If you had to explain funk to a visitor from outer space, Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” would be a great place to start.
Aside from the refrains at the end of each verse, the entire tune consists of variations on a single two-bar clavinet riff on the E-flat minor pentatonic scale. The scale might have a daunting name, but it’s extremely easy on the piano: just play the black keys.
The minor pentatonic scale is found in almost all world musical cultures. It’s no great mystery why everyone likes it: you can play the five notes in any order and any combination and nothing will ever sound bad. Notice that the scale notes are right next to each other on the circle of fifths above. Each note shares a lot of its constituent overtones with its neighbor, so it’s no wonder they all feel so closely related to each other.
The lack of wrong notes in the minor pentatonic scale makes it very forgiving, but it also limits the potential for drama. If there’s no dissonance, there can’t be much tension and resolution. In “Superstition,” as in most funk tunes, melodic and harmonic interest take a back seat to the groove. The clavinet acts as a percussion instrument, a set of tuned metallophones. You could play the entire riff on E-flat and it would still be pretty effective.
The “Superstition” riff might be melodically simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s insubstantial. Let’s look at it in four parts.
First half of bar one
The riff begins with the root, then the root an octave up, the flat seventh, and back up to the high root. The rhythm is simple so far, a steady stream of eighth notes. This little figure is one of the basic amino acids of Afrocentric popular music. If you’re not sure what to play over a blues, jazz, rock, or funk song, this figure is probably a good place to start.
Second half of bar one
The riff continues with another ubiquitous blues/jazz/rock/funk figure: flat three, one, flat seven, one. This time, the rhythm is more syncopated – the first flat seven deliberately avoids beat four, coming a sixteenth note early. Usually, we hear a melody that ends on the root note as resolving, and that resolution usually comes on a strong beat. But Stevie resolves on an extremely weak beat, the sixteenth note right before bar two.
First half of bar two
Here the rhythm is the same as the first half of bar one, but with different pitches. It’s a straightforward walk up the scale, starting on four. However, because the pentatonic scale has so much empty space in it, this part of the riff doesn’t feel like a scale walkup. Instead, it’s more like a group of parallel intervals: two whole steps a fourth apart.
Second half of bar two
The same pitches as the second half of bar one, with a little rhythmic variation. This time, the first flat seven falls right on beat four. Technically, that’s less syncopated than the anticipation of beat four that Stevie did in the first bar. But because you remember the anticipation from the first bar, Stevie defies your expectation, and the note ends up feeling syncopated anyway.
This simple-seeming riff has several layers of compositional structure. The music of the African diaspora uses a lot of call and response, and the “Superstition” riff is no exception. The first bar is a call, and the second bar is a response. Within each bar, the first two beats act as a mini-call, and the second two beats are the mini-response. The first half of the first bar calls, and the first half of the second bar responds. The same is true for the back half of each bar. The riff delicately balances symmetry and asymmetry, expectation and surprise. And the nested calls and responses are fascinatingly recursive. Like all good funk musicians, Stevie knows how to get the maximum musical interest out of a deliberately limited set of raw materials.