I’ve had a lot of music teachers, formal and informal. The best one has been the computer. It mindlessly plays anything I tell it to, over and over. Hearing an idea played back on a continuous loop tells me quickly if it’s good or not. If the idea is bad, I immediately get annoyed, and if it’s good, I’ll cheerfully listen to it loop for hours.
There’s something in the cumulative experience of a loop that makes it greater than the sum of the individual listens. Good loops create a meditative, trance-like state, like Buddhist mantras you can dance to. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s the right groove, there’s no such thing as too much repetition. Take “Hey Jude” by the Beatles.
At the end, they repeat “Naah, na na nanana naah, nanana naah, hey Jude” over and over for four minutes. I could listen to it for forty minutes. Why don’t I get bored? Each time through, the chant affects me a little differently. The forty-third time through might be musically indistinguishable from the forty-second but it feels different. My attention drifts and snaps back in. There’s a feeling of tension through each group of four or eight that gets resolved on the first repetition in the next phrase. A cumulative tension builds across all the repetitions.
Some western listeners get anxious from this tension. I’ve seen loops make people surprisingly angry. The loop reaches deep into the brain stem, and not everybody likes having their consciousness altered so heavily. I’ve also seen loops bring groups of people into ecstatic states with an afterglow lasting for days, weeks, even months.
Loops make me happy
In retrospect, I look back at stuff I liked the best instinctively before I was a musician, still just a fan, and what ties it all together is loop-oriented structures.
- Riff-based Ellington, Monk and Coltrane tunes
- “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads
- “Not Fade Away” and “Fire On The Mountain” by the Grateful Dead
- “Stir It Up” by Bob Marley
- “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson
- Everything by Run-DMC
- The first few minutes of “Chameleon” by Herbie Hancock
On paper, these tunes are all very boring pieces of music. But living in my ears, they’re bottomlessly gratifying.
People with a casual relationship to music tend to enjoy loop-based material, especially on the dance floor. But many if not most of the trained musicians I’ve worked with are resistant to the loop. Whether they come from jazz or classical, schooled musicians tend to equate quality with complexity, density and unpredictability. This to me is one of the great pathologies afflicting the music academy. Making good music takes a lot of study and focus, but that’s different from effort. Some of the best music is easy. After struggling with all the intricacies of music theory, we musicians get too suspicious of simple truths. That suspicion gets in the way of our main job of connecting to listeners and making their lives more bearable.
A few years ago I went to hear a highly respected quartet led by a saxophonist who the jazz nerds speak of in hushed tones. I got to the club early enough to catch the soundcheck. While the sound guy fiddled with levels, the band played an open-ended funk groove on one chord. It was exhilarating: the loose interplay between the band members was anchored by the straightforward groove to make a satisfyingly tight sonic knot. I was all excited for the actual set, which turned out to be… a snooze. The material was full of startling key and time signature changes at unpredictable intervals. The band maneuvered through these sonic mazes masterfully, and I’m sure they enjoyed themselves, but for me it was like watching someone else play a difficult video game. And these are jazz musicians, supposedly the warm, emotionally connected wing of intellectual music. The situation is even worse in the classical world.
All music is based on repetition
The definition of a rhythm is a patterned sound that repeats (or, for that matter, any patterned event that repeats.) Pitched sounds are produced by regular sine-wave vibrations as an air column’s pressure cycles back and forth.
Repetition and recursion
Nearly all world music uses repeating phrases grouped into longer phrases, and groups those metaphrases into meta-metaphrases. Entire sections get repeated to form still higher level structures. For my ears, the most satisfying music is the most modular and recursive.
Loops and thermodynamics
Repeated events are surprising because they’re thermodynamically improbable. Usually the rock falls off the mountain and just sits there. For the rock to roll around and around in a circle, some unusual force must be driving it. When we come across something improbable, we instinctively want to find a meaning for it. Symmetrical repetition creates structure and gratifies our pattern-recognition systems, the same ones that enjoy parsing out the meaning of a text or the rules of a video game.
