I've been doing something I would refer to as 'quixotic,' which is reading Tom Breihan's exceptional blog post series "The NumEitber Ones" on Stereogum from the start and listening to all of the songs therein. This is a series in which Mr. Breihan reviews every single Billboard Top 100 #1 hit in the history of the chart, starting in 1958 and going to the present. Since Mr. Breihan, who I have decided to refer to in this fashion because for some inexplicable reason he has not yet gotten a long form New Yorker interview and deserves one, got better at writing the articles as he went along this is a dumb way to do it. It's also a dumb way to do it because-- exactly as everyone always said-- a lot of the songs that topped the charts in the late '50s/early '60s in the United States are just boring as hell. On the other hand, since I wasn't alive and a radio listener for any of the songs I've listened to so far, it's let me replicate a couple of experiences I've never had before. One is 'listening to I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles and unironically thinking what a scandalously hard-rocking number! Another one is 'listening to the sound of the 70s arise aggressively to the top of the charts and thinking, holy shit. The seventies are a real thing.
It's not that I doubted the decade of the 1970s had existed. I've seen Young Frankenstein and my grandmother once told me that George Moscone tried to put the moves on her. It's just that I didn't realize that 'seventies music' was such a distinctive, across the board concept: that although any given shift is gradual and there are outliers in either direction, you really
I'm going to explain what I mean and then I'll explain what I was able to track down about the origins of this change. However I do want to say up front that this isn't a novel observation and it is literally on the wikipedia page for 'major seventh chord'. It's just new to me.
If you've taken an instrument that's local to what is generally although imprecisely called "Western music", meaning music that derives its theoretical basis from European classical traditions, you've probably learned the major scale. (A lot of these links go to Wikipedia, which has sound files demonstrating the things I'm talking about.) A chord is any arrangement of two or more notes played at the same time. A major chord is any combination of notes which includes these three particular notes: the first note of a major scale, the third note of a major scale, and the fifth note of a major scale. Here is a website where you can play major triads (the most basic form of major chord) on a virtual keyboard. This is one elemental building block of modern pop music and Western music theory will teach you to think about chords as they relate to the major chord. For example, a minor chord is a major chord but with the third note a half step lower. Minor triads sound like this.
A seventh chord is the simplest extension of a triad to a tetrad: instead of playing the 1, 3, and 5(th notes of a scale), you play the 1, 3, 5, and 7(th notes of a scale). You're keeping the relationships between the notes, you're still playing every other note on the scale, you're just... continuing the process one more note along. You can hear the version that arises when the scale you're using is the major scale on the major seventh chord page again. It's called a major seventh for obvious reasons.
But this is not the most common seventh chord in mass-market music. That is because the major scale is not the only or even the most essential scale in mass-market music. There is also the blues scale, which I talked about fleetingly last post. The blues scale originates in blues music and it is nowhere near as tightly or formally defined as the major scale. I was taught the hexatonic blues scale, which you can hear on the Wikipedia page for 'blues scale', and that's enough for the thing I'm trying to explain here. If the major scale is
Which you wouldn't have, in most of the sixties, because the songs at the top of the charts in the sixties were heavily blues-influenced (either because they were literally rhythm and blues, as with Motown's R&B, or because they were ripping off blues musicians directly or at a remove, like the Beatles and Stones). Is the most famous dominant seventh in music from Twist and Shout, a song that was originally released in 1961? Maybe it's just the one I was most obsessed with. Here's the Isley Brothers, coming in and building that chord on a bridge that is just a bunch of "aaaaahs": (Twist & Shout was written by Phil Medley and Bert Burns. This version went to #20, and the Beatles covered it and took it to #2 in 1963. Their own song "Can't Buy Me Love" beat this track to #1.)
Not every song in the 60s used a dominant seventh this aggressively but that was the dominant-- sorry-- tonality! Like it really was! You can hear it EVERYWHERE!
BUT THEN. APPARENTLY OVERNIGHT. THE SEVENTIES.
It happened with everyone. On the left in the examples below, a song from before 1970; on the right, a song from after.
Marvin Gaye:
Gladys Knight and the Pips:
* Explaining why it's called a dominant seventh would take another three paragraphs but if I ever do end up explaining this I will link that here. For now, here's Wiki on what the 'dominant' is.
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