Last week I learned the hard way why music is only meant to be felt. Looking at the bones of music is a curse for the uninitiated eye. Nevertheless, I appreciate the goosebumps more now after going on this wild-goose chase.
Without factoring in The Big Bang Theory theme song, the Canadian band ‘Barenaked Ladies’ has one of the biggest collection of what I like to call ‘family sitting room’ songs. The kind that childhood friends bond over in silence, in giggles, in lyrics corresponding to their lived experiences, each stretched out on a couch or on the floor.
Take one of their best charting songs “If I Had $1000000”. It’s an icebreaker, a Thanksgiving holiday conversation kindle for the 20th century discussion about what one would do with $1000000. At least back when that amount “meant something”. The song was released in 1992 and 30 years later that a million dollars is $2,211,874.55. What an unsexy figure it grew into.
At this landmark of the good old days, fans of the band filter in and out of comments checking how this song is keeping up with the times and their realities.
“If I had a million dollars, I’ll help Ukraine,” “Anybody else think it’s cruel that they are in Vancouver singing about buying a house with a million dollars? Maybe a one bedroom condo,” and “It’s almost 2022. A million dollars can’t get you sh*t anymore.”
It is a relatable hypothetical for financial freedom and personal values.
When you take a trip down south to New York City, home of the American rock band Fountains of Wayne, things get complicated in this purported sunny side of rock music.
Fountains of Wayne came on the scene in the mid 90s, releasing two albums before a brief fall out at the start of the new millennium. After a tough hiatus, in 2003 they hit the jackpot with their only Grammy-nominated song “Stacy’s Mom.”
It was inspired by a childhood admirer of band member and songwriter Adam Schlesinger’s grandmother.
Schlesinger passed away from COVID complications today in 2020.
Stacy’s Mom is the third track on their third album “Welcome Interstate Managers”. It was the only mainstream hit from the band but an Archilles’ heel for fans because, “It’s frustrating that Fountains of Wayne’s extensive repertoire of great songs often gets overlooked because of one particular track. “Radiation Vibe” stands out as possibly the finest power pop song from the 90s,” and “One day, Fountains of Wayne’s entire discography will get the respect it deserves.”
Those are some of the comments left under a Twitter Thread that has changed me forever. According to the cult-like fandom, “Stacy’s Mom” is a paragon of pop music in the last 20 years and every millennial’s lifetime.
I guess bonding over finding Stacy’s Mom hot and reminiscing about the early 2000s gets boring.
The Twitter thread started by Woke Stifler reads, “this is silly but I’m a little floored every time I listen to “stacy’s mom.” What should be a dumb novelty track is instead one of the most mathematically perfect pop songs of my lifetime.”
“What’s even more impressive is it’s the SECOND mathematically perfect song Schlesinger wrote, and the first one (That Thing You Do!) was a “personal exercise” that accomplished its (very niche) goals maybe more perfectly than any other endeavor in human history,” someone says in agreement.
The “mathematically perfect” claim piqued my interest. This is followed by a ridiculous nit-picking comment from one Bil Nombreini, “It’s nearly Pi minutes long lol.” (It’s 3:17)
To be fair, Woke Stifler followed up with a second tweet saying, “the key change! my goodness.”
That does not register to me as part of the mathematics or correlated to the first tweet. Some comments are from confused users wondering,
“What do you guys think mathematics is?” One Fox Milder asks. “Can you explain how it’s mathematically perfect?” Rami Bensasi and “What is mathematically perfect?”
I set out to find the mathematics.
Perhaps, more than the story, maths is behind the song’s success.
A quick Google search doesn’t reveal anything mainstream about mathematically perfect songs. The few Reddit and Quora discussions on the topic, however, point towards an unpalatable perfection of most pop songs.
“A lot of dance and pop music is mathematically perfect. They edit the h*ll out of it with modern software. They fix the pitch and the rhythm to make it perfect. And it sounds like sh*t. It’s the same trick over and over and there are a lot of things missing (dynamics for one.) Music isn’t math. Certain aspects of music use basic arithmetic, but so does everything,” says Ryan Shivdasani, California Institute of the Arts on Quora.
Doubly jarring is a discovery that some of the most mathematically beautiful songs and compositions can be so unpleasant to the ear.
The American rock band ‘Tool’ is a modern example in the exercise of mathematically beautiful songs. Their song ‘Lateralus’ from their 2001 album by the same name is based on a mathematical sequence known as the Fibonacci Sequence.
The Fibonacci Sequence is the road to the Golden Ratio in which each number is the sum of the two numbers before it as follows; 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…) This sequence is reflected in leaves, petals, among other fauna and flora. The Golden Ratio which is also known as the “Divine Proportion” is fundamental in the architectural structure of the natural world.