Structure acts very strongly on our emotions, often without our realizing why. One reason the Beatles and Michael Jackson sell so many more records than their seemingly equally talented peers is their mastery of structured repetition. Their best work repeats phrases exactly the right number of times, in exactly the right sequence. This aspect of songwriting is harder to quantify in rule sets than rhythm or harmony, but that hasn’t stopped the music industry from trying. Here’s an excerpt of an entertaining McSweeney’s series, Dispatches From a Guy Trying Unsuccessfully to Sell a Song In Nashville by Charlie Hopper.
To me, it appears that Music Row’s devotion to form and formula is not strictly venal. It’s just the smartest way to send a song into the Machine without you being there to defend it. “The first rule of songwriting is, there are no rules,” Barbara Cloyd, a Songwriting Tutor, likes to declare at the outset of her class. Then she takes a fairly deep breath: “Having said that…”
And she goes on to explain the three or four acceptable formulas.
It all proceeds from the notion that there are basic truths about how people like to get information. Barbara quotes someone she knows as saying, “We like to hear something, then hear it again. Then we want to hear something different for a while. After that, we’re ready to hear the first thing again.”That would be Verse Chorus, Verse Chorus, Bridge, Verse Chorus.
I knew John spoke the Universal Language of Beatles. “So the basic formula is like, oh, ‘Ticket to Ride.’ Or ‘Day Tripper.'”
I might have been a little didactic. “Then, if you want, you can start with two verses. That gives you an option to have one or two verses after the first chorus. But you never put two verses after the first chorus unless you had two at the beginning. That screws with the formula.”
John was laughing and shaking his head in a way that meant he couldn’t believe I had bought into this seriously.
“Like ‘Yellow Submarine,'” I said. “Two verses, chorus, one verse, chorus, the farting around in a submarine during the bridge, verse, chorus. Actually, the bridge is optional. I’ve heard publishers say, ‘Do you really need a bridge here? There’s no new information in it…'”
The other form that’s generally acceptable, though less prized because it has no soaring chorus, is the “A A B A” form. The hook comes as the end line of each A section. It might show up at the end of the B section, but doesn’t have to. Most songs that are written with no thought of formula tend to be in this form. “Yesterday” is A A B A. “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is. “Girl” is. Most Bob Dylan songs are.
Repetitive music teaches itself to you as you listen
Repetition creates familiarity, which is a prerequisite to emotional connection. Cognitive scientists use the word “rehearsal” to describe the process by which the brain learns through repeated exposure to the same stimulus. As they like to say, neurons that fire together wire together. Repetitive music builds rehearsal in, making it more accessible and inclusive.
Africa vs Europe
In America, our musical culture is a hybrid of mostly western European, African and Caribbean traditions. Our musical ancestors have some philosophical differences around repetition. The western European classical music term for a continually repeated phrase is an ostinato, from the Italian word for “stubborn.” It’s related to the English word obstinate. This is not an attractive quality in a person and the European classical world doesn’t think too highly of it as a quality of music either. Theodor Adorno criticized the repetitiveness of popular music as being “psychotic and infantile.” He was outspokenly contemptuous of jazz and dance music generally. From his book Prisms:
Considered as a whole, the perennial sameness of jazz consists not in a basic organization of the material within which the imagination can roam freely and without inhabitation, as within an articulate language, but rather in the utilization of certain well-defined tricks, formulas, and cliches to the exclusion of everything else.
Adorno is factually correct. But he’s wrong that this is a defect of the music. The tricks, formulas and cliches are the basic grammar of pleasure. Cooking tofu with sesame oil, ginger and soy sauce is a cliche too, and for good reason, it consistently makes the tofu taste good.
Fortunately, we in America are blessed with the strong African and Caribbean influences, and the musicians of these cultures hold circularity as a high virtue. To pick one example out of a vast many, Fela Kuti’s “Beasts Of No Nation” repeats the chords G minor to F for about half an hour. It doesn’t get old.
Sample-based hip-hop is the music most exciting my ears right now. The best beatmakers find fragments that were part of a linear stream and bend them into unexpected loops. I don’t know the provenance of this RZA quote beyond wikipedia, but it’s a good one:
For hip hop, the main thing is to have a good trained ear, to hear the most obscure loop or sound or rhythm inside of a song. If you can hear the obscureness of it, and capture that and loop it at the right tempo, you’re going to have some nice music man, you’re going to have a nice hip hop track.
This is good advice for any musician, not just hip-hop beatmakers.