Monday, August 30, 2010

Madonna's Holiday I: Music and Lyrics


Released without a stand-alone video in September 1983, Holiday became Madonna's first hit (and first signature song) early in 1984. And whereas Madonna has recently signaled her skepticism about or even disdain for some of her other early hits and signature songs, e.g., Into The Groove, she's evidently still very fond of Holiday, citing it as her favorite among her own (not necessarily self-written) songs in an interview in 2005. In this note I take a close look at this terrific record, focusing on Holiday's music and lyrics. In the sequel I discuss how Madonna made Holiday a pop landmark by getting out there and selling it and herself to the world.

Music
Holiday is musically very simple:
  • Just four chords (in D-maj) arranged in exactly one 4-bar pattern: IV,V|V,vi|IV,V|iii,IV
  • Each bar in the pattern has the same timing: 3/8 for the first chord, 5/8 for the second chord, i.e., the second chord in each bar is always a quaver ahead of the beat.
Since the first and third bars of the pattern are the same, the overall 'feel' of the pattern is (counted out): theme and theme and up and stretch; theme and theme and down and relax (repeat). That is, given its moderate-quick tempo, Holiday 'feels' very aerobic, or very like an aerobics class. This is crucial, in my view, and I'll make much of it in the sequel.
In part because of its extreme musical simplicity/directness, Holiday isn't musically especially original or forward-looking. Indeed, Holiday is more or less exactly like the direct musical offspring of Chic's Good Times (from 1979) and ABC's Look of Love (from mid-1982). Let's focus on Holiday's LOL-lineage:
  • LOL bounces around the same four chords as Holiday – IV,V,vi,iii (only in C-maj)
  • LOL's main verse pattern is the same as the final two bars of Holiday's sole pattern, i.e., IV,V|iii,IV with a 3/8, 5/8 timing within each bar, and essentially the same timbre (muted-chiming, synth chords) picks out the basic changes in both H and LOL
  • LOL's and H's tempi, synth bass-lines, and string section embellishments are very similar, although in each dimension Holiday is simpler, more metronomic, and more synthetic/electronic than LOL.[1]
Important musical differences between LOL and H include:
  • Madonna's beat is a gloriously stiff Oberheim drum-machine, whereas ABC's rhythm track employs God's own army of electronic wizardry and low-flying orchestral percussionists, courtesy of Trevor Horn and Ann Dudley
  • Holiday is fleshed out by a buffet of interlocking, Chic-/Nile Rodgers-style, disco guitar figures
  • Holiday musically climaxes with a delightful piano part due to Fred Zaar. After plinking away in the background for 16 bars or so, Zaar finally breaks out into a solo, bringing the track joyously home.[2] That piano overall is similar to piano in Nick Lowe's I love the Sound of Breaking Glass (from 1978), and Steve Nieve's piano parts in Everyday I Write the Book, a near-contemporary (July 1983) single from Elvis Costello and the Attractions. More generally, Zaar's solo is in the lightly vaudeville piano tradition that occasionally surfaces in the Beatles, as well as in things like Thunderclap Newman's Something in the Air, and then persistently in the mutant pub-rock piano of Nieve, Jools Holland (Squeeze), in Eddie Rayner's playing for Split Enz, and even in Benny Anderson (Abba) at least some of the time. This style of piano is very different from Ann Dudley's brilliant, cod-classical for ABC (and Benny Anderson much of the time), let alone from the (Korg M-1) 'House' piano that dominated dance music for years after about 1988 (and has arguably never really gone away).
It's worth mentioning at this point that the remix of Holiday on Madonna's first greatest hits package, The Immaculate Collection should be avoided at all costs. It barbarically omits the piano solo, thereby decapitating the whole track, and it coats the whole song in various kinds of obsolete audio processing whose micro-latencies destroy the precision-timing and stiffness of the rhythm track.[3] Throughout this note, I therefore discuss just the original single mix of Holiday, which was collected on Madonna's first album, and which was sensitively edited for radio and for lip-synch performances.
Lyrics
As we've already seen, Holiday has little musical structure to speak of. Thus, almost all of the variation in the song, e.g., all verse/chorus/middle eight structure, etc., has to be created solely by the vocal line and the lyrics. Holiday doesn't disappoint in this regard, and its basic structure so conceived is as follows: Intro/Chorus/Verse1/Double Chorus (with responses)/Verse2/Chorus (with responses)/Middle 8 (just 4 bars really)/Intro/Chorus (with responses)/Intro (with responses)/Intro (with principal novel variant responses)/Intro+piano solo/Intro to fade (with various responses).
The key to Holiday from this structural-lyrical perspective is its call and response structure, which develops throughout the song. We originally perceive the Intro:
Holiday
Celebrate
Holiday
Celebrate
just as itself. But by the end of the song it's become a 'call' handled by backing vox, and we hear both Madonna and the piano respond to it. Similarly, in the case of the Chorus, we initially hear mostly just its 'call' part:
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,
it would be so nice
Although the last response line is in place here, the full response side only gets filled in second time through, i.e., in the double Chorus after the first verse. For still another example, we don't originally hear the vocal in the Middle eight (just 4 bars) as a series of responses. But as the Middle eight's constituent parts get recycled as responses to Chorus and Intro calls in the final third of the record, all becomes clear. In sum, by the end of Holiday, we hear its bobbing and weaving vocal parts and apostrophes in place, and zippered together in a way that's immensely satisfying, even exhilarating

