Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues

There is a fascinating moment in “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin where Robert Plant plays a very flat ninth on the harmonica. I love this note, because there is so much music theory and history encoded within it. Listen at 0:41.

Before we can get into the details of this note and what makes it so, um, noteworthy, you need some background. “When The Levee Breaks” is heavily adapted from a song of the same name by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. It tells the story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which left hundreds of thousands of mostly Black people in horrific refugee camps. Kansas Joe sings and plays rhythm guitar, and Minnie plays lead.

Led Zeppelin’s song is a word salad of the original over a different instrumental backing. The lyrics don’t make any particular sense, and they don’t try to; Robert Plant is going for more of a vibe. When I was a teenaged Zeppelin fan, I didn’t know what a levee was, and my understanding of Black history was vague at best. I certainly didn’t know anything about the Great Mississippi Flood. The same was probably true of Robert Plant when he wrote his lyrics. Continue reading “Led Zeppelin and the folkloric integrity of the blues”

Groove: an aesthetic of measured time

As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.

Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.

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Human Behaviour

Here’s a Björk song that is both maddeningly catchy and relentlessly weird. That’s true of so many of them!

This was the first single on Björk’s first solo album (as an adult.) It was a bold choice! It’s not the weirdest song on the album, but it is far from the most conventional. The video was directed by Michel Gondry, the first of many.

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Elizabeth Cotten’s fingerstyle ragtime

Dust-to-digital posted this lovely performance of “Washington Blues” by Elizabeth Cotten. It reminded me that she is the greatest and that I should write more about her.

If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.

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I Wanna Be Your Lover

In addition to drumming with the Roots, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a brilliant DJ, and he wrote a Twitter thread about his top ten most reliable dance floor fillers. Prince figures heavily in the thread, first because he once tipped Quest $100 for having the audacity to slip Miles Davis’ “Milestones” into a DJ set. But of course the thread also talks about Prince’s own music, including “I Wanna Be Your Lover”. This reminded me that it’s one of the best funk songs ever recorded, and that I should transcribe it.

Songfacts says that Prince wrote the song about Patrice Rushen, who did some synth programming on his first album. They never got together, though. As with so many of his classics, Prince wrote, performed and produced the track himself. The album version includes a longer jam at the end, and rightly so. It’s a killer funk instrumental in its own right. And it’s Prince jamming with himself!

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Betty Davis and the blues sus4

I heard this Betty Davis song while I was doing a shift at the Park Slope Food Coop and the guitar riff grabbed my ears. In this post, I explain why, and what the riff can tell us about blues harmony.

First of all: is this music blues? You might argue that it’s a funk song. It is a funk song, but Tony Bolden’s book Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk makes the case that, well, it’s right there in the title. The sixteenth-note swing of funk is different from the eighth-note shuffle of the blues, but they share the same harmonic structure, and the same general cultural context. Betty Davis makes the connection explicit in this song, which is all about her and her family’s love of the blues. Continue reading “Betty Davis and the blues sus4”

Warp factor

In this post, I dig into a profound and under-appreciated expressive feature of Ableton Live: warp markers, the “handles” that enable you to grab hold of audio and stretch it precisely. Warp markers have practical applications for getting your grooves sounding the way you want, but they also open up unexpected windows into the nature of musical time itself.

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Psycho Killer

Read my entire Talking Heads series here.

I connect more to Talking Heads’ Afrobeat and funk-inspired material than to their more “song-y” material, but, I mean, this is the archetypal Talking Heads tune, so I can’t not write about it.

“Psycho Killer” is part of a particular family of Talking Heads songs that also includes “And She Was”, “Cities” and “Don’t Worry About The Government“: a collage of simple musical ideas that do not have any obvious relationship to each other. This makes the songs feel comfortingly familiar within each section while also feeling jarringly weird every time they move from one section to another.

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Crosseyed And Painless

Since I’m stuck in my apartment with Covid for a while, looks like I have plenty of time to continue my Talking Heads series. Here’s one of their funkiest and most Afrobeat-sounding tracks.

David Byrne always speak-sings to an extent, but this song has an actual rap verse (“Facts are simple and facts are straight…”) Chris Frantz says that he played Byrne “The Breaks” by Kurtis Blow to inspire his delivery. Frantz also says that the song’s title refers to being extremely drunk.

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Take Me To The River

See the complete Talking Heads series

The only cover that Talking Heads ever recorded was a tune co-written by Al Green and his guitarist Teenie Hodges.

Like all Al Green classics, this was produced by the great Willie Mitchell. Teenie’s brothers Charles and Leroy play organ and bass respectively, the drums are by Howard Grimes, the horns are by the Memphis Horns, and the strings are by the Memphis Strings. The Reverend Al dedicated the song to his cousin Junior Parker.

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