Switched on Pop - Summer Heat of the 2000s: Nelly + Katy Perry (Pt. 1)

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

What made summer jams of the aughties like Nelly's "Hot in Herre" and Katy Perry's "I Kissed a Girl" so hot? The answer: big, sweaty, doses of harmonic tension. Specifically, each track relies on the Baroque technique of the ground bass. Wait, we mean: the Baroque technique of PEDAL POINT! When the chords in these songs don't match up with their bass notes, the ratcheting tension adds heat—fueling both dance moves, and controversy. Featuring: Nelly - Hot in Herre Katy Perry - I Kissed a Girl Katy Perry - Teenage Dream All summer Switched On Pop & Splice have been diving into the DNA of summer hits, and now we want you to show us what you’ve learned. Get inspired by sound packs and chord progressions created by Switched on Pop and share your best song of summer with us and the world. Hosts Nate & Charlie will be listening and will choose their favorite submission to win a year of Splice Sounds and have their track played on the podcast. Check out all the details at http://splice.com/onpop-fire And, read Owen Pallett's excellent article on the use of harmonic tension in Teenage Dream. 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 songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, we're going to continue our song of the summer series where we've been really going kind of retro looking back into the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, and the 90s. But I want to take us into the 2000s

and look at what makes a hot summer jam hot. Okay. Literally. Yeah. Oh, wow. Literally. Color. Okay.

I want to figure out how do you make a song sound hot, like hot in temperature, like hot on the dance floor, hot. Right. This is going to be an all-out song of summer review because I've been diving deep into the music of the 2000s. And some of my favorite tracks from Nellie to Katie Perry to Beyonce to the black-eyed peas have all been colliding. And I've noticed that they're using this same technique to make that heat happen. I'm on the edge of my seat here, Charlie. take me there. And instead of just giving it right away, let's see if we can hear that heat. This song needs no introduction. Let's just spin it.

Oh, yeah. That's about as hot as it gets. Yes. This is Nellie's 2002, Hot and Here. Maybe this is a totally ridiculous question, Nate. Sorry, hot and where, Charlie? Her. Spelled H-E-R-R-E. Yeah. Yeah. So this may be totally absurd to ask, but Nate, why is this song so hot? Ooh. You know, what a profound question. I don't think I've ever considered it.

I mean, certainly, we've got like a relatively high Btm. We've got, is this a Neptune's production here? Yes, this is a Neptune's production. Frel. Who was the Neptunes? I don't know if the rest of it. That would be Pharrell and the, the, the Ursewild elusive Chad Hugo.

Yes, this is the Neptune's production. Okay, but they make hot tracks, but this one's particularly hot, and it's not just the title. I mean, it's got a great concept, but there's something going on here. Do you hear what I'm hearing? I agree, and I'm at a rare loss for words, Charlie.

I'm not sure what makes this song so hot. You could say it's the excellent narrative progression of the track. This is a fun sort of club track, where rather than being about being in the club, it's actually the entire progression of going to the club, waiting for the right time, checking things out, getting up on the dance floor, feeling like busting loose,

and then moving to the bar, popping the bottles, then getting in the car, going down the freeway, going to the next party, there's this whole sort of narrative progression. That could be a hot summer jam. Oh, yeah.

I mean, when you describe it that way, it's downright Homeric. But this narrative progression wouldn't be so fiery, if not for the underlying, harmonic tension in this track. And that's what we're going to look at today.

Harmonic tension. I see. So the heat comes from the tension. The heat comes from the tension created in the music. And for the uninitiated, we'll cover the basics of harmonic tension really quickly. In fact, it's such a basic concept, so entirely fundamental to all of popular music that we somehow have failed to cover it on the 90 plus episodes of our show. Right.

This really is a core building block of pop. And so quick digression from Nellie so we can figure out this harmonic tension concept. At the most basic level, harmonic tension is the way in which chords create a sense of building up to something

that wants some sort of release from that tension, usually back to sort of a home key. We've talked around this a lot on our show. The way we have a home key, also called a tonic or a one chord. And then there's this far away chord, this very tense chord we're called the dominant or the five chord, which wants to resolve back home.

The terminology isn't important. All that matters is that you can hear home and then away and then back home. This is the most common chord progression creating that sense of home, away, and back home. First chord is home, second chord, tense, and then we're back home. Okay, harmonic tension 101 chords literally create a sense of tension that progress a song. forward. But today we're talking about hotness, heat, fire. We need to move beyond this simple idea of just home and away because there are much hotter ways of building tension, which brings us back to Nelly. Right. Let's just go and check out that core progression that comes in just

before the verse of the song. Cool. So hot. Right? Oh yeah. So there are so many ways in which we could analyze these progressions. We could use big words like try to substitution, modal interchange, chromatic dissonance. But I want to focus on a concept that we actually started to look at on our episode with clipping about Afri Futurism, this idea of the ground base. Mm, love it. Okay, so the ground base is this idea that there's a bass note that just constantly repeats itself as things move over it.

