Switched on Pop - Justin Timberlake Goes Medieval

Episode Date: June 16, 2016

Summer heat is upon us and so are the jams. Our ears are hooked on Justin Timberlake's "Can't Stop The Feeling." What you may not know is that this song leans on the success of mononymous giants: Pharrell, Michael and Handel. If you think that pop is a modern phenomenon, you may be surprised by medieval references and techniques comped by JT. Join us as we break down the hidden hooks and musical tricks that make this song an ear worm. Featuring Justin Timberlake - Can't Stop The Feeling! Pharrell Williams - Happy Michael Jackson - Thriller Michael Jackson - Rock With You Elvis Costello - Allison M.C. Hammer - U Can't Touch This Electric Six - Improper Dancing Nicki Minaj - Feeling Myself ft. Beyonce Justin Timberlake - What Goes Around Justin Timberlake - Cry Me A River Bernart De Ventadorn - Can Vei La Lauzeta Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Charlie, it's that time of the year when we have to start talking about what is going to be the official 2016 summer jam. No, it's too soon. It's still spring technically, I think. What? You're out of your god darn mind, man. It is hot as... Okay.

Well, I don't think we're ready to declare anything, but I'm willing to entertain a hot jam for the summertime heat as it approaches. is what's got you excited? I think the strongest contender at the moment is Justin Timberlake's can't stop the feeling. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. This song is in the top three and it is going to be heard everywhere this summer I predict. So Charlie, let's get into this track and see what is so universal and catchy about Sir Timberlake's latest pop smash. Beautiful. Let's do it.

Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And in this episode, Let's Break Down Timberlake's effervescent summer anthem can't stop the feeling. I got this feeling inside my bones. It goes electric wavy when I turn it on. Off to my city. Off from my home. We're flying up no feeling when we end our zone. Charlie, I guarantee in my pocket Charlie, I guarantee whether you like it or not

this song is going to be in your head all summer. I'm excited about that. I don't want to stop this feeling. I'm glad to hear that and you are not alone. Many people out there like the blog, consequence of sound are all about this track, right? They call it soulful and vibrant, a four-minute mound of disco dust that is A-level Timberlake. Oh, disco dust. I love that.

Wonderful. But that just represents one side, Charlie. Yes. Because on the other are the haters. They're always going to be haters. Yeah, absolutely. What do haters do? They hate.

The Independent has an article whose headline, this is the headline. I watched Justin Timberlakes Can't Stop the Feeling and now I can't stop the feeling of needing to punch a wall. Wow, you know, whether or not they like the song, you must say it was effective on them.

Yeah, exactly right. And so that's the headline. If we pull a quote from that, we might select, Can't Stop the Feeling, along with Happy Brackett, the Farrell Williams 2014 in Escapable Summerhead.

Still stuck in my head. Close bracket. Are so calculated in their monetization of hope, spreading the fallacy that all your troubles will just melt away if you do jazz hands in a supermarket or sing into a banana. Ouch. Hate, hate, hate. So if we're going to distill this criticism, it's like this isn't a genuinely happy summer anthem, right?

A genuinely positive universal. This is like a calculated marketing ploy to get people to listen to this song nonstop. I guess part of that criticism is fair because both songs are associated with. a mega motion picture. Right, and not just any motion picture, but an animated motion picture. Hey, what's wrong with that? For children. No, fun for the whole family. I'm all about it. Particularly composed, focus grouped, marketed. Okay, okay, I see where they're coming from. Right. But, you know, love it or hate it, whether you're a cranky British journalist or my friend and co-host, Charlie Harding, love it or hate it. I think this music is undeniable. You're

going to have an opinion about it, and it's going to get into your head. Yeah, you can't stop it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You literally cannot stop it. All of a sudden, the song title seems a little less blissful and a little more ominous. So our question is, why? This is our job, right? Yeah, I think it's our job to dissect what is eliciting such strong feelings.

You may not be surprised that I have a few theories in evolving a constellation of artists, Pharrell Williams, Michael Jackson, and a subtle compositional technique that stretches back to the Middle Ages. You ready to do this? Take me to my happy place. So as that independent article points out, this song is definitely riding on the co-tales of Farrell Williams' Happy from 2014, right? Undenial.

What's the first connection you hear from Happy to Can't Stop the Feeling? Well, they're using a pretty similar playbook of making a retro sound, taking us back into this sort of soulful 60s, and 70s sort of sound. And then in addition, they each seem to have a universal message. Yeah. A message that you'd be hard pressed to find any substantial critique of, right? Yeah, be happy.

