Switched on Pop - Doja Cat’s “Say So” is a Masterclass in Good Times

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

Doja Cat has gatecrashed the Top 40 with her effervescent hit “Say So.” How did this Internet personality best known for a song whose chorus is “B***h, I’m a cow!” join the ranks of Dua Lipa, Drake, and The Weeknd? The answer involves a voice that careens from gentle soul to fierce rapping, a catchy chorus that grabs you from the first measure, and most importantly, interpolating the guitar patterns of Nile Rodgers, the secret sauce behind four decades of smash hits.  Songs featured: Doja Cat - Say So, Juicy, Fancy, Moo Chic - Good Times Sugarhill Gang - Rappers Delight Diana Ross - I’m Coming Out David Bowie - Let’s Dance Daft Punk - Get Lucky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm a songwriter Charlie Harding. Charlie, take my hands. Let's take a walk down the Billboard Hot 100 top 10. Okay. On our left, there's our friend Drake.

Hey, Drake. Sliding along. Hey, I hate that, Drake. Over there on the right foot slide. Six feet away, of course. Appropriately social distance is the weekend. Hey weekend. Oh, it's Dua Lepa.

Dua, doa. With her hit, don't start now. Hanging out at number four. There's future. Oh, and he's with Drake again? Drake? Drake's with everyone. Wow.

Two places and once. There's POSA Malone. What a character. They're running in circles. Just being weird over there in the corner. Oh, hey, it's Harry Styles looking. Fly as ever. Radiant.

I don't know how to say it. And here's, uh, huh. I'm sorry, I don't think we've met. Doja Cat and your song Say So at number eight? Uh, who are you? And what on earth do you sound like? Who is this interloper? Where did she come from?

And why do I already have this? song stuck in my head after just hearing 20 seconds of it today we will break down all of the above are you ready i'm thrilled because i'm already dancing onto the zoom call yes the zoom dance party it's on producer megan she's i see her grooving too okay so say so this is a song that is trying to convince a person to speak their mind right to just say what you feel and i feel like the whole song is trying to coax you to do that. I think there's a number of ways musically that it accomplishes this. And the first one happens at the very beginning. We start with this kind of, well, let's just call it an underwater

texture, right? This is something you talked about with Estelle Caswell about a year ago. All these songs seem to be starting underwater. You're like kind of like swimming upwards and then you break through the waves and you're just, where in the chorus? of the song. It's almost like it's DJed, you know? It's like you're walking into the club,

it's all the bass and then all of a sudden the whole thing opens up. Right, the door creaks open and you're like, whoa, there's a party in here. Like so many of her peers on the billboard,

they love to start with the choruses. I'm looking at you, Drake. Start it from the bottom now we're here. Start it from the bottom now my own. Yeah, Drake's definitely even Maroon 5. Here's to the ones that we got.

Cheers to the ones. This is something we've seen increasingly in the streaming era. And, you know, I think it makes sense generally, but especially with this song, it's like, this song is trying to get you to pay attention. It's like, I'm not going to waste any time. I'm going to go right to the chorus. And if I can't grab you that way, I don't know how else I will. But then the way that this song keeps us hooked in as listeners has a lot to do with the way

Doja Cat sings. And in order to get a nice taste of that, let's take a bite out of the first verse of say-so. It's a very sweet and tasty verse. Yeah, right? And it's like this vocal quality that I would describe as kind of floating over the track, like a cumulinimbus cloud. I don't know my cloud types. Just kind of like comfortably resting there. How does Doja Cat accomplish that?

I think it's this specific way of singing that's kind of in between the chest voice, the deep throaty, powerful belting voice, and the head voice, the light, fluffy, kind of walking on eggshell's voice. Somewhere, a better singer than me can really kind of hit the sweet spot between the two of those. And when you do that, it produces this vocal timbre that just sounds kind of effervescent and effortless and just makes you want to keep listening. There's a lot of breath in it as well. It's really airy.

A lot of breath. It feels like it's floating. To you extend your cloud metaphor. Now, just when you've been hooked in with this floating, breathy, vocal technique, Something happens about halfway through the song that completely flips the script. Let me check my chest, my breath right quick. He ain't never seen it in a dress like this.