I think most obviously what makes this song so hot is that the chords are really dissonant and close and grammatically moving in a way that honestly, wouldn't typically make its way into a pop song. Gotcha. Yeah. So for example, just check out this really tense chord. This is a chord that he plays in the track. Do you ever hear that kind of a chord in modern pop?

That is your kind of chord. That is a chord you hear in modern jazz, not in pop, right? Yeah. Let's hear that one more time. Oh, that's delicious. I could have that all day. There is a whole progression of these close chords to create a really dissonant quality by putting a bunch of series of notes that are really closely related and connected to each other,

basically on top of each other. But it all holds together because underlying it, there is this ground base, this E, this thing which is establishing us in the key of E minor. Because even though the chords are obviously changing in the song, underneath those chords is the same base note, that E. Played normally, the bass note is quick and anticipated and sounds like this. Ooh, it's sticky, right? Yeah, sweating, just listening.

But we can make it even stickier because if you hold that bottom note out, you can start to hear the color of these chords over that ground bass, and they become even more dissonant. Right, because when you hold out that lower note, it starts to sound with the higher notes and adds yet another flavor to these courts. Yes. But Charlie, I would be remiss if I didn't hit the pause button

for one second here. Oh, what do you got? Because only to say that I think a slightly more appropriate term than ground base here would be a pedal point. Ooh, you're right, it is a pedal point. Ooh, taking me back to a freshman year of college.

Yes. Thank you for correcting me. We want to explain the differences between pedal point and ground base? Yeah, absolutely. And maybe we can delve deeper into this in a future episode. But quick classical masters digression. Imagine you're an organist in Baroque Europe.

As I want to be. Right. You've got a lot of notes and a lot of pipes at your disposal. And one of the really cool things you can do as an organist is you have a set of keys at your feet, too. Yeah. that you play with your toes. And one of the really fun things you can do as an organist is just take your left foot and just slam it down on one of those pedals.

Yes. And that just gives you this fat, deep note that will last as long as you're hitting that pedal. And if we're going way back in time, you would literally have some poor guy pumping a bellows to send the air through the organ. So maybe as long as he or she can keep pumping. Yeah. And then once you've got your foot just slammed on that pedal, you can do all sorts of fun chords with your hands on top of it. Yes.

Now, fast forward in time, this term sort of gets deracinated from the organ. And now any time you have a low note that's just kind of constant, and on top of it, you have different changing chords and melodies, we're still going to call that a pedal point, even when, you know, an organ isn't involved. Thank you. And so if that's a pedal point, sort of the idea is like there's just kind of one note hanging down below while things are happening on top. Right. I was sort of misusing the idea of a ground bass,

which I think I have an idea of, but maybe you could explain that to me, so I'm not totally aloof. Right. So ground bass will take the same concept, but just stretch it out. That's a longer kind of melody line in the bass that would repeat over and over again. Right.

So also definitely a concept that's still with us, a baseline. Right. But not just a single static note. That would be a pedal point. Right. If you got really into this Nelly track, you might notice there are a few other anticipated little notes here and there and some repeated things.

But I think still it falls much more. You're right in line with this pedal point concept. Okay. Thank you for the correction. Thank you Nelly for taking us into the vagaries of Western musical history. Into the Baroque organ. Who knew? So these Nelly chords are really.

tense, right? Yeah. All the dissonance between them is, I think, super hot. Like, you're on a sticky dance floor hot. Everyone is too close. There's this pent-up tension that is really nicely resolved when we land back into our home chord of E minor, which has been hanging down below these chords the whole time. So let's just slow that whole thing down and hear these chords all together with that

pedal point underneath. You can see. As they move up, it gets real tense, really difficult, and you go back cold. How pleasant. Oh, yeah. That is super tense, super dissonant, super crunchy. I like it. Nellie is not alone in using this technique, as there are all sorts of ways to create summer heat with harmonic tension.

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Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice rink. 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 back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated.

My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. Disclaimer. Now, I don't think that this song would be successful today for a whole slew of reasons, mostly because of its fairly regressive sexual politics, its appropriation of queer identity,

and its obvious male gaze. But when I Kissed a Girl came out in 2008, it broke all sorts of chart records and was the song of the summer. Whoa, yeah, you're taking me back, Charles. All right. So even though it was controversial, even when it came out, this song was a summer hit that really built up that tension and heat using, in fact, that same method that Nellie used the pedal point. Wow, I was not expecting a bridge from Hotin here to kiss a girl, but there it is. The pedal point. It could take us in all sorts of ways. So to hear that tension more closely, why don't we just isolate the chords and the pedal

point base so that we can hear the way in which it creates that heat? Now, because the chords in this track are kind of sacado and a little syncopated, I think it helps to really hear the way in which the harmonic tension is established. It might even be helpful to slow this whole thing down and simplify the rhythm so that we can see how these changing chords underneath that same bass note create this really thick heat, that tension. Let's... Cool.