Don't stop dancing. Unless you're like in the movie Footloose, otherwise you can't critique it. Yes, footloose is the one exception. If you live in the universe of footloose, then you have a fair critique. Otherwise... This is a brilliant songwriting coup, right? You want to write a song that's going to appeal to a lot of people. what is something universally beloved,

the feeling of being happy, the feeling of dancing. Can't go wrong. I bet next summer there will be a song that's just called ice cream. That's perfect. Let's write it. Or puppies.

Home baked cookies. Okay, so there's two correlations between these tracks. There must be more. Anything else? Both of these songs have a super producer behind them. Right, because Pharrell Williams is both the artist and the super producer of 2014's Happy. And you totally surprised me that the mega producer behind can't stop the feeling is Max Martin.

Max freaking Martin. He just keeps on doing it. Dude is everywhere. All right. He's like zealic. But I feel like we've dedicated enough time to Max Martin on our show. Let's just keep on moving. By referencing this 2014 hit that's still fresh in people's minds, I think that gives Timberlake a leg,

a leg up already, right? He's already capitalizing on the momentum of this, of this happy song, which I think people are still singing, right? Absolutely. Yeah, no doubt. Okay, so if you want to have a massive summer mega hit, you can go to the last summer mega hit, right, and use that playbook. That's good. It's a good playbook, yeah. But if you want to be super safe, you might also want to rely on the musical playbook of the King of Pop, one of the most universally beloved figures in the last half century of music, Michael Jackson. I think you can argue that Timberlake and Max Martin and Co. are referencing Michael Jackson's longtime arranger, Quincy Jones,

and one of Jackson's chief songwriters, Rod Temperton. I actually totally agree with you here. One of my favorite moments in Justin Timberlake's new song is sort of towards the end, he's repeating the chorus a couple of times, and these awesome horn stabs come in. They're kind of synthesized, sacado, in between all of the vocal. They add so much energy to the song. And it reminded me of how Quincy Jones did the exact same thing in Thriller.

Yeah, Quincy Jones was such a master of these grooves and these sonic palettes that are just like so alive and so active that before you know it, you're just shaking your butt and nodding your head and you don't even know what's happening to you. Oh, absolutely. Now, Rod Temperton is a lesser-known figure in the pop music canon, though hugely important. Tell me about him. He wrote Thriller. He wrote Rock With You.

He wrote Off the Wall, three of Michael Jackson's biggest hits. My gosh. Good songwriting credits. Someone's got a nice house in Malibu. Okay, so what are you getting at? Well, I think even if we don't know, Rod, someone like Max Martin or Justin Timberlake would and would recognize that Temperton has this. very specific kind of sound that uses a lot of unexpected chords, chords with extended voicings, chromatic chords, chords that move in strange harmonic progressions.

This is really a signature touch of this relatively unknown songwriter. So basically he's pushing the boundaries of pop music writing into the genre that you grew up playing and loved most into the world jazz. Precisely. And if you go to the... What would we call this? I guess the pre-chorus of Justin Timberlake's song? The bridgy pre-chorus B-section thing that doesn't sound like the rest of the song. Yeah, that works for me.

I couldn't figure out what to call it, but it's something like that. Yeah, it's an interesting form. Okay, let's call it the bridgy pre-chorus thing. Yeah. The B-C-B-C-T. I think this is where you can really hear the influence of this Rod Temperton style. Because here we start to get some interesting chordal changes. We've gone to a very different place than when we've started, right?

I feel like I've gone into a different sonic landscape. Yeah, and then it really, and it builds so nicely at the end with that vocal pyramid of imagine, imagine, imagine, and that kind of slides into the chorus. Lovely stuff, man. Yes. I think you can even see a very deliberate homage to our friend Rod Temperton in the beginning of this B-P-C-T, Bridge Pre-Courist. We have this motion of a B-flat chord over a C bass. Okay, now not everyone's going to know what you're talking about. What's going on?

So without getting too technical, basically you can imagine that in this section of the song, we're hearing one note in the bass. But in the harmony, in the upper harmony, we're hearing two very different triads. And the first triad, which is a B-flat chord, doesn't have anything to do with the C that's in the base. So that's a very powerful dissonance for us. It's kind of like it's making me feel uneasy and misplaced like I need everything to come back to the chorus.

