Why is “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 such an uncontainable explosion of joy? It has the happiest chord progression ever, which I wrote about in a previous post. But the harmony is just the icing on the cake. The real heart of this tune is the groove.
Let’s have a look! I transcribed some key sections.
The syncopation in this groove is devastating. To understand why it works so well, though, first you have to understand what syncopation is. It helps to see rhythm on a circular grid. Here’s the main drum pattern from “I Want You Back” on the Groove Pizza. Use this as a visual reference for what follows.
The basic idea of syncopation is simple: surprising the listener by accenting weak beats instead of strong beats. The more times you divide the circle in half to reach a given beat, the weaker it is. The strongest beat is slice one on the pizza (the downbeat), because you don’t divide the circle at all to reach it. The next strongest beat is slice nine (beat three), because you get there by dividing the circle in half. The strongest beats after that are slices five and thirteen (beats two and four, the backbeats), which you get by dividing the circle into quarters. Weaker still are slices three, seven, eleven and fifteen (the eighth note offbeats). Finally, the weakest beats are the even-numbered slices (the sixteenth note offbeats.) You can get the most intense syncopation by accenting the weak beats that are closest to the strongest beats, because they feel that much weaker by comparison.
Now that you know what syncopation is, let’s look at the placement of the chords in the beginning of “I Want You Back.” Boring songs have predictable harmonic rhythm, meaning that the chords change at regular intervals, always in the same place in the meter. This is not how things work in “I Want You Back.” The first chord, Ab, is on the downbeat, Groove Pizza slice one. No surprise there. But the second chord, Db, is on slice sixteen, a quarter of a beat before that next downbeat where you’re expecting it. Hip! The next three chords are on strong beats: Fm on slice one, Cm on slice five, and Db on slice nine. But then Ab is on slice twelve, anticipating the backbeat on slice thirteen. Next, there are two more on-beat chords, Bbm7 on slice one and Eb7 on slice five. These are followed by another off-beat chord, Ab on slice twelve again. Throughout the song, the chords push and pull between strong and weak beat accents. And that’s just one element of the track. Similar pushing and pulling is happening in the bassline, the drums, the strings, the percussion, and of course, in the vocals. No wonder the groove has so much energy and life.
Notating sixteenth note syncopations is complicated. To make these rhythms maximally readable, you want to respect the “invisible bar lines.” Imagine dotted lines that separate each beat in the bar. It’s considered good practice to split offbeat notes and tie them across the invisible barlines, like so:
But this looks messy and complicated. Maybe it would be better to keep the notes as contiguous entities, without all those ties? That looks neater, but then it’s much harder to understand the offbeat notes’ placement in the meter.
Ultimately, music notation is not the right tool for the job. Continual sixteenth note syncopations weren’t common in Western European musics of previous centuries. The MIDI piano roll is a much more accessible representation system for complex rhythms:
There’s one more important aspect to the groove in “I Want You Back”, and that is its light and impeccable sixteenth note swing. This is harder to talk about, because you can’t notate swing. It isn’t mysterious, though: In each pair of sixteenth notes, the second one in the pair (the offbeat) is a little bit later than you’re expecting. The later the offbeats are, the wider the swing. If you look at the Groove Pizza beat above, you can see that the offbeats are late; pay special attention to the kick drum on slices ten and twelve as you listen. It’s conventional to use wider swing at slow tempos and narrower swing at fast tempos. “I Want You Back” uses the narrow swing of a fast tune, but its tempo is about 99 BPM, which is not particularly fast. Maintaining this feel is a delicate balancing act, and it is not at all easy to pull off.
The track isn’t just a bunch of notes and rhythms in a realm of platonic abstraction; it’s also an instrumental arrangement, recorded and mixed in a particular way. That arrangement is a very complex one by 1960s standards. The album credits on Wikipedia list seven vocalists, four keyboard players, three guitarists, a bassist, a drummer, and a percussionist. That list doesn’t include the string section, which sounds like it was substantial. All these voices and sounds are constantly entering and exiting, popping up all around the stereo image. Here’s what’s happening in just the first twelve bars:
- Intro part 1 (measures 1-4): Bass in the center, doubled by piano and guitar in the left channel. Guitar strumming the tonic in octaves in the right channel. Cymbal crash on downbeat panned far right. Handclaps on beat two only, center-left and center-right.
- Intro part 2 (measures 5-8): More sounds enter: strings far left, guitar playing chord riffs on the right, conga pattern on the mid left, tambourines following the handclap pattern spread around the center. The snare drum rustles in the right channel, probably just sympathetic vibrations from something else in the studio.
- Intro part 3 (measures 9-12): Drums begin full groove in the right and center-right. Bass, piano and left guitar switch to the chorus pattern, while the right guitar keeps strumming the tonic octave. Tambourine plays a full sixteenth note groove. Michael’s lead vocal enters dead center, with the rest of the Jackson 5 doing backing vocals on the right.
There is more to say about this recording, so much more. I haven’t talked about Michael’s vocal performance at all. I’ll just point out that later in the song, as the emotional intensity peaks, he and his brothers switch from A-flat major pentatonic to the A-flat blues scale. I haven’t talked about the mix, which pumps the bass and drums and keeps the VU meters constantly in the red for the tasty natural compression you get from oversaturated tape. I haven’t talked about the lyrics, which are frankly creepy coming from an eleven-year-old singer, but which at least don’t interrupt the flow of the melody. Ultimately, the track works because you have the hippest chart played by the best session musicians tracked by the best engineers, fronted by possibly the best pop/soul/R&B singer of all time. No wonder it’s such a banger.