If you're a white musician, you should probably
be playing slower and more repetitive
In general, the best work by the best musicians is their
slowest and most repetitive stuff. This doesn't mean that
the best music is always the slowest and most repetitive,
but I do think that in our culture at this moment in history,
it's true the vast majority of the time.
Within each major popular genre in the US, the tempos start
out frenetic, and then as the genre matures, the average tempos
pull back. Here I'm measuring by the average tempo of a dance
or party-oriented song, ignoring ballads and novelty songs.
James Brown
Dig the early zippy R&B stuff vs the prowling hip-hop
feel of the mature stuff. JB wrote the book on relentless
repetition:
Sex Machine
Soul Power
Payback
Funky Drummer (includes a ubiquitous hip-hop sample)
And so on, for the entire rest of JB canon.
Rock generally
Aside from the fringes of prog, punk and metal, the core
rock canon goes from medium up to surprisingly slow. Pink
Floyd and other stoner bands tended to play like they were
underwater. Perhaps the finest hippie rockers were The Band.
Levon Helm might be the grooviest self-taught white drummer
in history.
Music From Big Pink
The Band The Band
Hard is rock is usually more effective slow than you'd
expect. Dig out Led Zeppelin IV and spin When The Levee
Breaks, and dig its rich memetic
history.
The two Aerosmith songs I really care about are Sweet Emotion
(which is inexplicably not available on iTunes), and, of
course:
Walk This Way
The best U2 song is a drone-based groove.
All I Want Is You
My favorite tunes by the Stones:
Gimme Shelter
You Can't Always Get What You Want
Sympathy For The Devil
Miss You
The Beatles
Compare I Want To Hold Your Hand with Come Together. The
really killing Beatles tunes are even slower than Pink Floyd.
See Hey Jude, Julia, Don't Let Me Down, Something.
As for repetition, see Tomorrow Never Knows, ending of
Hey Jude, Why Don't We Do It In The Road?, I Want You/She's
So Heavy, Sir Paul's basslines in Rain and Taxman, the groove
section in Carry That Weight/The End.
Country generally
The only American musical forms slower and more repetitive
than country are modal jazz and hip-hop. Country musicians
don't listen to much of either, so this is a case of convergent
evolution. Too many examples to list.
Bob Marley
Bob re-recorded many of his hits at different points in
his career, sometimes several times over. Anytime he did
multiple versions of a tune this way, the tempo got dramatically
slower each time.
No Woman, No Cry - version on Natty Dread
No
Woman, No Cry
- version everyone knows from the greatest hits
See also Could You Be Loved, Stir It Up, Lively Up Yourself,
Rebel Music, Them Belly Full, Exodus, the entire rest of
the canon. The best way to hear these tunes is in the live
versions. This show in particular is a killer:
Bob Marley & The Wailers Live at the Roxy
Hip-hop generally
A typical old-school track clocks in at a hundred to a
hundred thirty beats per minute:
Run-DMC - My Adidas
A contemporary track is usually between seventy-five and
a hundred.
Missy Elliott - Izzy Izzy Ahh
And modern RnB gets down into the low sixties.
Lauryn Hill - Nothing Even Matters
Hip-hop is founded on repetition in its most extreme forms.
At the core of every rap song is a sample, the best measure
or two of a recording that runs on a continuous, perfect
loop.
Jazz generally
Ragtime and Dixieland bands were known for playing 'hot',
ie at frenetic tempos. Swing bands still played hot at times,
but their overall vibe gradually mellowed through the big-band
era. Check out the mature Count Basie sound in all its leisurely
splendor:
Li'l Darlin'
Bebop could be played ridiculously fast, but the real classics
of modern jazz are relaxed. For example, Miles Davis' famous
recording of Bye-Bye Blackbird is less than half the tempo
people were used to hearing this tune played at.
Bye-Bye Blackbird
The intellectual nature of modern jazz improvising bucks
the repetition trend - this is probably why the beboppers
haven't been moving units the way swing bands used to. Bebop
and its descendants are alive and well in the academic setting,
which I think owes partially to the extreme simplicity of
many of the classic heads. In composing and arranging, jazz
has progressed from busily polyrhythmic Dixieland to intricate
big-band arrangements to increasingly streamlined bebop
head arrangements that fit on one sheet of paper. Every
eighth grade jazz band has taken a crack at these:
So What
Blue Monk
Duke Ellington
There's a nice CD compilation out there called the Smithsonion
Collection Of Classic Jazz. Disc three begins with a classic
tune by the Duke Ellington Orchestra:
East St Louis Toodle-Oo
The second track is the same tune, recorded ten years later,
much groovier:
New East St Louis Toodle-oo
Nobody wrote a better chant-like riff tune than Ellington
and Strayhorn.
Ko-Ko
C Jam Blues
Fleurette Africaine
And Duke loved to find a groove and park on it.
Half The Fun
Happy-Go-Lucky Local
Diminuendo in Blue, outrageous Paul Gonsalves tenor solo,
Crescendo In Blue
Thelonious Monk
Check out his tempos in the forties
Genius Of Modern Music vol 2
vs his tempos in the sixties.