Right, which is exactly what they do, because then that B-flat chord resolves to a C chord, right? The chord that should follow from having a C in the bass. Oh, okay. Great. Yeah, beautiful. I mean, and this is happening very fast, but you have that kind of uneasiness that you described, resolving to the consonants that you desire. And that's a very pungent, very pleasurable effect, I think. It has that effect of building tension into the song and in wanting to move us along.

And it's exactly the same progression that Rod Temperton and Michael Jackson use in the chorus of Rock with you. You can feel that uneasiness resolving to the note that it's quote unquote supposed to be. Oh, okay. That's such a cool technique. Yeah, it's very effective, right? Really draws you in. Okay, J.T., Max Martin. That's a good palette to borrow from. Right? So even though on the surface, you may think, well, this is like a catchy song because Justin Timberlake is a good singer and it's like got these fun lyrics and it's got a good beat. I think if you peel back all the different layers, this is very calculated, right? This is very sophisticated stuff to make this song sound.

very natural. And I don't see calculated in a bad way. I see it's highly composed, highly structured. It's made to be catchy. Oh yeah. No, no. I'd say calculated in a great way. Yeah. But references to Farrell Williams and Michael Jackson aren't the only things getting this song stuck in your head this summer. After we take a quick break, we'll come back and look at another aspect of Justin Timberlll-stop-the-feeling that goes back past Farrell, past Michael. we're going to have to get in a time machine and do some classical masters to figure out what Justin Timberlake and Max Martin are up to here, Charlie. You ready? All right, take me there. I'm so excited. Let's dust off that time machine, hop on in,

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on records. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens

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That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Welcome back to Switched on Pop. In the first half of the episode, we saw how Justin Timberlake is using references to ghosts of summer jams past from Pharrell Williams and Michael Jackson to ensure that this new anthem will get radio play. But I also hear an ancient, subtle, musical technique here. And it's called text painting. I love text painting. It's good, right?

It's something we talk about a lot in the show without necessarily naming it, I think. Yeah, it's that thing where you have like a painting. brush that has like a word on it and then you paint the word. I love that image. That's very synesthetic. But no, that's not quite what we're talking about. And I think you do know. I think you're being deliberately obtuse here. I would never do. I would never do that too. Text painting is where something that happens lyrically is mirrored musically, that the musical form resonates along with whatever the message of the song is. Yes, that, ooh, very, very succinct. I love that, Charlie. And to illustrate this, we can go right to the beginning of Can't Stop

the feeling. Because I think there's text painting from the get-go of this song, right? This is actually the very first thing that caught my ear, because I guess it's also the first lyric, but I found it super compelling. He says, I got this feeling inside my bones. It goes electric wavy when I turn it on. And you have to pay attention to that electric wavy, because underneath, if you're listening to the music, Like, what are we hearing? We're hearing a acoustic piano, I guess? Exactly. We're hearing an acoustic piano, but it's not doing what an typical acoustic piano would do. It's not a typical acoustic piano, is it?

No, it's manipulated and processed. Exactly. Rather than having piano chords which are decaying, it's kind of going, wamp, wamp, in this electric, wavy sort of. way. Oh yeah, totally. This tremolo effect, this, this like mixture of acoustic and electric. Yeah, electric wavy. I love it. Textpainting. Textbook, text painting. And if we go to the next section, we have another line that does this because Timberlake sings, when it drops. And what happens after that? A little pause. And then the whole thing drops. Ooh. Yeah. Lovely. Lovely. But the text painting we're hearing so far is

child's play compared to what's coming. Because when we get to the section that starts with under the lights when everything goes, right? That section that we identified as being full of these Michael Jackson chords, the Rod Temperton chords. Love that section. Yeah. Here the text painting goes to a whole new level, right? Take that first line, under the lights when everything goes.

Something subtle and wonderful happens. The drums just disappear. all of the sudden everything has sort of floated away and we're in this much sparser texture. Oh, it's like letting up with the night sky and everything's quiet. Okay, this is great.

You see the night sky? I see the multicolid disco lights of a nightclub, but you know, to each their own. Sounds like you have a much more exciting nightlife than I do. But the most powerful instance of text painting in this section is still to come. My goodness,

Justin Timberlake, not giving it to us once, not twice, It's not thrice. You're saying he's going to give his text painting four times in one song? Dude is a text painting addict. All right. So what does he do?