He ain't never even been impressed like this. Probably why I got him quiet on a set like shit. This is great. This is almost as if Doja Cat has two different persona going on in the song. Where we had previously had that lovely floating breathiness. Now we are this punchy, rhythmic, really. compelling, wrapped vocal. Right.

It's almost like she's like the guest vocalist on her own song. Like she's the guest rapper. Right. But it's just her. It's her. It's just another side of her personality. And it's almost like, she's like, okay, if I haven't gotten you to speak your mind through my breathy floating vocals, let me try the opposite approach.

Let me bust like a rap. And if that doesn't work, I don't know what to do. Yeah. It's like you've got the seductive vocal. And then you have that direct. Here's how it actually is vocal. Okay. So this song has an underwater intro that cress right into a chorus.

It's got this light, breathy vocal style that just when you might get tired of it, flips it up with a rap verse. But I think one of the biggest musical hooks here is the guitar line. 100%. This is the first thing that grabbed me about this song. You know, usually on this show we'll do a little segment called classical masters. Right. But today, I think we need to mix it up a little bit. Let's call it Modern Masters.

Remix. Remix. In order to understand where this guitar line in Say So is coming from, we got to go back to 1979 and a song by Sheik called Good Times. I love Good Times. The song came up on our conversation about Diolipa recently. It's come up in a conversation about The Weekend at Daft Punk. Right.

It is a song that just keeps returning and returning. And I'm not surprised because when I heard Doja Cats say so, I was like, oh, this sounds like that Kelvin Harris song, Slide. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, wait, this sounds like rappers delight. I was like, no, no, no, no. This song is actually good times by Sheik. And then I realized that this sound is something which is barren. and it's almost like its own genre. Good Times is its own genre of song. Yeah, no, it is a touchstone. I mean, Doja Cat, Say So has a slightly different rhythm,

but Good Times is the clear antecedent. So here's Good Times and here's Say So. Pretty convincing. Slight rhythmic displacement on Say So, but I think it's no surprise that your ear immediately went back to Good Times, this 1979 hit. Because this song, and the duo behind it, Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards, are touchstones of pop music of the last half century. This is a song that has been sampled or rather interpolated into rappers' delight by the Sugar Hill gang, the song that first brought hip-hop to a mass audience. Nile Rogers, the guitarist in the Rogers-Edwards duo, lent him. his talents to David Bowie on Let's Dance.

He backed up Diana Ross on I'm Coming Out. And most recently, he teamed up with daft punk and Farrell to release one of the biggest hits of the last decade, Get Lucky. This is someone with a style of guitar playing that has been relevant in every decade since the 1980s. And I think it's worth zooming in and understanding what makes this guitar part from good times and say so, so effective. Why do we want to keep coming back to it? So, what do you need to create a funky Nile Rogers guitar line? First of all, Charlie, you need

the hitmaker. What's the hitmaker? You don't have the hitmaker? Oh, Charlie. What are we going to do? The hitmaker is a 1980 Fender Stratocaster guitar with a 1959 maple wood neck. So do you have one of those lying around? I have an approximation. I've got a 2004 Stratocaster with a 2004 maple neck. Okay, give us a little taste of that. You know what? I think that's going to do the trick.

Call it the hitmaker Jr. Okay. Now, the next thing. we're going to need is a guitar tone that is totally clean. I don't want to hear any effects. I don't want to hear any distortion. I don't want to hear any reverb. I don't want to hear any delay. I just want to hear the naked, unadorned tone of the guitar. Nice. There we go. And now I want to take the chord progression and it's no coincidence that both good times and say so are in the exact same key. Let's take this chord progression and I want to hear kind of the most basic version of that,

Charlie. So we're moving from an E minor chord to an A major chord. And let's just hear like a really simple, what you would call the triatic version or the simplest possible version of a chord. Okay, sure. So here be your E minor. And here's your A major. And that's lovely, right? No shade on E minor triads and A minor triads. They sound fantastic. But if you want this Nile Rogers sound,

you're going to have to dig into some of the jazzy inversions and extended chords that he gravitated towards. So instead of that E minor triad, I'm going to need you to play an E minor seven chords. So we're going to add an extra note that crunch it up a little bit. Mm, nice, a little more sauce. Let's take it up even, turn the heat up even a little bit more.

Next chord will make a B minor 7 over E. Ooh, I like that. Yeah, now we're going to outer space. That's lovely. And then instead of our A major chord, hit me with an A9 sus-4. So we're going to add two extra notes to that. Crunch it up. Cool, cool.