From the top, then, and, to be clear, writing all the calls to the left and all responses to the right, we get -
Intro
Chorus:
If we took a holiday
Took some time to celebrate
Just one day out of life
It would be,
it would be so nice
Verse 1:
Everybody spread the word
We're gonna have a celebration
All across the world
In every nation
It's time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together
To release the pressure
We need a holiday
Double Chorus (with responses):
If we took a holiday
Oh...Ooo hoo hoo hoo
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Holiday!
It would be,
it would be so nice
If we took a holiday
Oo yeah oh yeah
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Just one day out of life!
It would be,
it would be so nice
Verse 2:
You can turn this world around
And bring back all of those happy days
Put your troubles down
It's time to celebrate
Let love shine
And we will find
A way to come together
And make things better
We need a holiday
Chorus (with mixed responses):
If we took a holiday
Holiday!
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Just one day out of life!
It would be,
it would be so nice

Middle eight:
Ooh yeah oh yeah
Come on let's celebrate
We have got to get together
Intro
Chorus (with mixed responses):
If we took a holiday
Ooh yeah oh yeah
Took some time to celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Just one day out of life
Holiday!
It would be,
it would be so nice
Intro (with mixed responses):
Holiday
Oh yeah oh yeah
Celebrate
Come on let's celebrate
Holiday
Just one day out of life!
Celebrate
It would be so nice
Intro (with principal novel variant responses):
Holiday
Holiday, Celebration
Celebrate
Come together in every nation
Holiday
Holiday, Celebration
Celebrate
Come together in every nation
Intro+piano solo
Intro (with mixed responses) + piano continuing to go nuts:
Holiday
We've got to get together
Celebrate
Take some time to celebrate
Holiday
Just one day out of life
Celebrate
It would be so nice
Intro (with principal novel variant responses) (repeat to fade).

Is there anything to these lyrics behind all of this busy, ingenious structure of Intro and Chorus call patterns, zipped and unzipped with varying responses? Probably not. In effect Holiday revolves tightly around the twin concepts Holiday and Celebrate/celebration for its whole length (perhaps drawing on the 'Holiday, Holiday, Holiday, Celebrate!' chorus of Change's A Lover's Holiday (1980)). But spinning though that so gracefully and unmechanically that a song with an unrelenting groove and a single chord progression nonetheless ends up powerfully expressing freedom and release is a significant achievement in my view. It may look easy to write and perform a lyric that invites and urges everyone 'all around the world' to get up and dance and 'get together' - to speak in a plausible 'we' without seeming obnoxious or ridiculous - but evidently it isn't. (I hail and discuss the significance of Holiday's egoless-ness in the sequel.)
The super-positivity that Holiday hymns became a key theme within dance music over the next 20 years (sometimes forming the attitudinal raison d'etre for whole sub-genres, e.g., Hi-NRG, Happy Hardcore, Italo, etc.), but rarely, if ever, was that theme as well articulated and demonstrated as Madonna and her producer managed in Holiday.

