We should be counting most pop music in 8/4

Almost all Anglo-American pop music is in 4/4, aside from occasional 6/8 ballads. However, dancers tend to count off “five, six, seven, eight.” Why are they counting like this? Is it because they are thinking in 8/4 or 8/8? If so, they are right to do so. I think everybody should be counting pop music in 8. The history of Anglo-American popular music over the past hundred years is a steady progression through slower tempos and finer subdivisions. We already made the transition from counting in 2 to counting in 4, and counting in 8 would be the next logical step.

Let’s go back 120 years and consider Scott Joplin.

Every rag in this book except one is in 2/4 time. (For whatever reason, “Magnetic Rag” is in 4/4.)

Marches by John Philip Souza are mostly in 2/2 time, aside from the occasional 6/8.

Joplin and Souza embody the mainstream of American popular culture at the beginning of the 20th century: the “oom-pah” rhythm is the standard pulse.

The transition from ragtime and marching band music to jazz and R&B was accompanied by a transition from 2/2 and 2/4 to 4/4. Bassists started to play walking quarter note lines rather than just doing the “oom” in “oom-pah”. People also started swinging their eighth notes more. When you listen to Louis Armstrong, everyone behind him sounds like they’re playing marching band music, but he sounds like he’s playing jazz.

Country music made the transition from 2/4 to 4/4 too. Sometimes people like to claim that country music is still in 2/4, but I have never in my life heard an actual country musician count off in 2. This doesn’t matter much for this discussion, because country wasn’t and isn’t usually notated, but it’s worth pointing out.

Anyway, throughout the jazz era and into rock and roll, most popular songs were in 4/4 with an eighth note pulse. But then, starting around 1960, two big things happened: the pulse shifted from eighth notes to sixteenth notes, and the piano was displaced by the guitar. We’ll deal with the pulse issue first.

Let’s compare two performances by the Jackson 5. Here’s “Rockin’ Robin”.

Though this was recorded in 1972, it’s a clear throwback to the 1950s, with swinging eighth notes. Now listen to “I Want You Back”.

In this tune, the eighth notes are straight, and the sixteenth notes swing. There are also lots of accented sixteenth note offbeats, most clearly in the bassline. The tempo is slower to accommodate all this structure at the finer subdivision level. These two songs illustrate the transition from jazz-based pop music to funk-based pop music: slower tempos, straight eighths, and sixteenth-note-level syncopation and swing.

Sixteenth note syncopations sound great, but they are difficult to notate and difficult to read. We could save ourselves a lot of trouble by writing all this funk in cut time, so, writing eighth notes at half the tempo. Here are two ways of writing the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” by Michael Jackson. They both sound exactly the same. Which would you rather read?

If we really did start notating pop music in 8 rather than 4, then we wouldn’t be thinking in terms of a 16th note pulse; we would still be thinking in eighth notes, just with a slower tempo, and with the backbeats on beats 3 and 7 rather than on 2 and 4. Most pop music uses two-measure hypermeter, which is just implicit bars of 8 anyway. And dancers habitually count off in 8. But while notational convention changed to reflect the transition from 2/4 to 4/4, it did not change to reflect the transition from 4/4 to (implicit) 8/4. Why not?

To answer that question, we have to consider the transition from piano-centrism to guitar-centrism. Up until the rock and roll era, popular music was something you mostly played on piano, most pianists were reading sheet music, and most songwriters were writing in notation. Rock and roll was also a piano-based music in its earliest incarnation as well; think of Fats Domino and Little Richard (Shoutout to Andrew Hickey’s 500 Songs podcast for this observation.)

But with Elvis, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, rock went from being paradigmatically performed by Black guys on pianos to being paradigmatically performed by white guys on guitars (with Chuck Berry representing a transitional point between the two.) Some guitarists can read notation, but most can’t (aside from chord charts). They write by memorization and recording. There are certainly still music readers in pop music, but they are professionals: session musicians, arrangers, musical theater composers. These people are skilled enough to be able to handle sixteenth note syncopations. Meanwhile, there is no longer a culture of amateurs reading sheet music, so there’s no real pressure to keep that sheet music accessible.

This shift puts music educators in an awkward position. Amateur musicians may not be reading music at home, but school ensembles continue to be notation-based almost across the board. Progressive-minded, culturally responsive music teachers want to bring in music that the kids relate to, but that music is both melodically too simple and rhythmically too complex to be well-suited to wind band, choir and orchestra. When arrangers do adapt pop songs for student ensembles, they can’t fill them with sixteenth note syncopations because those are too hard for the kids to read. So instead, the rhythms get simplified and squared off, and the results sound grim.

There are amateur music communities that do play very rhythmically sophisticated music: the Black church, hip-hop and dance music scenes, blues and funk jam sessions. It is no accident that all of this music is created, learned and played by ear.

Meanwhile, the trend of slower average tempo and finer subdivision continues. Hip-hop subgenres like trap and drill are starting to move into 32nd notes. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of popular culture follows suit. I predict that notation won’t follow along. The main medium for pop music has shifted from the guitar to the computer, and in DAWs, you can work at whatever subdivision level you want to. Hip-hop producers usually work in cut time, so if a trap song with a lot of 32nd notes is at 65 BPM, producers will usually set the session tempo to 130, put the snare on beat 3, and use 16ths as 32nds. It’s only confusing if you have to describe this music in the language of notation. But notation belongs to institutions now, and institutions are resistant to change by their nature.