We’re putting together the segment of Theory For Producers that deals with the minor modes. We needed an iconic example of natural minor, and we ideally wanted it to be by a woman. After many rejected alternatives, we settled on one of the high water marks of contemporary R&B, “Family Affair” by Mary J Blige.
I didn’t know until I looked it up just now that this was produced by Dr Dre. I’m not surprised, though, because it’s such a banger. Here’s my transcription of the string riff:
The song is in a minor key, but it’s not at all clear which minor key it is. That’s surprising, since there’s a grand total of two chords. The thing is, either one of them could plausibly be the tonic. The consensus out there seems to be that the second chord, G-sharp minor, is the tonic. That means that C-sharp minor is the iv chord, the chord starting on the fourth note of G-sharp natural minor.
This is not how I hear the tune. It starts on C-sharp minor, and since the first chord in a song is so often the root, that’s how I hear it in “Family Affair.” I just assumed that the G-sharp minor is the v chord, the chord that starts on the fifth note of C-sharp Dorian mode.
If you examine the diagrams, you’ll see that one is just a rotation of the other. It’s the same seven pitches either way, just mentally oriented differently. Using the MusEDLab’s aQWERTYon app, you can try playing over the tune with G-sharp natural minor, and with C-sharp Dorian. So which one is right?
If we’re thinking G-sharp minor, we’re oscillating back and forth between the subdominant iv and the tonic i, which is natural minor boilerplate. If we’re thinking C-sharp minor, we’re going back and forth between the tonic i and the minor v, which is considered by standard theory to be a “weak” progression that doesn’t establish the key. But if, like me, you listen to tons of jazz and funk and hippie rock, that i-v establishes Dorian mode perfectly well, and Dorian is as “natural” as natural minor. The vocal melody supports my hearing. It mostly sits on the root of the C-sharp minor chord, but it sits on the weaker fifth the G-sharp minor chord.
Ambiguous key centers are surprisingly common in pop music. There’s a whole universe of rock songs that some people hear as being in Mixolydian, while others hear them as being in the major key a fourth away–for example, “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd could either be in D Mixolydian or G major. There are only four chords in “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, but any one of them could plausibly be the tonic. “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry is part of a small but significant family of songs that either use the exotic Lydian mode, or are major-key songs that never land on their root chords. And music theorists have come to no kind of consensus at all about how the blues works.
These sorts of harmonic mysteries get less mysterious if you let go of the classical idea of functional harmony, the idea that chords have formal and logical relationships to one another. Instead, you can think of the chords as being signposts to help you stay oriented within the groove. Music of the African diaspora has strong and predictable rhythmic structure, and it tends to build and resolve tension metrically rather than harmonically. The chords just have to help you keep track of what bar in the form you’re up to. Those chords might happen to function in the classical sense, or they might be modal, or seemingly random, or absent entirely. The important thing, structurally, is the groove. Ultimately, that’s how I think we should understand “Family Affair.”
By the way, there’s another form of musical ambiguity at work here. We stereotypically think of major keys as being happy, and minor keys as being sad. But “Family Affair” is most certainly not sad. Musical mood is determined by the interplay of harmony, rhythm, timbre and countless intangibles. It’s hard to feel sad when you’re listening to a bumping dance beat. But what is the mood of “Family Affair”? I might use the word serious, though the playful and slangy lyrics argue against it. As with the key center, the emotional quality of the tune is an unresolvable contradiction.