Cool. Cool. I like that a lot. And then finally an A-13 chord. Saucy. Saucy. So we've taken those simple triads. We've added these jazzy extensions and inversions.

Now we need one more elements, the rhythmic element. Okay? This is where chucking comes in. This is the term that Bernard Edwards and Nile Rogers use. Perfect, because you've got a chuck here, so I like to chuck. Give us some just like strummed 16th notes, just like a little da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That would be chicken grease,

which we explored recently on an episode about DeAngelo, which is a similar style that Prince used. Wait, hold on. I got to take you down a very quick diversion, down a little even further down modern masters and just say that I recently found out that that chicken grease sound actually comes not from Prince.

It actually comes from Jimmy Nolan, who was the guitarist for James Brown for about 15 years. And his style of playing was often described as Chicken Scratch. You can hear it on Papa's got a brand new bag. All right, sorry, I've taken you down,

we've gone down multiple lanes. Let's zoom back in. The plot thickens from chicken scratch to chicken grease to chucking. Okay. Take that chicken grease 16 notes. drum, but this time press your left hand alternately up and down so that only certain chords are highlighted and other ones just become this kind of rhythmic, well, chuck sound. Let's hear that.

Now we're chucking, now we're having some good times. With these multiple techniques working in tandem, you get this indelible and irresistible kind of funky guitar pattern from 1970. in Sheik's Good Times to 40 years later in Doja Cat's Say So, this sound has undergirded some of the biggest hits in popular music. So if you have a song in 2020 that is trying to convince someone to open up and take you seriously, there's probably no better musical element to use than this Nile Rogers guitar. I think it's cool that Doja Cat is referencing the sort of Nile Rogers' Sheik Good Time sound. But I also want to sort of think about how it operates. Like, what is it doing in the song?

Why is it so effective? Let's hear the song from the top again. I think when we zoom in on the core elements here, the kick drum, the snare, the bass, and the guitar. We realize that they all operate obviously as a rhythm section. The guitar, though, isn't doing a typical thing where it's laying out the harmony as much as it's filling in its own kind of percussion. we think about that playing that you describe Nate, right? Where you have a chord, and then you have a chuck,

and they kind of alternate back and forth. You can almost see those as almost their own two kinds of percussion, right? Just like the kick drum is the low and the snare is the high. Here you have actually kind of like a high thing and a middle thing, and it sits in the rest of the percussion section kind of like maybe like where a woodblock and a cowbell would sit, or maybe like congas and bongos, like somewhere above the bass drum and above the bass guitar, right? That it's kind of like in the middle of the guitar range.

And then the chuck is its own kind of sound, which is above the snare but below the voice. And so all of a sudden now we have this additional percussive movement, the guitar acting as these two high and low sounds that fit perfectly in the mix that add even more syncopation and rhythmic interest. I love that breakdown, Charlie, because this style of guitar playing is like a party in a box. It's almost like listening to a whole orchestra at once. So between this irresistible guitar line, these breathy floating vocals, the wrapped verse and the chorus right at the very top, This is a song that has so many elements that just draw you in as a listener. It's no surprise that it's popping off on the Billboard Hot 100.

But a question still remains, who on earth is Doja Cat? And where did she come from? Let's dig into that after the break. Euforia of Calvin Klein. The new collection Elixir. Three new elixir is perfume intense. Solar. Magnetic. Ball.

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com Barra Records Charles, it may seem like Doja Cat came out of nowhere but in fact, Amalaratna Zandile Dlamini has been hustling for a while. Her name Doja Cat is the combination of one of her favorite strains

of marijuana and a cat. Deep. She first got on people's radars with a song I'm very curious to learn if you're familiar with simply called moo. Yeah.

Bitch, I'm a cow. Bitch, I'm a cow. I don't say now. Bitch, I'm a cow. Bitch, I'm a cow. Bitch, I'm a cow. Bitch, I'm a cow. Go mo.

That is a very silly novelty song. With an equally silly video featuring Doja Cat in a very sexy cow costume. And with French fries up her nose. Okay. Sounds very DIY.

