Remember the indefinable murk of Paranoid Android? Well, that ambiance is partly achieved through the song using a 12 bar pattern – much harder to wrap your head around than the usual 4 bars. Citing the Pixies as a major influence, they took this rhythmic tomfoolery to the next level in their timeless 1997 OK Computer. Pixies did some pretty original things for a rock group, but they were still essentially fiddling with the 4 bars of 4/4 format, adding or subtracting a bar, maybe throwing in an extra 2 beats here and there. Silver uses a 3/4 time signature, which is actually not uncommon in classical music, but unusually it puts bars in groups of 7. La La Love You uses a 2 ½ bar pattern (!), and Crackity Jones and Dead are so all over the place that I can’t even figure them out. Wave of Mutilation also does this, except with only 2 beats per bar, while There Goes my Gun uses 6 beats per bar. The excision of the expected 4th bar creates a frantic rushed effect, like the repeats of the chorus are crashing down upon each other. The tracks Tame and Hey both use a 3 bar pattern in the chorus. It wasn’t long after the Gouge Away discovery that I realised that, in fact, the entire of Doolittle was as riddled with weird rhythmic choices as Madame Chat is with fleas. But what if, just for once, you drank your soup from… a boot?
By analogy, you could make an infinite number of soups by combining different ingredients, but the final product is pretty much always served in a bowl. All songs are written with different tempos, instrumentations, melodies and harmonies, but for the great majority of popular music the time signature is fixed: 4 beats per bar, 4 bars grouped together. This structure is so ubiquitous in many musical genres (rock, dance, pop, country, hip hop etc) that for many listeners – and many musicians – it’s a given, a fundamental constant of music which needn’t even be considered. So, 4 bars of 4 beats each, repeat ad nauseum.
These 4 beats together make up a bar, and bars are usually found in groups of 4. Many, many songs are written in ‘4/4’, meaning you can count 1 to 4 over and over again to the rhythm. The discovery that such a thing was possible – and felt so good – was on par with the fateful day back in high school when I accidentally discovered my penis’ second function.Ī quick aside for any non-musically savvy readers may be in order. I remember I was hanging in my room being awed by the track Gouge Away, a ferocious take on the biblical Sampson and Delilah story, when a realisation hit me like a slap in the face: the song didn’t use a 4-bar progression. NB: I f you’re not interested in bands like Pixies, Radiohead and the Dismemberment Plan, you might want to give this a miss.īack when I was still a freshling undergraduate, a friend introduced me to the Pixies’ seminal 1989 album, Doolittle.
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