Crushing On

One of many fan-made “Bang Bang” promo covers with a decidely retro feel.

I have always loved Motown. This post is about Jessie J’, Ariana Grande, and Nikki Minaj’s late-summer hit, “Bang Bang.”

These two statements are closely related, I promise.

I grew up revering Motown music. I was obsessed with “Stop! In The Name of Love,” and listened to Oldies 98.1 WOGL on every car ride with my father. The beauty of the great majority of Motown songs is their disarmingly simplicity. The classic and seemingly complex “I Want You Back” is mostly just one endlessly descending bassline. Smokey Robinson created intricate riffs and harmonies over the simplest of blues progressions. My favorite dance tune – “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” – distills down to just one pair of chords.

As it turns out, simple songs with clearly distilled messages are hard to ignore.

This presents a terrific conundrum when it comes to Motown covers on acoustic guitar. “I Want You Back” translates to plenty action on an acoustic guitar, and Smokey songs can be dressed up or stripped down as you choose. Yet, other songs lose their sing sans arrangement and bassline. Plus, what to do with “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg” – so simple in its execution that it hardly holds together on one instrument? There, the power must be in your delivery and interpretation – there’s nothing spare to dress with.

Which brings me to “Bang Bang,” a raunchy summer slam from two of the hugest young female voices in pop. I heard it for the first time a few weekends ago while standing in a cell phone store, and my immediate first reaction wasn’t, “Who is singing?” or “Why is the production so huge?”

Nope. My reaction was, “This is so Motown!” I tried to explain it to E later that day, but not being the Hitsville connoisseur that I am she didn’t wholly appreciate the distinction. However, when I confessed it to Ashley in Smash Fantastic rehearsal yesterday, she shrieked, “I know!”

At which point we attempted our first cover of the ridiculous hot weather confection that is “Bang Bang” and discovered its true Motown realness: It’s just one damned chord! C7, over and over again. I thrashed it over and over in rhythm while Ashley annihilated that crazy Jessie J vocal that starts on an Eb. (I claimed Ariana’s verse as my own, as I love belting to her range. We are still negotiating over the Nikki verse.)

The similarity doesn’t stop there. Despite the decidedly unsubtle chorus, the first linee in Grande’s verse is practically cribbed from pint-sized Michael Jackson, “She might’ve let you hold her hand in school. But I’mma show you how to graduate.” Is that so different than the punnish innuendo in “The Love You Save,” where he sings, “When Alexander called you, he said he rang your chimes. Christopher discovered you’re way ahead of your times!”

It remains to be seen if Ashley and I can make our cover interesting enough to hold its own sans all of the arrangement and production on the studio cut, but at least now we understand why the song screamed “Motown!” at us on first contact.

When you hear these Indie Pop, or Art Pop, or Indietronica, or Electropop, or Synth Pop, or Alternative Dance – or whatever you would label hip wierdball dance bands like Hot Chip and Dirty Projectors with high-voiced male singers  the first thing you almost assuredly notice is their plastic elastic vocals. Just like the skinny-jean culture I loosely associate with their fans, husky(-voiced) boys need not apply.

(I would just call them “Pop” or “Dance” and let them duke it out for attention with Bruno Mars, personally. How they material differ from Paula Abdul I will never understand. But I digress.)

Yet, I don’t trust that we’re always hearing the authentic sound of a real voice singing. It is not just because these are genres that positively glisten with auto-tune. No, it more that as a rule I don’t trust that any vocal that sounds better than George Michael and not as good as Michael Jackson. That’s an uncanny valley that hardly any guy occupies. I’ve heard the subtle stuff you can do with gating and pitch correction and snapping to a click track.

(I actually once questioned Nate from Fun. about that on Twitter, and he swore his own plastic elastic vocals were achieved sans any tuning effects. This was before Some Nights, obvs.)

Then, last week “Look At Where We Are” from Hot Chip’s 2012 record In Our Heads shuffled onto my headphones. It’s such a nude song. A few synth burbles. A two beat kick-snare kick-snare drum loop. Completely unadorned electric guitar, so plaintive you can hear the pick and fingers on the strings. And the voice is right there in your ear. It is not a vacuum-sealed thing in a can. It is silken and easy, and you can hear the air surrounding it.