Lateralus offers a soothing welcome to the unsuspecting ear leaving you unprepared for the Fibonacci Sequence of lyrics starting at exactly 1:38. The drum beat is also based on this sequence but it’s more pronounced in the staccato of lyrics. The first line has one word, second line two words, third line three words, and so on until eight. After the eight-word line, the structure reverses and starts to descend on the sequence.
It’s a mathematical masterpiece but your ears may not appreciate it. The worst song choice for karaoke night.
Going by these examples and expert opinions, I know better than to insult Schlesinger’s “Stacy’s Mom” with accusations of technological fixes or mathematical rigging.
So I revert to looking within the structure of “Stacy’s Mom”.
At first it seems the mathematics is a pattern of three. Third song, on the third album, 2003, the “almost Pi” statement. As if to push this “3” baader-meinhof further, there’s a unique chord in the song which is a combination of three notes. It is literally called a triad chord.
It’s written “Cdim” (C Diminished) and D#dim in the progression in the outro chorus. Cdim is a triad of notes C, Eb, and Gb; where Eb is three half steps above C and Gb is six half steps above C. At this point I feel silly being so invested just to find a deuce-ace shrouded in the song as if Fountains of Wayne’s own Bermuda Triangle.
There’s no indication that this was intentional.
Before I can dismiss the whole thing as a coincidence, something about this Cdim chord catches my eye. Its placement in the lyrics is in a way that it’s only played on the word “not” in the part of the chorus “You’re just not the girl for me.”
I realise that Woke Stifler meant symmetry rather than numbers.
“A diminished chord injects a sense of drama, tension, with its distinct dark, eerie and dissonant timbre,” according to Icon Collective.
According to iZotope, “Without context, diminished chords may sound off-putting.”
It hits me, for the first time, that music is not plucked out of the ether ready-made for lyrics in a ceremonial matchmaking on a computer. Perhaps I thought instrumentalists are tuned into a naturally-occuring music? I don’t know what I thought or if I thought about it at all. The reality that people build music from notes, scales, degrees, is depressing.
It’s so dark that my perspective on the song takes a morbid turn.
She’s “Stacy’s Mom” instead of, say, Ms. Holly because with Stacy in the middle as a safety net, he can ogle and creep as much as he wants. Without Stacy, he either loses access to her mom or he stumbles and falls in the basement where he finds out that Stacy’s Mom is actually made up of wires and iron bars, she cries while looking at pictures of her ex-husband, and hides there and pretends to be on a business trip.
Our young creep does not want any of that. None of the viewers or listeners want that.
Here the Cdim chord plays with this safety net as if to say “oops” or “kidding, maybe not, kidding!”.
Although depressing, it’s also stunning that strings (music instruments) have structures which are basically their own alphabet and emotions equivalent to human experiences.
That hoists my curiosity to see more.
Chris Preperato claims that, “its (Stacy’s Mom) sequel is Call Me Maybe; which has about as much depth as Stacy’s mom…yet somehow also mathematically hacked just the right variables (repetition, vaguel hinting at female empowerment, over the top strings) to be massive.”
There’s a link to a YouTube video titled “Understanding Call Me Maybe”.
I click on the link.
The video starts playing and I start to fall through a dark grey tube.
I have no idea what ‘12tone YouTube channel’ is talking about 99.9% of this video. All I can see and hear in my mind is a man (probably Stacy’s Dad) welding metallic symbols, dipping them in lava and hammering them into trinkets while he breathes heavily in a medieval knight mask. He is only wearing unsigned divorce papers and an oxford cap.
Is this what music feels like to my ears before they process it? Have I stumbled on something I have no business looking at or knowing?
The .1% I manage to comprehend explains how music reflects the progression of the story in the lyrics, supporting the energy and emotions of the experience in the context. The crush, the anxiety, the build up of confidence to approach, the excitement and sustaining the new relationship.
It’s fascinating to learn the witching way instruments sew music in stories. At the same time, my head is about to explode even his artistic doodling isn’t distracting enough. It is torture listening to this break down.
It’s nice to know there’s a world beneath the dance floor, under the stage, where notes, tones, crescendos, chords, melodies, mirror and even support our sober or drunken interactions, and lifetime role playing.
But at the end of the night, the M in MILF doesn’t stand for music.
It’s funny that a terrible listening experience like Lateralus is beautiful when you diagnose it but looking under a pleasant song might ruin it for you.
Now I’m cursed to hear the echo of this underworld without understanding any of it. It doesn’t take away from my music experience. I’m not required to know that a song is in Dorian mode in order to feel relaxed. It’s not equivalent to the relief from seeing a reasonable answer for my fractions calculations homework back in school.
All I need to know is when the music drops, I will soar. Now that’s symmetry, and just because it’s symmetry doesn’t make it any less magical. For all I know my superstitious attitude towards music was robbing me of something in my music experience that has been given back twelvefold.