Let’s ditch “The Star-Spangled Banner” and make “Lean On Me” our national anthem instead

Over the summer, with the BLM protests raging, my fellow music educators were doing a lot of soul-searching about the more problematic items in the traditional repertoire. The conversation inevitably turned toward “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with some questions about its appropriateness as a national anthem. Francis Scott Key owned slaves, and the third verse of the song belittles the British soldiers as “hireling and slave.”

Is the SSB racist? Maybe, but that isn’t the main reason to ditch it as our anthem. For me, the big issue is that the SSB is a bad song: an awkward and unsingable melody with incomprehensible lyrics. Also, the War of 1812 is a weird hook to hang our national identity on. It’s stirring to imagine America overcoming tremendous odds against a better-armed attacker, I guess, but when was the last time you could accurately describe us this way? Probably 1812? Now it’s just tone-deaf. Another problem is that both the music and lyrics sound more like the cultural heritage of our opponents in that war, the British, because it’s a British melody using archaic British phrases.

So how about we make America’s national anthem sound more like, you know, America? Jody Rosen considers various alternatives to the SSB before arriving at the only correct answer: “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. I learned the song as a kid from Club Nouveau’s synth-heavy version, but nothing compares to the original recording:

Now we’re talking: the song is unpretentious, communitarian, easy to sing but with room for bluesy embellishment, and gently but insistently funky. This is a song that I would sing with pride, and it represents a vision of a national community that I would want to be a part of.

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Für Elise

Like most piano students at his level, my kid is now learning Beethoven’s Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor for solo piano, better known to the world as “Für Elise.” Or more accurately, he’s learning part of it. There turn out to be more sections than the iconic minor-key hook we’re all familiar with. These sections are weirdly disjointed from the main hook.

When I pointed out on Twitter how strange it is that there are all these other parts, a former student responded:

That’s pretty funny. It’s not clear exactly who Elise was, but a likely candidate was a student of Beethoven’s. She was eighteen when he was forty, which, gross.

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Lonely Woman but it’s Gregorian chant

This morning I saw this tweet:

I read it and thought, huh, that’s interesting. So I opened an Ableton session and put “Lonely Woman” by Ornette Coleman on a track. I have a few Hildegard von Bingen pieces in my iTunes, and I dragged them onto other tracks.

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Transcribing Kendrick Lamar

There is a lot going on in “DUCKWORTH”, between the story, the samples, and the production. I’m just focused on Kendrick’s flow for now, but there is a mountain of musicological study to be done with the other aspects of the song, and how the song relates to the rest of the album.

Check out this sample breakdown by Tracklib.

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Transcribing Missy Elliott

As a kid growing up in New York City in the 80s, I loved rap, especially Run-DMC. In my teens, I moved away from it under the pressure of my rockist peers and other white nonsense. I found my way back into rap fandom as an adult, thanks in large part to Missy Elliott’s music of the early 2000s. “Get Ur Freak On” was especially undeniable, and it remains as fresh today as it was in 2001.

The track is my go-to example for Phrygian mode. I love that the plucky tumbi part doesn’t repeat identically; in the seventh repeat out of each eight, the last note is raised a half-step. (I marked these pattern-breaking notes in red in the chart below.) This is the kind of producerly attention to detail that makes a track grab you hard. Superb though Timbaland’s track is, though, my main interest here is Missy’s flow. I transcribed the first verse and the hook by writing a melody like I did for KRS-One and Lil’ Kim. Because I have Missy’s acapella track, I could assist my ears using Melodyne.

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So What

If you have never listened to jazz before, Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue is a great place to start. If you’re an obsessive jazz fan like me, it never gets old. The heart of the album is its first track, “So What.” Even before you press play, there’s a world of meaning in that title. Its cool hostility reminds me more of hip-hop than jazz. It’s no accident that Miles was eager to embrace rap at the end of his life.

Gil Evans wrote the abstract intro section, supposedly inspired by “Voiles” by Debussy, but people don’t usually perform it. The tune proper begins at 0:34.

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John Oswald said he likes my Stevie Wonder/Laurie Anderson mashup

I got an unexpected email today from the legendary composer/remixer John Oswald, whose Plunderphonics project was a major inspiration for me. (For example, check out “Dab,” “Power,” and the terrifying “Pretender.”) He told me that in the course of researching the connection between the second movement of Dvořák’s Piano Quintet No. 2 and the haunting jazz standard “Nature Boy,” he came across my mashup of “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson and “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder, and that he dug it.

So, that is awesome.

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Transcribing Noname

Having transcribed verses by KRS-One and Lil’ Kim, I wanted to take on something more current. I decided to do Noname‘s haunting neo-soul-infused song “Don’t Forget About Me.”

The song evokes D’Angelo, and calls him out by name.

In some ways, this Noname track was an easier transcription project than the verses by KRS-One or Lil’ Kim. Noname sings a clear melody on the G-flat major pentatonic scale, so even when her pitch is casual, it’s still obvious what note she’s pointing at. However, Noname’s flow is quite a bit more rhythmically complex and ambiguous than the relatively straightforward sixteenth note grid of boom-bap. The main question for me is how literally to take her performance. There are phrases where it sounds like she might have mentally conceived of a string of straight sixteenths, but then dragged or rushed for effect. Or maybe she did all these complex tuplets deliberately? Rather than try to read her mind, I ultimately opted to write out her performed rhythms as exactly as I could. Continue reading “Transcribing Noname”

Transcribing Lil’ Kim

Toni Blackman recommends a rap writing exercise: take an existing flow and replace the lyrics with your own. In order to do this with my music education students in the spring, I’m going to provide them with notated transcriptions as well as recordings. I’ve transcribed a couple of Toni’s recommended verses. The first was KRS-One’s “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight.)” The second is Lil’ Kim’s feature on Mary J Blige’s “I Can Love You.”

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