This one I like because it's really buried kind of deep in the harmony. Timberlake sings, when we move, you already know. And right on the word move, something happens. We have a really surprising harmonic shift. Oh, yeah. It feels like we're in a totally new sonic territory. Without getting too technical, we've been in the key of C major so far. And as we've seen in this Michael Jackson section, things are going to become a little more chromatic, a little more intense.

And indeed, right on this chord move, we go to a chord that is very far from our home of C major. We go to an F minor over a B flat. That's really strange. We've gone into something which does not sound like our home territory. Yeah, really. If you imagine a keyboard, the C major scale is all the white key. This chord has a bunch of black keys in it. It is funky. Yeah, oh, cool. And we really experience the sensation of movement, right? We are like moving from one harmonic world to another as Timberlake sings the same thing. It's like, oh. I really like how he's doing this. We're moving from one area to the next and he's doing it with text painting, which I guess makes me wonder, how is text painting so effective? Why does it work? It's a great question, Charlie.

I think part of the answer is that there's something very satisfying when the music and lyrics mirror each other like this, right? It's kind of as if the music is fulfilling the tautology of the lyric of the song. They're beautifully interroven. Ooh, well said. Way to get tautological up in here. I've been hanging out with you too much. And I think when it's done well, it's something that's very subtle, right? Something that you can hear and experience without even realizing it.

That makes the experience of listening to music that much deeper. Of course, this technique can go awry, I think. Really? If it becomes too obvious or too predictable, maybe we don't really experience the magic of text painting. It just kind of gets in the way of the song. Yeah, I think there's times when it can make a saccharin pop song way too sweet. And there's one particular instance that I think is a little overdone at this point.

It is the text painting of the word stop. I hear this one everywhere. What do you do when the lyrics say stop? Everything stops. Yeah. And this is just a small sampling, but you can hear this going back to Elvis Costello. Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking when I hear the seller things that you...

To MC Hammer. Emma time. To Electric 6. Continue. To Nikki Minaj and Beyonce's Feeling myself. Male, I female, and make no difference I stop the world. World stop. Carry on.

Kittsy on fake. Nate, stop it. I can't. I can't stop the feeling, Charlie. We need to start a campaign to stop stopping. Well, I will say that Justin Timberlake historically uses text painting really well in his songs. This is not the beginning of his text painting career. He is a master painter.

No. And you can find a really. crystalline example in the song, What Goes Around. Because what happens in the chorus of this song? We start on a note, our home key. And then the melody proceeds downward and downward and downward. And then it goes up, back up to the note above the original note. And then finally at the very end of the phrase lands back at the original note. Meanwhile, what's happening in the lyrics in this chorus?

they go, what goes around, goes around, goes around, comes all the way back around. Oh my gosh, it came back around. It's so much more tasteful. It's like a delicate brush stroke, right? Because where other people just say stop and the text painting happens at that one moment, he's actually building up to the moment of text painting. You don't realize it's happening until it's already passed. Right.

Oh, it's so smart. What goes around, comes back around. This melody is going to travel down, up, and then return to its home key, just as the ex-lover that Timberlake is singing about in this song is going to get their, I guess, carmic retribution. So you're leading me to believe that he's like the Leonardo da Vinci text-pain.

Well, I don't know about that. They're not all quite so subtle. I mean, if you take a song like Cry Me a River, there's nothing subtle about this, but it doesn't stop me from loving it all the same. Because how does this song start? We have the sound of, rain of flowing water. Is that a river? Is it tears? Is it just the lacrimos mood of the song?

I'm going to say it's probably a river of tears. Nothing quite as subtle in that text painting, but effective nonetheless. You compared Timberlake to Da Vinci earlier, Charlie, but I think you got the wrong art form. Oh, really? Because our friend Justin Timberlake is actually steeped in classical music. Of course he is. Let's go to it. Get in the time machine, classical master's time. Cry Mea River is kind of like a time machine itself because there is such a weird touch to have in a 21st century pop song. Oh, it's so strange. Gregorian chant. It's so weird.

