We Don’t Talk About Bruno

Lin-Manuel Miranda certainly can write an infectious earworm. His songs from Moana were in constant rotation in my apartment (and in my head) for years, and as much as I tried to resist Hamilton, I fell pretty hard for those tunes too. But nothing by LMM has gripped me or my kids harder than this:

It isn’t even my favorite song in the movie; that distinction goes to “Surface Pressure.” But “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is the one that’s burning up the pop charts.

So why is this so effective? There are the ultra-charismatic vocal performances by Carolina Gaitán as Pepa, Mauro Castillo as Félix, Adassa as Dolores, Rhenzy Feliz as Camilo, Diane Guerrero as Isabela, and Stephanie Beatriz as Mirabel. The choreography is spectacular too. But the groove is really the thing that grabs me. My friend Jason Rosado says that it’s in a style called son montuno. Hear a NPR Latin Roots piece about this genre.

I transcribed the first verse and chorus. It was hard!

So much syncopation! I put the MIDI into Ableton, screencapped it, and wrapped it in a circle. Here’s my circular visualization of measures 5-12. The outer ring is the piano, the next ring in is the bass, and then the inner blue ones are the vocals.

You can get a sense of just how hip the groove is by looking at all the places where the bass crosses the grid lines (the quarter notes). But why is that such a big deal? For this to make sense, you need to know what syncopation is. Consider a measure of 4/4 time. You can divide it into one whole note, or two half notes, or four quarter notes, or eight eighth notes, or sixteen sixteenth notes, like so:

The beats that fall on bigger subdivisions are “stronger”, and the beats that fall on smaller subdivisions are “weaker.” (Larger denominators mean weaker beats.) You naïvely expect significant rhythmic events to happen on the strongest beats. When they happen on weaker beats, it’s surprising, and “syncopation” is the technical music term for that surprise.

With that definition in mind, consider the rhythms of the son montuno groove in “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” The downbeat of each measure (the whole note “division”) is the strongest beat. There are bass notes, drum hits and so forth on the first downbeat of every odd-numbered bar, like you’d expect, but there are hardly any on the downbeats of the even-numbered bars. The next strongest beat is beat three, the half-note subdivision, and the instruments carefully avoid that beat in every bar. The next strongest beats are two and four, the quarter note subdivisions. The bass tends to hit beat two, but the piano doesn’t. Meanwhile, the piano tends to hit beat four, but the bass never does. Most of the note onsets are on the eighth note offbeats. That is an extraordinary amount of rhythmic instability for a popular dance genre!

Syncopation is a bit more complicated than the above paragraphs suggest. The important thing is the listener expectation rather than the mathematical weakness of a particular beat/subdivision. So once your ear gets used to the son montuno groove, then those syncopations start to feel expected. But then the musicians can surprise you by occasionally playing on an unexpected strong beat. It’s like negative syncopation! So hip.

The harmony is much simpler than the rhythm, but it’s still pretty interesting. Mostly the chords are just there to signpost locations in the groove. Notice that aside from the Cm and Ab chords on downbeats, chords change on very weak offbeats. The melody and the chords are drawn entirely from two scales. The “base” scale is C natural minor:

You can derive the Cm, Fm and Ab chords from C natural minor. However, the G7 chords (and the B naturals in the melody and bassline) are from C harmonic minor. In the opening line, “We don’t talk about Bruno, no no no,” the second syllable of “Bruno” is on B natural. So much flavor!

The tune is nominally in C minor, but it spends very little time on Cm itself. I hear G7 as being equally central, so much so that it feels like a second tonic. The Fm and Ab chords kind of float in between. The chorus feels like it’s really in G Phrygian dominant mode, the fifth mode of C harmonic minor:

Dual tonicity is a common feature of Latin music, with both the “tonic” and “dominant” chords feeling like two poles of stability, rather than the tonic feeling stable and the dominant feeling unstable. Dual tonicity is also a typical feature of klezmer. The soneros of Cuba and the klezmorim of Eastern Europe would appear to be culturally remote from each other, but they share some musical roots in the Arab world: Jews via their Middle Eastern origins, and Latin America via the North African influence on Iberia. Read more about the musicological connections in this fascinating paper by Peter Manuel.

In the bridge of the tune, when Isabela is singing, the rhythm straightens out and the harmony shifts to a plain-vanilla Axis progression in E-flat major. But things heat back up when Mirabel enters: “Umm, Bruno, yeah about that, Bruno…” It’s super cool how the last Ab chord in the Axis progression turns into the bII chord in the Phrygian dominant groove, and the ominous tresillo rhythm builds tension too. And then just when you’re expecting everything to resolve back to the main groove, there’s the unexpected part where Camilo mockingly sings, “Isabela, your boyfriend’s here.” It’s two entire measures on a Db7 chord! That’s the tritone substitution for G7, the most dissonant thing you hear in the whole tune. Then the last verse is all the previous verses sung simultaneously. My only complaint with the ending is that it comes so soon. I wouldn’t mind at all if they grooved out on that last chorus for another ten or twenty minutes, you know?

Finally, enjoy LMM dominating Larry David on season nine of Curb Your Enthusiasm: