The happiest chord progression ever

See also: the saddest chord progression ever. And also check out this deep dive into the groove of “I Want You Back.”

We customarily think of descending melodies and chord progressions as being sad–they call it the “lament bass” for a reason. You may be surprised to learn, then, that the happiest song of all time also has a descending progression: “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5.

This recording was made just after Michael’s eleventh birthday. I do not approve of child labor, and making a prepubescent boy sing all these songs about romantic love ended up having some horrific long-term psychological consequences. But he gave incredible performances as a kid, there’s no question about that.

Like all early Jackson 5 songs, “I Want You Back” was written by “The Corporation,” Berry Gordy’s team of professional songwriters at Motown. The backing track was performed by ace jazz-trained session musicians. Here’s Wilton Felder’s isolated bass part:

The YouTube video shows a picture of a saxophonist because Felder played that instrument in the Jazz Crusaders. He also played bass on records by Marvin Gaye, Grant Green, Seals and Crofts, Billy Joel, John Cale, Randy Newman, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell.

Here’s my transcription of the bassline and the chords. There are lots of little figures in here that seem like ornaments, but Felder plays them the same way every time, meaning that he considered them to be integral to the melody.

The chords to “I Want You Back” are not nearly as complicated as they look. They’re all derived from the A-flat major scale, using a simple formula that I’ve represented with the graphic below.

To make chords from a major scale, you start on a scale note, for example, A-flat. You skip a scale degree to land on C. Then you skip another scale degree to land on E-flat. That makes an Ab chord. To make the chord that starts on B-flat, you skip a scale degree to land on D-flat, and skip another one to land on F. You can build chords from any degree of the scale this way. The ones with purple roots are major, and the ones with green roots are minor (except for the seventh, G, which gives you a half diminished chord.) “I Want You Back” uses chords built on all of the notes in the Ab major scale except for the seventh. The whole song just jumps around this harmonized version of the scale.

The nice thing about the major scale is that all the chords it generates sound good in any order and any combination. That said, not every combination and sequence is equally satisfying. To understand why “I Want You Back” is so satisfying, it helps to see the scale written on the circle of fifths.

It’s intriguing that, when written on the circle of fifths, the notes in the major scale are all grouped consecutively. Western listeners hear things that are close together on the circle of fifths as being related to each other. We especially like it when chord roots go sequentially around the circle of fifths. In classical music, and jazz, chord roots usually move counterclockwise on the circle. In pop, chord roots can move either direction. When you look at the chords in “I Want You Back,” there’s a lot of circle of fifths root movement, in both directions. This kind of classically functional harmony is unusual in black pop music. I’m wondering if Berry Gordy’s team wrote this tune specifically so that it would appeal to white listeners.

The third and fourth measures of each section have a particularly gratifying Bach-like harmonic logic to them–it’s the part underneath the words “won’t you please let me back in your heart.” The chords here are changing every quarter note, which is an unusually fast harmonic rhythm for a pop song. The chord progression is Fm-Cm-Db-Ab, Bbm7-Eb7-Ab. The overall root motion is downward, but with lots of jumping around. When you step through these chords in pairs, they show all kinds of fascinating structure:

• Fm-Cm: a plagal cadence in C minor
• Cm-Db: the root moves up a half-step, which has a cadence-like feeling
• Db-Ab: a plagal cadence in A-flat major
• Ab-Bbm: the root goes up a whole step, which is sort of a backwards plagal cadence in A-flat major
• Bbm-Eb7: a v-I “cadence” in E-flat Mixolydian
• Eb7-Ab: a classical-style authentic cadence in A-flat major

If the chords to this song are less complicated than they seem, the rhythm is more complicated than it seems. “I Want You Back” is a really tough groove to get right. To understand why, you need to know what syncopation is. You can subdivide a measure of 4/4 time in half, then in half again, then again, and so on, like so:

The more finely you subdivide the bar, the more complicated your rhythms can be. We feel the beats that fall on the more coarse-grained divisions as “stronger,” and we feel the beats that fall on the finer subdivisions as “weaker.” The more times you have to divide the bar in half to get to a given beat, the weaker it is. Syncopation is the effect of unexpectedly accenting the weak beats. The weaker the beats are that you’re accenting, the more syncopated the rhythm is. “I Want You Back” is full of accents on the weakest beats, and that’s what makes it so complex to play.

The effect of syncopation is especially pronounced when you accent a weak beat that’s very close to one of the strongest beats. The downbeat is the strongest beat of them all. At the end of the very first bar of Felder’s bassline, there’s an accent on the last sixteenth note of the bar, which is very close to the following downbeat, and thus an ear-grabbing surprise. This groove is so solid that it works fine if you replace all the notes in the bassline with A-flat.

Classical music usually does rhythmic complexity by changing the underlying meter and phrase length a lot, but within each meter, most events fall on strong beats. African-American vernacular music usually keeps the underlying meter the same over the entire duration of a song, and uses syncopation to keep things sounding interesting. Most listeners in the past hundred years have come to prefer the African-American strategy, because it’s friendlier to audience participation. No matter how complicated a funk groove is, there’s the very predictable 4/4 underlying it, and even untrained listeners can follow along. If the meter is changing all the time, there’s no way to predict or follow it unless you have the piece memorized or are reading along in the score.

So, why is “I Want You Back” so joyful? Functional major-scale harmony usually reads as happy. Uptempo funk absolutely reads as happy. The overall emotion comes from the interaction of both those components, along with the arrangement, and the raw exuberance of everyone’s performance, especially Michael. Change one aspect of the song, and the whole mood changes. For example, Janelle Monáe’s cover is only slightly little slower and more relaxed than the original, but its mood is totally different.

This is still happy, but it’s more wistful and abstract, less jump-out-of-your-chair exuberant. Janelle Monáe feels like she’s holding something back. The Jacksons leave everything they have in the recording booth, and that comes across.