Monk's Dream
As for repetition, there's a similar progression from
Skippy
Criss Cross
to
Green Chimneys
Functional
Billie Holiday
BH never broke a sweat her whole performing career, and
all of her work used repetitive standard-tune structures.
Ella Fitzgerald
EH is best known for sprinting but she was actually mostly
very chill - compare how slow she sings Cole Porter to the
way they do him in piano bars. As with BH, every note EH
sang was within the repetitive standards. Dig especially
some of her marathon live scat workouts.
How High The Moon
Mack The Knife
John Coltrane
Coltrane rose to fame on the strength of chopsy bebop:
Moment's Notice
Giant Steps
But as he matured, his best playing happened over a relaxed
ambient rumble.
Crescent
Alabama
A Love Supreme
Miles Davis
Miles himself always took his compositions much slower
than any of his interpreters do. Every white bebop group
in the world plays Four as fast as they can, but Miles took
it at a relaxed medium swing on his original recording,
and check out how much better it sounds. (I know he played
it absurdly fast in the sixties, but that band's goal seems
to have been to make an intellectual point with that, not
to sound 'good' per se.)
Four
Ditto Milestones, Donna Lee, Dig, Oleo, So What, and most
of the rest of the canon.
As for simplicity and repetition, see the progression from
Birth Of The Cool
to
Kind Of Blue
and from there to
Bitches' Brew
Bluegrass
Bluegrass is an unusual case, something of an exception
to the speed rule. In some ways, bluegrass defines itself
specifically by the virtuosity it requires to keep up with
the absurd breakneck tempos of some of its canonical works:
Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms
Foggy Mountain Breakdown
But really, while bluegrass lovers are impressed by speed,
the real lasting pleasure comes from more from the music's
groove-oriented, highly predictable repetitive structures.
The best bluegrassers aren't the fastest ones, they're the
ones who sound the most relaxed, even at the craziest tempos
- thus Earl Scruggs is better than Bela Fleck, even though
Bela can play tiny technical circles around Earl. Bela sounds
like he's trying really hard to impress you, while Earl
sounds like he's having a good time and wants you to have
one too. Most really great bluegrass is laid back.
Uncle Pen
Angel Band
Punk and its many offshoots
Punk musicians have defined themselves in opposition to
technical weenies like Bela Fleck, but they wind up playing
excessively and annoyingly fast anyway. Punk values intensity,
but most punk musicians confuse intensity for exertion.
Indie rockers also play too fast for the most part, more
out of anxiety than anger. The only REM song I can get behind
is their slowest groove tune, which if it were streamlined
a little would be terrific:
Drive
It's not just the punks and the metal virtuosos who drive
themselves crazy trying to play faster and faster. All white
Americans obsess about speed to the point where we look like
complete nutjobs to most other world cultures. James
Gleick wrote a good book called Faster, which argues that
most of us, having trained ourselves to be fanatically efficient
in school and at work, can't stop ourselves trying to be that
way in every other aspect of our lives, much to our great
psychological detriment.
Every guitar student I've ever had, regardless of ability,
shows a certain behavior during lessons. To learn any instrument,
you spend one hour learning some particular new technique
and a thousand hours getting really fluid with it. Your muscle
memory learns a lot slower than your semantic memory because
you're wiring lasting neural connections between various different
brain regions, it takes time. It's important that as you practice
a given passage or chord or whatever, you play it correctly
- otherwise you're programming yourself to play wrong, which
later means a lot of effort spent correcting it. I myself
lost years this way. But my students immediately start playing
any new piece of guitar technique as fast as they can, stumbling
over their fingers in a way that quickly turns unmusical.
A terrific teacher of mine, Joe
Giglio, transformed my playing by instructing me to set
the metronome "as slow as you can stand it." He
was right; music students need to play as slowly as is necessary
to play evenly, steadily, and confidently - in short, musically.
Pushing yourself to play faster is useful if you want to play
faster, but it's not helpful if you want to play better.
Musical mastery is about being able to play a given thing
effortlessly, with no technical obstacles in the way of the
flow of feeling between the musician's mind and the listener's.
That given thing doesn't have to be difficult or esoteric
in order to work. Some guitarists have built incredible careers
out of a very small repertoire of beginner-level chords and
scales played at unchallenging tempos - Neil Young, John Lee
Hooker, Keith Richards, John Lennon, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley.
The thing that separates these musicians from the guys at
open mic night is that the masters play more confidently and
definitely, not that they play at a more advanced technical
level. Andre 3000 sounds like he learned to play the guitar
about three weeks before he recorded this classic of effortless
mastery:
Outkast - Hey Ya!
Of course, if you want to play bluegrass or bebop, that's
a lot more information you'll have to absorb first than if
you want to play Hey Ya. Nevertheless, whatever technical
level you're aiming for, effortlessness is much more important
than chops. Brian
Eno reminds us that it's important to keep reducing what
the music attempts, and one way he does that is to compose
everything at double the speed it'll be when released. Anxiously
overstimulated modern human that he is, Eno can't help but
anxiously insert a lot of clutter into his music; he's smart
enough to have adapted technology to help him around a known
limitation.
Here's a satirical composition by John Stump that in my opinion
represents the logical conclusion of academic musical culture
in the West:
