As with my post about rap songs from 1986 to 2000, this is not a complete or systematic survey. Instead, it’s a selection of songs that I love from different styles and eras, that are musically and lyrically interesting, and that point to larger trends. Missy Elliott – “Work It” (2002) I recommend the hilariously filthy album …
Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 2000 to 2025”
My Advanced Pop Transcription class has started our rap unit, where the students have to pick a verse and transcribe eight bars of it into notation. In preparation for that project, we are listening to and analyzing tracks from various styles and eras, and also talking about the larger social and political context of the …
Continue reading “Five songs that show the evolution of rap from 1986 to 2000”
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 …
Continue reading “We should be counting most pop music in 8/4”
For my most recent column, I analyzed “Brown Sugar”, “The Root”, “Playa Playa” and “Really Love”, looking at their peculiar groove, harmony and form. I’m proud of this one. I think the annotated audio waveform screencap is going to become a more regular feature of these things, because you need to be able to see …
I have been teaching at NYU for eleven years. For most of that time, I taught music tech and pop songwriting to music education majors. Recently, the music theory program did a hard pivot from the traditional Eurocentric sequence I went through as a grad student, and they started offering a diverse range of classes …
Continue reading “Advanced Pop Transcription at mid-semester”
Since Bernadetta is the world’s biggest David Byrne fan, I invited her onto the pod to give her review of his current tour.
Next week, my NYU graduate seminar on technology in music education is supposed to start talking about AI: large language models, prompt-based generators, stem separation and so on. I am not feeling much enthusiasm for this unit, for a couple of reasons. First of all, we are currently talking about YouTube, which is a richly …
This is a seemingly dry music theory topic, but it gave me an excuse to sing “You Never Give Me Your Money” and “Fly Me To The Moon” over the instrumental to “I Will Survive”. Should I sing more on the podcast? Chord progressions on the circle of fifths part one by Ethan Hein The …
Continue reading “Circle of Fifths sequences on the pod (also me singing)”
This is a favorite topic of mine, and people on the internet are surprisingly receptive to learning about it. This is another one where the podcast format suits the material well, because being able to splice together verbal explanation of the music with the music itself is so easy and straightforward. It’s making me want …
Continue reading “F-sharp, G-flat, and the mysteries of just intonation”
I tried this already as a YouTube video and a blog post, but I don’t think I did a good job explaining what was going on in each tuning system. This is because I didn’t really understand the tuning systems myself. I have been filling gaps in my knowledge and refining my examples, and the …
Continue reading “Listening to the Well-Tempered Clavier in actual well temperament”
