Drive-By Diplomacy, Yo!

Shoot'em Up In Style

‘The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook’ and Chord Progressions

Back in the late 1970s, you could get The Beatles Complete, a chord Songbook featuring nearly all the songs by The Beatles. As a kid, I had this thing even before I had my first guitar with the idiotic notion that if you could just play these chords, you could get to playing these songs. It’s not wrong, but there’s a lot more to it than just pressing down on those chords and strumming. Through my high school years, most of my guitar-playing friends had this book too. It was de rigueur.

If you’re any way creative, what happens next is you start writing your own songs with your own words and by recombining the chords, and that is how Gen-X learned to write songs. This is where we got all our chords, and learned how to sequence them so it started to vaguely resemble music. It was the Rosetta Stone for kids who flunked music lessons through primary school, to climb back into music through a bathroom window pried open by John and Paul. Screw the recorders and harmonica; strumming 6 strings on a guitar got you to finding the truth!

That is how The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook looms so large over the landscape there is a whole Harold Bloom/Anxiety of Influence going on. Kurt Cobain for instance, famously made a study of The Beatles Complete, but worked very hard to swerve away from the kind of chord progressions Lennon and McCartney devised. You can detect it in his work as he writes decidedly interesting progressions and voicings.

A song like ‘Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle’ is diabolical.
The Verse goes through G - Eb - F# - Eb - F# with a slight detour to A# -F - F# before returning to the original sequence. The chorus goes C -D# - C# - A# - B ending on a chromatic walk down of A# - A - Ab. The breakdown section goes G-D# repeating, and then it closes out with a C - C/C# - A# - Ab at the end of which, the complete uglification of music is complete (I’m joking!). There’s nary a Lennon-McCartney derived chord change in there, but it is so studied it makes you ponder how ornery and idiosyncratic Cobain was as a human being.

You can compare that to a more slavish effort like Noel Gallagher of Oasis who looks like he made a study of it as well as he just lifts changes. ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ has a E7 with a weird bass note G thrown into an otherwise ordinary progression: C -G - Am - E7/G -F - G - C. The first 4 chord moves of course come straight out of ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’ and voila, there’s your regurgitated song for the 1990s. That’s a teenager’s effort. I know I’ve done one of those myself, just not with ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’.

More sophisticated acts draw different lessons. They don’t steal the progressions, they life concepts and model new chord substitutions. Radiohead show they studied the Beatles Complete and work very hard to surprise the listener by retaining aspects of the Beatles chord progressions but trying to go further. with modal interchanges Songs like ‘Everything in its Right Place’ and ‘Pyramid Song’ by sticking in major chords in dark and minor modes.

There is an aspect to songwriting in Rock this side of 1980, that is a gigantic undertaking to digest the lexicon the Beatles assembled through their song catalogue, as presented in ‘The Beatles Complete’. And this is why I brought up Harold Bloom’s book earlier. Everybody in songwriting who has done their due diligence is trying to measure a distance or relationship between themselves and the Beatles song catalogue. In this light you begin to understand the experiments that took place where you have 1 chord dirges, or the abolishing of melody in Rap, or stripped down minimalist progressions. Everybody is coming at the problematic of songwriting after Lennon-McCartney in different ways.

So just how big were The Beatles? You could say we’re still finding out.

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Carney Comes To Town

This week saw the visit by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who delivered a couple of important addresses. I managed to catch the speech to Parliament and was struck by how strange it was to have that kind of serious moment with the top representative of Canada’s polity. Albo for his part understood the moment and in his opening remarks pointed out we didn’t share hemispheres neither North-South nor East-West. We’re really far away diagonally across the Pacific Ocean if but for the weird historic inheritance of the Great British Empire, we’d be total strangers thrice-removed. So you had a moment where we were all very glad colonialism was a thing. I bet that didn’t go down well with the Greens.

It wasn’t couched that way but when you unpack it, you have to draw the conclusion that what Mark Carney was asking of Australia is to continue the process of Civilisation that led to the globalised economy. His argument was that if all the middle powers banded together and kept the rule of law going, then we could keep the cake of globalisation and eat the cake of global mutual security. It’s a reasonable proposition which is why there were no serious commentators complaining about it. If you said 5 years ago this is what the PM of Canada was going to tell the Australian Parliament, it would have been pretty damned outlandish.