What is that doing there? He's going back to the Middle Ages. Right, back to one of the earliest forms of musical notation that arose in Western history. Okay, so let's set the dial on the time machine back a full thousand years, nice round number. just a classic millennium. We're going to step out into the Middle Ages, into what is now France. And we're going to see that even in the Middle Ages,

people are using this text painting technique. I mean, this is old. This goes right back to the beginning. So J.T. is taking the music of the era, not only sampling it, but also taking their technique. Exactly. If we find a troubadour named Bernart de Ventatouren singing his song in old French

Convee la la laus et maovee And we are going to hear him Probably accompanying himself on Aleut Sing this song in Old French I'm going to whisper in your ear the translation Because I don't think you're an old French expert, Charlie I cited French for a couple semesters And completely forgot everything I learned

Convee la la la laus et maovee When the lark beats its wings When the lark beats its wings It's a beautiful line And what do we hear on that word Moevee the beat word. We hear the melody doing this kind of fluttering effect, right? It's like the melody is flying, like the lark. Yes. Yes, there's this melisma shake effect and you can almost see the lark in the air

beating its wings. Ooh, Bernart, that is some medieval brilliance, man. Way to go. Text painting all over that thing. So again, from the very beginning, people are using text painting and it really comes of age in the Renaissance, in Renaissance Madrigals. It is all over the place. And in the Baroque era, composers like Gjord Friedrich Handel really use that satisfying, exuberant feeling that we identified in the text painting of Justin Timberlake to create these religious oratorioes that completely lift your soul. Oh, yeah. So I was wondering, like, why is text painting so powerful? And Handels kind of got it.

I feel like in religious music, it's used to make you feel closer to the divine. We've been talking about summer jams, but if we take one of the greatest winter jams of Western history, Handel's Messiah. Christmas time and summer. Beautiful. We can go to an aria like the astonishing from every valley he shall be exalted. So the lyrics here are Every Valley Shall Be Exalted. And every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

So in the scrap of text, there are a lot of opportunities for word painting, right? Absolutely. Let me just guess, right? Like, the mountains and the hills. And so I imagine the melody has to rise at that moment going over the hills. And then they're made low, and when they go low, they probably go low again. The crooked straight. The crooked straight. Ooh, that's interesting, right?

Does the melody, like, go up and then down, then up and then down? I believe it does. Brilliant. Also pay attention to what he does with the word exalted. I feel like this is text painting at its best because the idea here is that we're supposed to feel connection with the divine. And in exaltation, we move into these great, crazy, wild moving melodies that bring us to that place. Okay, I think we've learned about text painting. So let's hop back in our time machine, take it back to 2016 step-out.

turn on the radio, can't stop the feeling, is bumping, and we are so at home, right? Because we're hearing the same musical techniques that we heard a millennium ago, half a millennium ago, up into the present. This is so tried and true. If you want to hit song in any era, throw in a little text painting, and you're going to bump up the charts. I love that he's drawing from Handel's Messiah, because if the song is about feeling connected to a higher place. They're both kind of doing the same thing. One is secular, one is religious. Ooh, yeah. They're both trying to make us feel excited in movement and connection. Yeah, one is in a Baroque church. The other is in a modern discotheque, but, you know.

But the Baroque church was just like the club of its period. You're totally right, though. As we've seen, this song is perfectly calibrated to be a summer smash from making musical illusions to past pop hits like Pharrell Williams Happy or Michael Jackson's thriller and rock with you, not to mention this brilliant use of the ageless musical technique of text painting, this song, whether you like it or not, is going to be all over the radio. This episode of Switch on Pop was produced and edited by me, Nate Sloan, and my frenemy, Charlie Harding. We have some really exciting news to bring to you.

We are so thrilled to be joining the Panoply Podcast Network. This is really exciting to us because we are joining a roster of some amazing other shows like Slate's culture and political gab fest. You must remember this and the gist with Mike Peska. The Charlie Manson season of You Can Remember This, which is Karina Longworth's podcast about Old Hollywood, is some of my favorite radio ever. And if you're a music fan, you will definitely be interested in that season because it goes deep into Manson's relationship with the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson. It's fascinating. It'll keep you up in night, though. And if you've exhausted all the great shows on the Panoply Network,

you can always go and listen to more episodes. I'll switch on pop on pop on our website, switch on pop.com, Stitcher, Google Play, and of course, iTunes, where it is my job, to ask you to please go leave a rating or review. It really does help the show. I won't beg too much. I promise, just please go leave us a review. Thank you.

As always, big ups to Luke Harris for our sweet logo. Check out more of his work at lukeharris.com. all of the non-pop music in the show is written by Charlie and myself. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode, and until then, thanks for listening. Attention, Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Carolina Herrera, a fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, tofu caramelized and tonka-tosted.

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