How is it that Crazy appeals to everyone without being bland?
Why is it catchy enough to demand repeated listens, and deep
enough to reward those repeated listens? How it can be simple
without being tiresome? If you somehow missed this song, don't
deprive yourself for another minute:
Crazy
There are a lot of different components to a successful song.
Crazy's best quality is the delicate balance it maintains
between predictable and unpredictable. It streams information
into your ears fast enough to keep you engaged, but not so
fast that you get overwhelmed. Crazy has what the Buddhists
call crazy logic. The song flows,
and running it through your consciousness can help you experience
some flow of your own. Its emotional tone is raw and desperate,
but its production invites you to shake your tailfeather,
the most sensible strategy for feeling better about yourself
that we have. I regard music
to be a crucial human survival skill, a set of tools to mediate
our experience and to carry out our emotional responses to
the world. Crazy is an extremely valuable addition to
our collective toolbox. Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse gave us all
a genuine gift.
By far the most stable and predictable aspect of the Crazy
is the simple disco-funk drum loop. It runs with basically
no variation for the entire duration of the song.
| ||: |
one |
and |
two |
and |
three |
and |
four |
and |
:|| |
| |
hi-hat |
-- |
hi-hat |
-- |
hi-hat |
-- |
hi-hat |
-- |
|
| |
-- |
-- |
-- |
-- |
snare |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|
| |
kick |
-- |
-- |
-- |
kick |
-- |
-- |
-- |
|
Here's the chord progression for the verses. "I remember
when, I remember when I lost my mind, there was something
so precious about that place," etc. Each measure here
is one cycle of the drum loop.
||: C minor| -- | -- | -- | Eb major | -- | -- | -- |
| Ab major | -- | -- | -- | G7sus4 | -- | G7 | -- :||
Next, the chorus. "Maybe I'm crazy, maybe I'm crazy,
maybe I'm crazy, possibly." The words and melody are
different and the instrumentation gets fuller, but the underlying
harmony stays the same. There's no repeat, so the chorus is
half as long as the verse. This mild asymmetry is standard
practice in hip-hop and related
musics.
|| C minor | -- | -- | -- | Eb major | -- | -- | -- |
| Ab major | -- | -- | -- | G7sus4 | -- | G7 | -- ||
C minor is 'home base', the ground state. Eb is the relative
major, not a very dramatic harmonic move. Then up a plain
vanilla perfect fourth to the subdominant-feeling Ab, from
there logically to the suspenseful G7sus4/G7 cadence. The
tension at the end of the last bar is released when we land
safely and expectedly back on C minor as the form repeats.
Then comes the second verse, just like the first. The second
chorus, just like the first. And then, the surprise!
|| C major! | -- | -- | -- | Ab major | -- | -- | -- |
| Eb major | -- | -- | -- | G7sus4 | -- | G7 | -- ||
Almost the same ingredients, but with two key differences.
First, the bright, joyous C major instead of the dark, tragic
C minor. Several of my musician friends literally cried out
in delight the first time they heard that. I remember saying
something like, "Aauuuugggghh." It's a blues commonplace
to use minor-feeling tones in a major tonality; to use major
tones in a minor key is to turn this practice on its head.
Classical composers have long used a surprise major chord
to conclude a minor-key piece, but switching abruptly to major
in midstream is not nearly so common. Jazz fans, dig John
Coltrane playing major right at the climax of Alabama, his
otherwise minor-key musical setting of a Martin Luther King
Jr speech.
The Crazy bridge also has a subtler but equally important
change from the verses and choruses: Ab major and Eb major
reverse positions in the phrase. Now the root falls a major
third from C to Ab, a Wagnerian swoop that sounds more like
a fim score than a pop song. After the plain-vanilla fourth
move from Ab to Eb (this time inverted), the root then climbs
a cinematic major third from Eb up to G. In a further breaking
of symmetry, the bridge doesn't repeat, so it's only half
as long as the verses and choruses. And there you have it.
Exactly enough symmetry for the song to be learnable by anyone
and enjoyed by everyone, enough asymmetry to keep you on your
toes. That's why you like that song so much.
People ask me if thinking about music in these scientific
and technical terms like symmetry
and information
theory doesn't cheapen or diminish the experience for
me. By reducing it to quantifiable aspects of our nervous
systems' operation, am I grinding out the magic? I hope so.
To think of music as a magic or mystical entity diminishes
its very real power over our emotions. The more I learn about
the natural history of human musicmaking and its physiological
underpinnings, the more I appreciate the really lovingly well-made
stuff like Crazy.
What about the lyrics? It's my opinion that words are the
least important part of any pop song. There are many great
songs where the words are unintellible or opaque: Smells Like
Teen Spirit, Stairway To Heaven, everything by the Stones
or Talking Heads or Björk.
It's perfectly possible to be moved by songs in other languages,
or sung in nonsense syllables - think of Louis Armstrong and
Ella Fitzgerald. In modern life we overprivilege verbal, semantic
communication. In music, as in human relationships, language
is frequently inadequate to express complex emotions. This
should come as no surprise if you believe, as I do, that music
preceded language in human evolution. That said, I do
like Crazy's lyrics. It's significant that Cee-Lo had a long
and distinguished rap career in Goodie Mob and as a solo artist
before launching Gnarls Barkley. You can hear it in the way
he doubles up certain phrases for better rhythmic flow. There's
a lot more Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk in hip-hop than
the jazz world realizes. Try singing along for the full experience:
I remember when, I remember, I remember when I lost my
mind
There was something so pleasant about that place.
Even your emotions have an echo
In so much space
And when you're out there, without care,
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Does that make me crazy?
Probably.
And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice
Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you, who do
you think you are?
Ha ha ha bless your soul, if you really think you're in
control
Well, I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
I think you're crazy
Just like me
My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on a limb
And all I remember is thinking, I wanna be like them
Ever since I was little, ever since I was little it looked
like fun
And it's no coincidence I've come, and I can die when I'm
done
Maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably
The song talks to the listener in the second person. Cee-Lo's
rap lyrics usually do too. I don't know what to make of that
fact. Your thoughts are welcome.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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