
What’s amazing about this key change is that the connecting chords are just a half step away from each other, and the preparatory chord isn’t the I of the previous key (the cheeseball way of putting two chords one half step apart from each other and modulating). Better still, the connecting note between Amaj7 and A flat major is the major seventh of the first chord, a dissonant interval between the root and the melody, which then becomes the tonic note of the new key. In other words, WHAM! The dissonant note is now the tonic!
I could go on about a number of amazing things about this song: the dynamic range of the melody line (four steps above an octave) and the contrast between the funky-modal verse and the super conventional I-vi-IV-V chorus, but let me leave you with this. Take a look at the transcription:
Notice that the key of four sharps transform into the key of four flats.
A Total Eclipse of the Key Change if there ever was one.