It is. And there's an element to Doja Cat's stardom that is based on her personality on the internet, which is immensely entertaining, as evidenced by something our producer Bridget Armstrong showed us. A recent Instagram video of Doja Cat reciting the lyrics to Roddy Riches the box in the style of a medieval night. complete with chain mail. Lassas trying to get me for my water. I lay his ass down on my son or my daughter. I had the Draco with me, Dwayne Carter.

Lot of lasses out here playing ain't bawling. That is delightful and utterly silly. Now, at some point, Doja made the switch from kind of a niche internet personality into a full-fledged pop star. And you can trace this a little bit in the music. You know, I'd like to listen to a song called Fancy, which samples Pockabell's Canon,

one of the most famous chord progressions in music, one that's used in so many pop songs. But this track goes back to the OG Pocket Bell's Canon. Check it out. I've heard Pockabell's Canon a million times but never over a synth-wavy trap beat. Yeah, Pockabelle in 808s. What did it take for Doja Cat,

to finally hit the billboard charts with say-so though it is a phrase that we're probably going to be saying a lot charlie it's two words each of them start with a tea and end with a k tic-tock yes okay so here is the viral say-so dance okay we're watching the uh tick-toker yodeling haley right now she's in her bathroom and she's doing the following series of moves to say so, okay? You kind of do a shrug, arms crossed, roll your hands around, in focus, make a little camera, and then walk off screen. You got that, Chuck? Let me see it. I definitely don't have it down, but I think that you might have a whole new internet career. So thanks to Yodeling Haley, this dance has taken off. You can find thousands of people doing this on TikTok,

and like so many songs of recent vintage, the TikTok platform propels a track onto the Hot 100, and Doja Cat pays it forward, including Yodeling Haley in the music video for Say So. That is some kind of snake eating its tail. The only more egregious example would be Drake, who is, I believe currently as we're recording at number one, whose Tussie Slide was first basically a TikTok challenge and dance

before it was even released as a song, so the song was released so that more people would do the dance, so more people would listen to the songs so that more people like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. Wow. Do you want TikTok to get off your lawn right now? No way. I love TikTok.

And thanks to Megan, our producer, who turned me onto it, it's the best thing in the world. It's the most joyous thing. But I don't like Tussie Slide. I like Doja Cat. Good, but I'm going to have to bring you down for a second because it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Doja. because Doja Cat is a deeply online pop star, someone who is known for speaking her mind,

it's both gotten her a lot of attention and also sometimes gotten her into trouble as when she made anti-gay comments that she at first wouldn't retract but eventually apologize for. On the other hand, there are moments where her outsized personality and her body positive message in songs like Juicy really resonate with people. Reading the YouTube comments below a live performance of this song is a very moving experience. I'll just highlight one. I literally cried watching this video.

One, because the song is lit. Two, just because seeing Doja standing there strong and confident with a body similar to mine makes me feel so good about my own image. Thank you. I just love reading this and it makes me want to hear more artists like Doja Cat, not just for this body positive message and her ability to connect with fans, but for the incredibly funky, catchy production that we heard on Say So. There's some real scandals happening here, as much as internet fame can happen through

fun little memes, the internet also doesn't forget. And so I'm wondering how to take this given that, you know, especially just not apologizing for saying vile and insensitive comments and then production on this. It kind of changes my take on it.

What do you think? I don't think there's an easy answer here, Charlie. No. There's good, there's bad. I think every listener needs to make their own call on how they feel ethically about listening to Doja, cat. I think one thing that is

incontrovertible though in all this discussion is the indisputable power of the funky, catchy production that we heard on Say So. And with that of mind Charlie, can you give us a little soundtrack for our credits? I want more

of that Nile Rogers trucking guitar to play us out. I got you. Switch on Pop is produced by Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding, Megan Lubin and Bridget Armstrong are our producers. Nashak Kerwin, Liz Nelson, executive producers, Brandon McFarland, editor and engineer, Abby Barr, social media, Iris Gottlieb illustrations.

You can check us out anywhere you find your podcast and on social media at Switchdown Pop. We'd love to hear what you're listening to. I also have to make a little apology, which is it last week. I said that we were going to be talking about some soundtracky stuff. We're going to be doing that real soon, so stick around. For shame. Shame. Shame. How could you? You know, there was more stuff that I had to listen to. I wasn't quite ready.

It's Ashanda. I'm so sorry. But we will be back again in another week. Yet another episode. And until then, thanks for listening.