In any case, we find ourselves in this part of history where the USA has become a rogue nation. How are the rest of us sensible nations supposed to carry on without our sponsor? Was the 80 year post-war era of peace and commerce really just an illusion and are we headed back to some brutal border-bending international politics? I suspect there should be a bit more soul-searching about how this came to pass, but I know we’ll be hostage to pretty rudimentary partisan barking.

I guess we’ll see how the middle powers can band together.

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This Week’s AI Music

I’m not sure I should be making this a weekly spot but I am paying for Suno for a year so I may as well make the most of its powers. This week I’m going with Rap and Hip Hop. That’s really not my native genre of course, but it’s a genre suited to telling truth to power. The best way to listen to this week’s batch is to “pump up da volume”, get up, and dance, baby.

First up is a song about the parlous state of Trump Presidency Mk 2.

This one is about how people seem to get protected by institutions having committed heinous crimes.

Here’s a song about how US Diplomacy is resembling Gangland Drive-By Shootings lately.

Heavy weighs the crown Mr T-Rump.

Back in the 1980s when Rap broke through, the naysayers were asking “is this even music?” Well it wasn’t music as you knew it, Jim, but it sure was here to stay. And so we look at AI music today. The naysayers are saying “is this even music?” once more.
I reckon it too, is here to stay.

These didn’t take long to conjure up using AI. Our relationship to making music is changing. Arguably, the ability to produce musical recordings has really hit zero. From here on in, people can make their own music to reflect their own moods and sentiment using AI. Why would you need some artist out there producing this utility for you to buy in some product format? In a weird way we’ve crashed through to a horizon where the medium isn’t the message any more because there is no message, there’s just the medium.

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What’s Spinning This Week (in no particular order):

1. Mahavishnu - Mahavishnu Orchestra

2. Panic of Girls - Blondie

3. Gone to Earth - David Sylvian

4. Triple J’s Hottest 100 Vol.16

Briefly in the mid-1980s, The Mahavishnu Orchestra made their return and promptly turned in an airy, almost easy-listening kind of fusion music. John McLaughlin is on the Synclavier a lot. It sounds oddly out of place in the context of 1984 as well as the rest of the Mahavishnu Orchestra catalogue. I remember reading about this album coming out in Guitar Player magazine, around the time I was going my HSC Trials. of course, I never saw it in any of the record shops I frequented. Perhaps there is a reason why I didn’t get to this album until now.

The afterlife of Blondie is interesting. What does a band do after they put out their Greatest Hits album and go into hiatus for 17 years, and then stagger back into the spotlight? You keep making records in a very particular vein. Everything I said about ‘The Curse of Blondie’ applies to ‘Panic of Girls’ Debbie Harry still sounds like she’s 27 on this record. It’s eclectic in a New York post-punk manner. Debbie Harry continues to sound like an awkward chorus girl brought to the fore to front for a band and is a little miscast. It’s hard to believe there was 8 years between the two albums.

The week’s nostalgia listen is ‘Gone to Earth’ by David Sylvian. Back in the day, I thrashed this thing. It was so awesome when it came out. Robert Fripp and Bill Nelson make their mark on this album. Also present is Mel Collins, another King Crimson alumni. The 16 bit digital reverb on this was delectable. We hadn’t heard anything so transparent and pristine until this thing popped onto our laps. Today I can get an even more elaborate convolution reverb on my Apple MacMini, so it doesn’t sound quite so impressive today as it did back then. The music is still awe-inspiring.

Vol.16 - Damn. Didn’t know any of these songs. Halfway through the 30 year stretch, I’ve found the year I stopped being a JJJ listener. Disc 1 is really good, Disc 2, not so much. Contrary to the myth bandied about, music is not getting worse. A lot of the material on here is good and if you were to assign scores and average it out, the average would probably come out higher than for some of the earlier offerings that I can remember from the 1990s. The Rap material is developing a slanted Australian irony, the rock stuff is rich and well-arranged, the pop is sophisticated and there are few boring songs on disc 1. There are a number of years you can’t say that about this series from the 1990s. Arguably, the second decade is much more consistent in quality, and the annual novelty song has quietly dropped off the radar.