[24/365] Star-Spangled Lady Gaga

[cosmolinguist]

I really enjoyed this video that looks at the music theory behind the arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that Lady Gaga sang at the inauguration.

It gets quite technical in places but even if you don't know much about music (or if, like me, you definitely remember knowing what "sus" means in a chord but can't for the life of you remember now), I think it's accessible enough to potentially be enjoyable. You hear both the whole recording, a little bit at a time and you're told what to listen out for at each point, and the guy playing he chords he's talking about. He's of course explaining them but also sometimes he's just reacting to them like a fanboy, which is fun but also indicative of some of the points he's trying to make -- after all part of the point of music is to move us emotionally and it definitely does that.

Apparently the arrangement takes a lot from the way Whitney Houston sang it at the 1994 Super Bowl, "but also created this new approach that I think is sorely needed," this dude says. This inauguration was about new things, about the positivity of change, and I think it's interesting that this is evident even in how this weird, boring, awful song was sung.

After going through this weirdness and innovation in detail (I like the insight that it was more of a musical theater approach than the pop one Lady Gaga used when she sang it at a Super Bowl herself), the video ends with

This was very well thought out by everyone involved. The meters served to tell a new story, and I think that's important for us when we're listening to the United States' national anthem. We've been hearing the same story over and over again....

Americans...hear our story spoken by an individual who at big events, like the inauguration or the Super Bowl, serves as kind of an avatar for everything that we might be feeling. And there's this like lightning rod that surrounds that individual as they're singing it.

It was definitely a weird day, and an innovative day (the Capitol tour guides we had as announcers kept saying how different it was because of coronavirus regulations, but even they made mention of the National Guard patrolling the building...), and I just think it's cool that that's even reflected in the music for a song foisted upon us so often as Americans that I can't be the only one who doesn't even hear it any more when I have to listen to it.

Comments

[packbat]

As a plural system that knows between two and three things about what a sus chord is (we can talk about it if you want but you're right that you don't need to know what it means for this), we've been a huge fan of Adam Neely's videos for a long time and are glad to see other people talk about them. :D

[cosmolinguist]

He's clearly very popular so I'm a little sad I'd never heard of him before I saw this video on Mastodon the other day. :)

[packbat]

We've been impressed and gratified over the past eight months with how productively he has responded to the George Floyd protests in his field of music theory by talking about issues of racism, Eurocentrism, colonialism, and so on - both in videos on specific subjects connected to those things and in discussions in other videos. He's a really thoughtful and well-read student of music, theory, history, and practice, and we've been a fan for a while.

(And, uh, let us know if you want us to recommend more videos by him, because we absolutely can.)

[conuly]

Sweet video, thanks.

[jesse_the_k]

I learned a lot from that video, thank you!

[cosmolinguist]

I'm glad to hear it!

[diffrentcolours]

I watched that and went "yeah this is somebody who knows what he's talking about saying some cool sounding things". I was entertained, but lacking the base level of knowledge to be informed :)

[cosmolinguist]

I'm genuinely glad to hear this, because I hoped it'd be entertaining to people who don't know music theory and etc. but I have no way of telling because I haven't been one of those people since I was like six years old. :)

[ivy]

This was really interesting, thanks for linking! (Took me a few days to get to it, but I enjoyed it!) I ended up watching his friend's Whitney Houston video afterwards too, and now I want to find and read a book on music theory so I have any idea what he was talking about, heh.

[silveradept]

I don't have the formal music education that I would need to understand the chord progression, but luckily for me, I can listen to what's being sung and played and I understand the effect being sought. I was much more with him on the meter changes and their effects, since that's a little easier to understand.

I do like the idea of the musical theater version of the story, especially because of how much Hamilton has been and still is something that resonated and opened up an idea of what kind of music is acceptable to tell stories of history and what kind of music is acceptable for the Broadway stage.