#CHANGE MUSIC KEYS FULL#

Instead, he modulates to the MAJOR key built on the third scale degree, in a stunningly unexpected move. From here, one would normally expect to go to a I6 chord with the third scale degree in the bass. Incidentally, her vote would be for Barry Manilow’s “I write the songs,” where he goes from a prolonged dominant chord (V) to a V42 by moving the bass down a step. Specifically, it’s an “LP” transformation a leading-tone transformation (E-G#-B to G#-B-D#) followed by a parallel transformation (G#-B-D# to G#-B#-D#(enharmonically equivalent to Ab-C-Eb)) where both notes are actually changing simultaneously. If you prefer, you can analyze this as a Neo-Riemannian transformation. This is actually pretty standard practice. The Ab and G# are enharmonically equivalent, so what’s really happening is that the third of the E major chord is just being reinterpreted as tonic. Lee, according to my wife, who has a PhD in music theory and knows about such things, you’re making a bit much of the modulation in the Bonnie Tyler song. For a split second atop the tip top of what used to be the top of his shattered lungs and discarded dignity, I can feel it shudder a little.

In that one key change, Sisqo demands, like Superman at his most absurd, that the world spin backwards. I love the behemoth key change in the Thong song because it is a world-killer, because it makes John Williams look like Phillip Glass (or John”ny” Cage), because it has all the sublime glory of Icarus ascending to the heavens just before his brief record career melts in the heat of a bethonged sun and crashes into the Adriatic Sea (or, for Sisqo, the Chesapeake Bay).īut I think it’s the greatest key change ever because it does more than any other of its kind what all over-the-top pop song key changes aspire to do - it forces emotional significance on moments and lyrics that cannot bear it otherwise.

#CHANGE MUSIC KEYS FULL#

After expounding deliberately, loudly, enthusiastically and shrouded in only the most halfhearted simile about his enthusiasm for “that thong” - after doing so in front of a full orchestra in a song with multiple choruses and verses piling layer upon layer (much like the multithonged women in the video) into a full oratorio of thong worship, Sisqo still thinks that you either literally can’t hear him or figuratively don’t understand what he’s talking about. At the peak of a mounting cascade of modulations that wails to the heavens with a fury and pathos no undergarment ever deserved, Sisqo belts out the greatest counterfactual in all of music. At the very least, it relieves us a bit of the mundanity of the real world.īut Sisqo gives us a special sort of delusion. In this world, Britney is a Slave 4 U, everybody gets to be immortal with the Oasis Brothers, and Whitney Houston will always love Kevin Costner.

There’s something aspirational about pop music - it’s escapist, and it hopes for a world much different from our own.

Change music keys