Owing to the fact that I have less days in front of me than behind and am thus already over the hill and on the inevitable downward slide, hurtling towards death, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the peak of my listening to music on the radio has also passed. (Memento Mori Quam Pura Nites). It also doesn't help that the death of Rock Music on the charts likely happened c.2011 and that in an age where everyone get find anything all of the time, that music is now so diffuse that Taylor Swift can occupy all top ten places on the Billboard charts with total sales of those song which two decades ago would not have even charted on the Billboard Top 100.
This means that what does pass through the filters of my personal apathy and public diffusion, is either something so very massive that everyone in the world has heard it or something so old that it's taken a long time to reach me. I for instance know about the existence of Gangnam Style and Despacito but that's likely because those songs have had literally billions of plays on the radio and the internet. Thanks to an advert for an allergy medicine which features a lady singing the song (which may or may not be the lady in the advert), the song that has finally decided to reach me of late and which is currently running around as an ear worm in my head is the 2009 song "Bulletproof" by La Roux. I have heard her version of the song far too often to enjoy it and I am not really a fan of the original but I think that I have discovered my favourite song of 2022.
"How so?" you now ask unless you are able to read text without any kind of inner voice at all. How so indeed? To listen to the version that I like, you're going to have to do some tweaking to the track via the simple controls on YouTube.
I want you to play this song at 0.75x speed because what emerges is something which I do not think that La Roux ever thought of but which in my opinion is better than all other versions of this song, which I think are mostly annoying.
At 1.00x speed, aka 'normal', I think that the usual chord structure of this song is Bm E G Bm. I should point out that I don't really know as I do not have access to a piano and therefore am unable to determine whether or not my guess is correct. I did however noodle about on the guitar and this seemed about right. If we take my guess as true, then I think that the nominal key of this song is B Minor. If so, then I think that B Minor acts as the I chord and the chord which the song constantly wants to return to. I don't really need to know what the functions of the other chords are in this song but you might like to have a play and see what you get.
If we assume that A is a concert A which sits at 440Hz, then the B at the root of the B Minor chord in question likely works out to be about 493Hz. When you stretch out the song, the pitch of literally everything drops and applied maths will give you a new root for the altered song at 369Hz. If you then work backwards from there, then the I chord becomes an F# and the four chords in the song drop to F# Bm D F#.
In principle F# is not exactly a sensible key to be writing songs in, however, because this whole thing has been pitch shifted then all of the hard work has already been done. Here's the fun thing, we already find F# B D in a bunch of Blues Chord voicings because all of those chords exist in the key of G; which is already a good blues key. GDG as a triad is the root and the fifth of G. What we have in effect is a de-facto-faux-les-blues song; which given that the original song is sort of a diss-track post break-up, seems like an apt sort of set of chords to be playing in. F# is not a sensible key to be writing songs in but when they all exist in G, then we're just playing with a chord substitution.
I like the ornamental features of this song which include a 1980s synth pad which sounds like an 8-bit video game, and the 16 bar repeating beat pattern but ultimately my wish is for someone to rerecord this song in the lower key and at the slower speed and in the style of a 1930s big band or an 1890s ragtime piece on a parlour upright piano. I guess that this is a roundabout way of saying that I am way less enthusiastic about the original version and the advert version of this song and more enthusiastic about the potential that this song has.
Both the original song sung by La Roux and the version sung by the lady in the advert, are both in octaves which are impossible for me to reach. When you get a choir together who are all singing in different registers, they might be singing different parts or perhaps even a different set of notes but they're still singing the same song. However, my suggestion for playing the song at a slower speed doesn't just play the same notes and chords at lower octaves, it shifts everything from pitch to key; all at the same time because the same recording is used.
This is a fun thing about humans. Practically none of us have perfect pitch and to be perfectly frank, it would be a perfect storm of a perfect curse to have perfect pitch. When people remember a song, they nary give a hoot about things like key and/or about what the actual notes at. Music is not about notes but is actually about the intervals between them. Once you have pitch shifted a song by playing it back at a slower speed, it is still recognisable as the same song because it IS the same song.
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