Yeah, that's nice. and dissonant and tense and crunchy. Cool. And it's interesting to me that this tense moment is actually the very beginning of the chorus. They start on this pedal point and establish this really big tension where you usually expect the hook to give you some release. Perry really only gives us that sense of release for just a moment when she actually drops the pedal point base and brings in the normal bass notes to the song. And it takes on a totally different quality. Hmm. And if we isolate it again, we'll hear that the chords are moving with the bass now. The bass is moving along and moving up and up and up. Right. So as soon as she says it felt so wrong,

no longer is it that static pedal point base, but the base starts to move with the changing chords. Exactly. But in those moments where things don't move, where the pedal point is just hand. hanging, there is the underlying tension. Unlike Nellie, where Nellie is using these really dissonant chords, instead, Perry is using some pretty common chords. Like, these chords are all in the key. There's nothing particularly strange about them. In fact, they just kind of move up from the home chord, the one. They move up to the three, to the four, briefly up to the six, and then to the five. And the bass note just sort of stays rooted underneath all of that. But because you're hearing that bass note, it's kind of like, am I in the home chord, or am I in the

this away chord where am I you have this just wonderful underlying harmonic tension throughout yeah I see that so this isn't the only place that Perry uses this sort of concept of harmonic tension to build that summer heat in fact she does it and really I think one of her best songs so well in the song Teenage Dream mm yes cool I know we've talked about this one before but I think it bears repeating because even though maybe this is like a slightly beachier hit than hot in here I do think that

it has just so much angst and tension and she does it in a way which is slightly different than the other two songs we've looked at. Nate, what is this song about? This song is about being forever young. It's about the endless

eternal summer, Charlie. Endless eternal summer, endless eternal youth. And that is the fundamental tension of the song which is set up in the harmony because underneath this entire song is a chord progression that never resolves itself. It keeps you suspended as if you can live forever in suspended youth.

There's a lot of people in Los Angeles trying to do this. It's not possible. It can only be done in a three-minute pop song. Right, through the transcendent power of music. Yes, because it's, Except for the very beginning of this song where we hear a sense of our home key, this song actually just builds and builds and builds going back and forth and back and forth and never resolving. We can isolate that and hear how the chords never resolve themselves right here.

Whoa, interesting. That just keeps going on throughout the entire song. If we add in her top melody, you'll hear a part where you think it, should resolve and go back home. You know, you don't have to be a musicologist to hear this. Like, there's just, there's a place where you think, like, that's where it's going to land and resolve all the tension. See if we can identify that.

What do you think? Hmm. I think it's right where the melody jumps up. Yes. I guess what in the lyrics would be the line, don't ever look back. Yeah, don't ever look back. Don't ever look back. And you think it would resolve there, but it doesn't.

It just keeps on repeating the same chord progression. But I think a probably less talented songwriter who wasn't aware of how you could suspend eternal youth in the tension of harmony, they might have done something a little less sophisticated and written it like this. That's like cheese whiz, right? Right. What you've done there is you've actually gone to the home chord that Katie Perry spends this whole song avoiding. Yes. And as soon as you do that, it loses that excitement. and that tension and that feeling of summer heat.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that chord is death to the song. It has lost its perpetual tension, perpetual youth. The only thing that holds this very simple song together is the fact that, despite having very little going on harmonically, it just doesn't ever go to where you think it's going to go. That's what makes that tension,

that heat, so successful. It's why you want to keep playing the song. In fact, these chords just run throughout the entire song. A lot of songs will have a loop and chord progression, but this one you just never get tired of because it never gives you what you expect. And it's so straight.

I mean, to return to the metaphor that you started the show with, like of harmonic tension being something moving from home where you have the release of tension to a way where you build up tension and then back to home where you release the tension, the song never goes home. It never goes home.

It never releases that tension. And that's so bizarre. Yeah. And yet is exactly. like you say, what makes the song so effective. Yeah, man. I mean, that's what for me makes this a successful song of summer. It's the never-ending summer, the never-ending youth,

and it does it through harmonic tension. I have to point our listeners to a piece by Owen Palette on Slate called Katie Perry's Teenage Dream, explaining the hit using music theory in which he goes even deeper into this track, a real inspiration for the show as well before we started doing Switched on Pop. Go check out that. article on Slate. Definitely.

Okay. Nellie, Katie Perry, these are not the only artist using harmonic tension to create a summer hit. Because on our next track, things are going to get crazy. Hint,

they're going to get crazy in... You're going to have to see. Because, Nate, I think that things are getting too hot in here and that we should take a break, cool off,

In fact, I think that these next two songs are so hot that we're going to have to extend this episode into part two. Whoa. So come back for part two of feeling the summer heat next time with the Queen Bee. Cliffhanger, our first to be continued. I love it. Switched on Pop is produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan. Our editing, mixing, and all good things are done.

by Bill Lance. Our design is by Luke Harris, and we are a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can find more episodes at switched onpop.com on iTunes, podcast, Spotify, or any podcast player you choose. We're going to continue our song of Summer Series, our part two episode of how to make that heat happen with that harmony in two weeks. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.