When Composers Listen to Pop Music
I’ve been listening to the Four Tops a lot recently, particularly their work from the mid-1960s. However, even as my head bobs, I’ve gotten stuck on a perceptual problem in their 1965 tune “It’s the Same Old Song.” Written and produced by the legendary Holland-Dozier-Holland team, it features the talents not only of the Tops themselves but of the Funk Brothers, the fraternity of session musicians who supposedly played on more hit records than any contemporaneous rock band (which is to say, any rock band from the era when chart success was a meaningful yardstick). Unless I’m mistaken, James Jamerson, Motown’s most influential bassist, plays on “It’s the Same Old Song.” I don’t know the extent of the writers’/producers’ control over Jamerson’s bass line, but whether Holland and Dozier or Jamerson himself devised it, there’s a riddle there that continues to confound me.
The harmonic implications of the bass’s ostinato—C, D, E, A, (rest), A, G, A—are maddening. Does the A imply a relative minor progression or is it simply a whole-tone suspension of sorts, a non-chord tone? The sixth isn’t uncommon in this context; if the fourth note had been a G rather than an A, we could write the latter A’s off as such without too much hand-wringing. As it is, however, it seems to exert its power over the entire second half of the bar. None of the transpositions of that ostinato incorporate analogous ambiguities.
An even more vexing consideration is whether the accretion of popular music idioms that encrusts my analytical apparatus is occluding the historical sensitivity I’d need to approach the question in a sensible manner. Would listeners in 1965 have heard the first A as a non-chord tone in the absence of decades of literature to reinforce that reading? On the other hand, maybe they would be less likely to interpolate the overlaid haromies (i.e. the other instruments) into their judgment, instead compartmentalizing the bass from the rest of the texture and taking the A as a diatonic upper leading tone. In short, the meaning of that A is a moving target: It’s different now than it was in 1965, and it’ll be more different yet by 2045.
Music is full of phenomena like this. Whether Motown or Mozart, the pieces we love are changing all the time as our context for them changes—it’s actually never the same old song. To me, this problem suggests a compelling argument for historical musicology: Much as historically informed performance has flowered in the recent past, historically informed listening may come to constitute a new stratum of mediated listening behavior. If nothing else, it’s an admirable personal goal, one whose accomplishment may furnish perceptual rewards that are unrepentantly sweet…you know, like a honeybee.