When all three elements line up, the song turns into some sort of Luther Vandross baby-making jam. Sure, we get some sampled vocals and synths later, but the point has already been made:

(Buy “Look At Where We Are” on Amazon)

Hot Chip can do all of that bippity boopity dance stuff with the best of them, but they don’t need to do it. The best song on the LP is something any kid could do in their bedroom with the most basic instruments out there, yet any kid can’t.

Think it’s an illusion of the studio? Watch this nerdy dude in a sweatshirt who is Hot Chip’s singer deliver a perfect live version complete with the very minor vocal warbles at Coachella:

(Seriously, how freakishly great is his voice?)

Suddenly I find myself liking Hot Chip a lot better, even if they are an indie-art-electronica-indie-synth-pop-dance-indie-alterna-pop band.

Or, you know, A POP BAND, as it was known in 1987.

Continuing the theme of “traumatic experiences” from last night, earlier this summer I had the distinct experience of viewing the gloriously random trainwreck that is the video for Miley Cyrus’s comeback single, “Can’t Stop” (which this weekend I had verified to me by an actual beach-going teenager as “the song of the summer, because ‘Blurred Lines’ is so overplayed”).

It was early or late or I was half-watching teevee or something, so I remember having the sound turned very low. My watch was purely for the aesthetics of the piece (or, I suppose, the lack thereof). Yet even a whisper of the song left an imprint on my brain. It only took one more listen to get the “la da dee da dee” refrain irretrievably stuck in my brain, and after watching the second glorious visual trainwreck that was Miley’s MTV Music Video Awards performance I also was stuck with the throaty “we can’t stop” chorus.

We’re talking 24/7 under-the-breath singing here. Constant subconscious replay. Ultimate earworm.

At that point I broke down and bought the damn song, and here’s what I realized: it’s actually a pretty interesting song. If you just treat the lyrics like the gibberish they are and listen to the arrangement, it has many interesting little hooks in it – the real performance of the chiming high piano notes, the thrumming fuzz bass, the “la da di” vocal hook, and the way it all evaporates into a brief vacuum at the top of a chorus before it enters on the repeat.

It’s just that the flat, Rihanna-aping vocal production sucks all of the air out of Miley’s performance and makes it joyless and robotic on the whole. (And, note that writing team Rock City actual pitched this to R before Miley sunk her grill into it.)

Enter Scott Bradlee and The Postmodern Jukebox. Yes, I know they are all over the internet already. No, I don’t care. Have some more.

The magic of the Bradlee version of the song is that it strips away all of the obvious differentiators I mentioned above and somehow emerges with an even catchier song.

First off, I am a total sucker for anything Motown, and the raw doo wop blend of unison and harmonies from The Tee Tones is a welcome throwback.

Second, the time signature – Postmodern Jukebox is in 6/8. For the non-musicians among you, just tap along to it. You’ll find you’re tapping in two sets of three – 1-2-3, 1-2-3. You can’t really make the argument that the original song contains this feel, yet after hearing it in the cover I can track that steady pulse in the original as notes in swing time.

Third, the vocal. I’m not just talking about the syrupy swoop of Robyn Adele Anderson’s vocals, which runs a lovely counter towards the trend of all retro-style singers having that taffy catch in their voice like Adele or Duffy. It’s her melody that’s distinct. She hews pretty close to the original on the verse, just adjusting for the time signature and – you know – actual singing. Then she breaks out in the “la da di,” transforming the earwormy sing-song of the original into an actual song-worthy melody that allows her to blossom into a brief crescendo on “doin’ whatever want.”

And, they do all this with the ridiculous lyrics about big butts and lines in the back room intact – the only difference is now we’re dancing with “Miley,” rather than “Molly.”

I’ve always said that a good song can be stripped down bare. This cover of “We Can’t Stop” isn’t exactly bare, but it had to be stripped down to the basics of the chord changes and melody to build it back up to this point. The fact that it’s even more catchy without the trappings of modern studio production just proves what lovely bones the song has.

Not every song on the radio right now would survive the transition – certainly not the tuneless “Blurred Lines.” Buy the Postmodern Jukebox version now!