Anyone care to analyze this R&B song?

[qa2pir]

the singer even takes an A with emphasis

"doing this and that is sort of like a faux tat"

blablablablabla

are you from the french court or smth jancivil?

I agree about no F minor though

[A.M. Gold]

Of course this is just a "stupid pop song" so feel free to refrain from wasting your time with it if you so choose.

So, do browbeat your straw man. I think it's a fine song. I liked it, and I jammed with it and got into a blues mode for the evening which I enjoyed.

You are both seeking to apply a bit of information, digested in your case not so well I think, rather than really listen. Two to one in an ad populum argument to justify ignoring someone you don't like much. Complete failure logically.

You demonstrate to me you aren't ready to hear this material. I'm not doing this to impress you. You would be the last person in the world I care to. I'm the person to listen to about this music. And since you are not ready for this information, this knowledge I AM wasting my time. If you want an answer get out of your own way. If you want to jagoff you're doing a fine job.

Apologies for expecting that you dismissed the piece out of hand. That was apparently my bias that was incorrect in this case.

The rest of this post is just plain bizarre, though. You are so over the top you end up at the bottom again.

[A.M. Gold]

I agree about no F minor though

Respectfully disagree. I'm still hearing it. Either that or something else that is inherently out of key is going on briefly in the second half of the chorus. I think it's a brief shift from G minor to C minor, which is a simple one degree modulation by fourth, which would explain why it has a smooth and subtle quality.

[BertKoor]

It's quite simple to me... There are musicians that do analysis and those who don't. Musicians that can't play without sheet music and those that only play without. And everything inbetween, nothing's black or white.

It reminds me of the discussion I had with a piano player that played along excellently with everything he heared. But if you asked him to play a Cmaj7, he could not deliver even if his life depended on it, and he played it just a minute ago in a song. To him it was no problem at all that he could not put names to the chords he played. EVen though communication about schemas was rather difficult with him.

Each to his own, it's all OK by me... Whatever floats your boat.

[A.M. Gold]

There's a reason why I stay off this forum primarily, and it has to do with what I think of as "musical reductionism".

A prime example, to me, was demonstrated here when jancivil immediately started characterizing this piece as "pentatonic", and then went so far as to equate it with blues.

So here we have to confront something, and that is this question: does the actual experience of this piece for the average listener have anything at all to do with blues?

I strongly contend that it doesn't. I think 99.9% of listeners would hear very little blues in this piece. If it had to be equated with any genre outside of the very generalized category of modern R&B, it would be something like "smooth jazz".

For that reason, the whole exercise of zeroing in on any kind of pentatonic (and as a possible extension, blues-based) aspect of this piece really doesn't mean anything to me. If your way of deconstructing music leads you to perceive this as a blues based piece, then, in my opinion, you are pointed in the wrong direction, because this piece sounds nothing at all like blues, regardless of how many reductionistic components can in some way be connected with blues.

The bottom line is this: I make music for an audience, not for a group of academics. Academics feel some need to pick apart music and make it into a collection of little component parts, but almost no one actually hears music that way.

So the question has to be asked: for anyone who wishes to make music for public consumption, is it ultimately a winning or a losing proposition to approach music in this kind of intellectual and inherently reductionistic manner?

[shankfiddle]

So here we have to confront something, and that is this question: does the actual experience of this piece for the average listener have anything at all to do with blues?

I strongly contend that it doesn't. I think 99.9% of listeners would hear very little blues in this piece. If it had to be equated with any genre outside of the very generalized category of modern R&B, it would be something like "smooth jazz".

There's a reason why I stay off this forum primarily, and it has to do with people taking others' words entirely out of context. ie: when posters like yourself completely ignore the substance of someone like jancivil's post and argue with one phrase out of context.

In this case, it's not even a phrase, but a word: "blues", that's causing you to dismiss jan's entire post.

She was referring to the minor pentatonic scale, not the blues genre, go back and actually read the posts. I thought that was pretty obvious. It can help to call it the "blues scale" because of its widespread use in the blues. But nowhere in her posts does she say it is "blues".

Your song adheres to the minor pentatonic scale more rigidly than it does to the chord progressions you charted out. That is all jan's saying. And in your own quote above, you admit it falls into the R&B genre loosely-defined (I hate to use genre distinctions because there's so much overlap/ambiguity).

So what does the B stand for in R&B!?!?!

minor pentatonic, yup.

[osiris]

It;s a ripoff of Irreplaceable by Beyonce.

[BERFAB]

FWIW, I'm fascinated by everyone's analysis in this thread. Personally, I need 'the blocks' (as jancivil says) of the chords to hang my compositions on. But they are, for me at least, just a starting point where substitutions become the norm.

I'm also intrigued by jancivil's analysis, which, to my thinking, is a more out-of-the-box approach. There's more of a 'poetry' involved there, and I think I get the point about looking at what each musician is contributing, rather than trying to box in the composition with staid structural analysis.

I don't personally believe there's any 'correct' way of doing this, which, ironically, is why the OP posted the question in the first place.

Cheers
-B

[A.M. Gold]

FWIW, I'm fascinated by everyone's analysis in this thread. Personally, I need 'the blocks' (as jancivil says) of the chords to hang my compositions on. But they are, for me at least, just a starting point where substitutions become the norm.

I'm also intrigued by jancivil's analysis, which, to my thinking, is a more out-of-the-box approach. There's more of a 'poetry' involved there...

I didn't read poetry into jancivil's assessment. I read a hasty analysis in which there was a claim of "no chord movement and no key changes". I couldn't disagree more, and so I immediately took issue and saw it as overly reductionistic. If I mistook that assessment for belittling the piece when it wasn't intended to, then I apologize for that.

[A.M. Gold]

In this case, it's not even a phrase, but a word: "blues", that's causing you to dismiss jan's entire post.

No, there was more to it than that. The claims made were more radical (i.e. no chord movement), I just picked out the blues part of it because it exemplifies to me the tendency of academics to home in too much on factors that are ultimately much less relevant than they make them out to be. I agree that if you isolate the vocal there is a blues feel, but the overall piece is so far from a blues piece that making that connection isn't very helpful.

Your song adheres to the minor pentatonic scale more rigidly than it does to the chord progressions you charted out.

Not to my ears or my perception of the impact of the song. I clearly hear chords here that are more jazz than blues, "Minor pentatonic" is neither here nor there to me. If you would call this a "modern pop/jazz" piece with a minor pentatonic basis, I couldn't disagree with that, but bringing up blues is misleading in this case, as far as I'm concerned.

So what does the B stand for in R&B!?!?!

minor pentatonic, yup.

"Rhythm & Blues" is actually a very broad term coined by white journalists (probably in the 40's or late '30's) and originally just meant "African American popular music". It means all kinds of different things if you follow it through the decades, but to assume that it is inherently anchored in a blues sound, I think, is incorrect.

Most American black music is either jazz, blues, or reggae influenced (and to some extent Afro-Cuban and African influenced but let's leave that out for now), but blues, per se, has a very strong sound of its own and, as I stated earlier, the vast majority of listeners don't identify R&B strongly with blues, regardless of past influences that may be traced to blues. R&B has evolved to a state where it is closer to the sound of white jazzmen like Dave Koz and David Sanborn than it is to something that strongly identifies with any blues based roots.