ROCK 'N' ROLL BON MOTS #012: you-thought-my-correct-punctuation-usin'-ass-abandoned-you-didn't-you edition.

The problem with "Fuck It" is that there are stretches where it will completely disrupt any anticipation I have for listening to any other piece of music. This morning, for instance, I was walking along 177th street to the train, thinking, "Oh boy, I'm going to listen to the new PJ Harvey album!" when suddenly, it popped into my head: "Fuck what I said, it don't mean shit now..." And then there was just no way I could go on living if I didn't hear "Fuck It" in the next half hour. Damned annoying.

Incidentally, were one to want to do a musical rather than textual analysis of said track, one could note the way the high hat in the second half of the beat tends to avoid the quarter note, sometimes coming in only on the second and third sixteenths and then skipping the first, thus introducting the idea of envealoping the center of the beat, an idea that is reinforced by how often the verse vocals tend to land on the fourth sixteenth (or at least so it seemed to my rapidly-tappin' fingers) but not fully realized until the chorus, where the vocals on the first half of the bar are triplets (the general pattern is three triplets quarters, quarter, quarter rest), and two out of every three triplets exist so far in the middle of the beat that they're not on anything, just sort of around an odd-numbered 32nd. (OK, they're on something, I know, but not in the context of 4/4 pop.) One could then go on to look at how this in-betweenness defines "soul" or "funkiness" (roughly, to my mind, here's how it works: blues has harmonic in-betweenness, funk has rhythmic in-betweenness, and soul has a mixture of both) as well as how the sort of thematic rhythmic congruence or counterpoint of the chorus works to emphasize the anger in a sort of soul-punk way. But I got shit to do, so don't ask me to do it.
posted by Mike B. at 10:53 AM 0 comments