Love Rollercoaster, Genius of Love, and nonsensical chord loops

I have a hypothesis about harmony in loop-based music: if you have a good groove going, then any repeated chord progression at all will start to make sense and sound good after a few repetitions. In this post, I demonstrate the idea using two dance floor classics. “Love Rollercoaster” by Ohio Players (1975) is from the peak disco era, and “Genius of Love” by Tom Tom Club (1981) sits at the crossover point between disco, new wave and early hip-hop. Let’s start with “Love Rollercoaster”.

This song gets sampled a lot. Here’s my chart of the main/chorus groove.

Why is this chord loop so angular and weird? It’s not unusual for a chord progression to begin with C, Bb and A chords. The typical situation would be for that A to be a secondary dominant in the key of D minor. Then it would be followed by a Dm chord, then G, then back to C.

||: C Bb A | Dm G :||

But this is not what the Ohio Players do. Instead, they simply reverse the progression from the first bar and walk it back up.

||: C Bb A | A Bb C :||

This makes no particular sense at all from a functional harmony perspective. It isn’t implying any particular modal sound, either. The Bb chord implies C Mixolydian, but then once you have that expectation, the B-natural on top of A implies… I don’t know, just straight A major? Of course, I am overthinking this. Guitarist Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner was just moving a chord shape up and down the neck. Guitarists have a way of finding weird and interesting progressions that way.

What does the vocal melody tell us? The word “rollercoaster” is on C major pentatonic. The words “of lo-o-ove” moves from E down to a very blue E-flat before landing back on C. What relationship does that have to the underlying A(add9) chord? Nothing, conventionally, but I guess the blues gestures open your ears to such unexpected note combinations. The boldest harmonic choice in the chorus is on “woo hoo-oo oo-oo hoo”, which is harmonized C major until its last syllable, an unambiguous C minor chord. Blues tonality!

“Genius of Love” would seem to be more harmonically conventional.

Tom Tom Club is a side project of Talking Heads’ husband-and-wife rhythm section, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz. The harmony vocals are by Tina’s sisters. They are singing some of the weirdest lyrics ever to appear in a club hit. Stop Making Sense features a joyously silly performance of the song while David Byrne is backstage putting on the big suit.

“Genius of Love” is an even more popular hip-hop sample than “Love Rollercoaster”, and it is also the basis for one of Mariah Carey’s biggest hits, which I will represent here with its delightful remix, featuring Ol’ Dirty Bastard from the Wu-Tang Clan. (What is he going to do to that clown?)

Here’s my chart of a few representative sections of “Genius of Love.”

Most of this tune is an uncomplicated shuttle between G and its relative minor, Em. The vocals and guitar parts imply Gmaj7 and Em7. Any note that works over one of these chords will work equally well over the other one, and it is not clear which of them is the tonic chord. (They might both be!) The harmonically strange part of the song happens at 1:03 in the album version, when Adrian Belew’s phaser-drenched guitar enters. Adrian is playing a riff that suggests G7 and E7 rather than Gmaj7 and Em7. These chords have some sharp corners to them! If we are in E minor, then the F-natural in G7 is a clash, and if we are in G major, then the G-sharp in E7 is an even bigger clash. There isn’t any special reason why looping dominant seventh chords a minor third apart should sound good, and yet.

Once I heard enough weird two-chord shuttles that still sounded good, it made me wonder if I could loop any two chords at all and have them work. In other words, in a groove, maybe chord function doesn’t matter; the loop structure creates the relationship, and then your ear just cheerfully accepts whatever the relationship is. To test this idea out, let’s think about every possible combination of two dominant seventh chords:

• C7 and Db7 – Tritone substitution chord shuttle, I7 and bII7. Thelonious Monk does this a lot. Also check out “Doin’ It To Death” by the JBs.
• C7 and D7 – A bluesy version of the “backdoor dominant”, bVII7 and I7 in D.
• C7 and Eb7 – The “Love Rollercoaster”/”Genius of Love” progression in E-flat with the order reversed.
• C7 and E7 – A version of the Pink Panther chords, bVI7 and I7 in E.
• C7 and F7 – Regular old blues I7 and IV7 in C or V7 and I7 in F.
• C7 and F#7 – This is a weird one because it resists you hearing either chord as I, though you could disambiguate it through brute metrical or melodic force. This loop is mainly used in metal, for example “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. They are playing power chords, but dominant chords would work just as well.
• C7 and G7 – Blues I7 and V7 in C or IV7 and I7 in G.
• C7 and Ab7 – Bluesy I7 and bVI7 in C.
• C7 and A7 – The “Love Rollercoaster”/”Genius of Love” progression in C.
• C7 and Bb7 – I7 and bVII7 in C.
• C7 and B7 – The Monkian tritone sub shuttle, bII7 and I7 in B.

These shuttles would work with bare triads too, but dominant seventh chords are better because they prime your ear for groove harmony, for blues and funk and jazz. 

I think it’s important to talk about groove harmony in music theory classes. It does not work the way that harmony works in the European canon. Jazz theory gets closer, but it still centers V-I cadences. Neither framework gives you much insight into a song like “Love Rollercoaster.” You may feel that a two or three-chord groove does not exactly require formal training to understand. Maybe not. But as long as musicians are being formally trained, I think they should be prepared to think about the kinds of music they will commonly be encountering, not just the kinds that you can analyze with classical tools.