[1] And whereas Holiday had a train journey on its single sleeve, LOL has lately (and deliciously) soundtracked Virgin Rail ads.
[2] According to wiki, Zaar was a friend of Madonna's and her producer 'Jellybean' Benitez's, and his part was a last-minute, at-home/extra-studio addition to the track.
[3] 'Jellybean''s straight remix of Holiday for Madonna's 1987 You Can Dance collection of dance versions is OK in my view, but the 'drier'/less processed sound of the original mix is still better. 'Jellybean''s 'Dub version' remix of Holiday for the same collection is more interesting: it's just a classic, largely instrumental, 'separate all the parts', 12" mix. If you're a fan, everything from the piano to the layers of Nile Rodgers-ish guitars to the backing vox to the drum-machine cow-bell on Holiday is worth hearing in (near) isolation. For me, then, Holiday (Dub version) 6:56 uniquely, nicely complements Holiday's original mix.

Thursday, August 05, 2010

Political Compass

I'm somewhat surprised by my social result since I went out of my way to concede grains of salt to various putatively reactionary views, e.g., I agreed (though not strongly) with 'Eye for an eye', with 'Sometimes death penalty is OK', and with 'Military action unauthorized by international law may sometimes nonetheless be OK':

This definitely makes me wonder what sort of lunatic you have to be for the test to count you as an authoritarian.

My 'center left' econ score seems OK (it's an American test - and I always count as center left (= Hillary Clinton) there whereas that computes to center right in NZ. Take the test yourself here.

Wednesday, August 04, 2010

A match made in heaven

I would never have guessed that Joy Division's She's lost Control (12" B-side version) would fit so well with scenes from Powell and Pressburger's beloved classic The Red Shoes (1948):

The overall effect is a little like Peek-a-boo/1989 period Siouxsie & the Banshees:

Yay!

Sunday, August 01, 2010

Welcome to the Tangent Universe

In 1988, at least with hindsight, there were three big, political stories:
  1. The Soviets finally gave up in Afghanistan, and Gorbachev disavowed the Brezhnev doctrine (which had officially claimed Eastern Europe as part of the Soviet Union-administered, wider empire of international socialism), thereby in principle allowing the countries of Eastern Europe to go their own ways. 1989 would put all of that into shocking, explosive practice, and triumphalisms of various sorts (‘The end of history’, ‘We mujahadeen can defeat and destroy empires’) emerged fully-fledged by mid-year, and were commonplaces by the time the Berlin Wall fell and Germany reunified in November/December.
  2. The first round of ominous data about climate change led to the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was tasked to produce its first report by 1990. (Al Gore held the first US Congressional hearings on the topic in August 1988, but was really more interested in his abortive Presidential primary run.)
  3. Japan Inc. appeared to be winning at everything, and was buying up large chunks of everywhere on the strength of its asset prices, etc.. See Die Hard (1988) for a representation of the fear that provoked, although Mitsubishi's purchase of Rockefeller Center in NYC in 1989 was probably the high-water mark of the unease (and Japan's asset bubble continued to inflate for another couple of years).
2010 feels much like 1988 (although maybe 2011 and 2012 will bring us closer still), only now:
  • It's the US playing the role of economically-troubled-at-home-exhausted-loser-abroad in Afghanistan
  • Averting massive climate change seems quite impossible (without truly staggering scientific breakthroughs in carbon sink tech) given how little progress has been made so far and how much worse the terms and conditions of any solution will be after adding another 2 billion+ people ('another 2 Chinas') to the planetary pop. over the next 30 years. The richest people on Earth probably can make things a little less bad globally than they'd otherwise be, but that's about it, and achieving even that much seems likely to require near penetential falls in living-standards: compulsory vegetarianism, small, sealed-up houses, minimal private transportation, minimal travel, and the like, i.e., much less economic activity and life generally, e.g., as summarized here)
  • China is the rising power, the one with the gold making the rules (the real golden rule)
In sum, the US is the new USSR, China is the new Japan, and climate change, always a bear, is now most definitely the bear that eats us.

Right in the middle of this 1988-2010 period, Donnie Darko (2001) nicely captured or expressed some of its spooky, 'only the labels change' stasis. DD is set at the end of 1988 and tells of the formation of a tangent universe/alternative reality, which we see collapse at the climax of the film. The real world in 2010 does indeed feel a little like a formed-in-late-1988, tangent universe. The notable exception to 1988-2010's loopy, through-the-looking-glass-and-back stasis is the seemingly Millennial rise of the internet/networked economy and culture (which, of course, have their own temporal rhymes and structure). Maybe only the internet is preventing some underlying wormhole from collapsing, revealing that there's still all to play for in the 1988 Presidential election. Tell 'em George. 28 days... 6 hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds.