FLIP SIDE BEATLES: presentations, books, musical analysis
  • Beatles Minute
  • Pop Goes the Theory
  • Calendar
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Newsletter Sign-Up
  • Blogs
    • Beatles Blog
    • Pop Music Blog
    • Star Wars Blog
    • Origami Blog
    • Shakespeare Blog
  • Contact

An Analysis of 'Sour girl' by Stone Temple Pilots

2/10/2019

5 Comments

 
I discovered the late-night radio talk show Loveline, with Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky, just before Christmas 1999. I was in eighth grade and starting to assert personal independence. With the benefit of hindsight, it's difficult to overestimate how important that discovery was because hearing frank and explicit discussion of sexual matters helped me realize, understand, and accept my own maturation process, both physical and mental. I suspect I'd be a very different person today had I not randomly encountered that broadcast while scanning the radio dial that night.

Like many adolescents, I used musical preference as a way to establish an identity, or at least the beginnings of an adult identify. I suspect many of a certain age connect The Beatles with this process, one major reason they're still so popular a half-century later. And Loveline would frequently feature guests, including many pop bands who were promoting their recent records. One night, I turned on the radio and heard for the first time a band called Stone Temple Pilots. They played a song called 'Sour Girl' from their 1999 album ​No. 4, which immediately captivated my 14-year-old ears.
Fast forward 19 years, and I've forgotten about 'Sour Girl' - but not about Loveline. A while back, I discovered the website www.lovelinetapes.com, which contains exhaustive archives of Loveline shows. In a nostalgic bid, I decided to listen to the entire archive in chronological order. And the other night I stumbled upon that same broadcast with STP that I heard two decades ago, including its performance of 'Sour Girl' (and now I even know the exact date: 10 May 2000). This time, my musically-trained 33-year-old ears heard all sorts of new and fascinating musical subtleties that my eighth-grade ears were too inexperienced to notice. And so I set out to analyze it. Here's a transcription:
sour_girl_with_bass.pdf
File Size: 272 kb
File Type: pdf
Download File

One of the first things I noticed was the change in key between the verse and chorus. The former seems to be in D major while the latter is in C major. What particularly captures my current attention is Robert DeLeo's bass line, which, by often playing the third and fifth of the tonic D major chord, constantly undermines any authoritative tonal conclusions about the verse. This is an example of what Mark Spicer calls a "fragile tonic", in which “the tonic chord is present but its hierarchical status is weakened." DeLeo's bass line is also what determines the BbMM7 chord (bVI in D) that appears near the end of each verse, differentiating that particular progression from the D minor chord that appears earlier in the same location. By altering the bass line, DeLeo also alters the progression, changing things up to keep a listener engaged.

Even more fascinating is the harmony. That BbMM7 chord in the verses foreshadows the Bb that initiates the chorus. This time, however, because of the key change to C major, Bb is now bVII instead of bVI. While Bb moves to F in both the verse (bVI-bIII) and chorus (bVII-IV), in the verses that F proceeds to G (IV), while in the chorus it resolves to C (I). It's a great example of what I call "multifunctional harmony", where the same chords can function in different ways, even within the same song.

Lastly, and most important, the harmony is also heavily chromatic. The intro riff and chords employ 10 of the 12 tones (only C# and G# are absent). While the progressions from F-C and C-G are extremely common, the move from Eb major to B minor is striking and most unusual. This is what Richard Cohn calls a "hexatonic pole" because it jumps across the hextonic cycle - in other words, it's as far away as you can get and still be in the same hexatonic cycle (Cohn, p. 18).
Picture
Hexatonic poles are exceedingly rare in pop music - I cannot think of any examples. The closest I can think of is The Beatles' 'Michelle', which uses a similar but not identical progression from Eb6 (Eb-G-Bb-C) to B°7 (B-D-F-Ab). So 'Sour Girl' is, at least to my knowledge, the first pop song to employ a hexatonic pole.


REFERENCES
Cohn, Richard. 2012. Audacious Euphony. Oxford University Press.
5 Comments

    Aaron Krerowicz, pop music scholar

    An informal but highly analytic study of popular music.

    Archives

    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018

    Categories

    All
    AABA Form
    Alanis Morissette
    Ariana Grande
    Asymmetric Rhymes
    Augmented Sixths
    Bass Line
    Beatles
    Beck's Bolero
    Billy Joel
    Black Dog
    Bluegrass
    Bolero
    Bon Jovi
    Brian Hebert
    Bring It On Home
    Cheap Trick
    Chordal Accretion
    Christopher Doll
    Country
    Dazed And Confused
    Functional Harmony
    George Harrison
    Good Times Bad Times
    Half-diminished Sevenths
    Harmony
    Have A Cigar
    Here Comes The Sun
    Hexatonic Pole
    Houses Of The Holy (song)
    Howlin Wolf
    How Many More Times
    How Many More Years
    Interview
    James Jamerson
    Jeff Beck
    Jimmie Rodgers
    Jimmy Nash
    Jimmy Ruffin
    Kiss
    Led Zeppelin (album)
    Led Zeppelin (band)
    Led Zeppelin II (album)
    Led Zeppelin III (album)
    Led Zeppelin IV (album)
    Linkin Park
    Los Lonely Boys
    Lou Reed
    Luke Bryan
    Madonna
    Mandocello
    Metallica
    Meteora
    Meter
    Milli Vanilli
    Mode Mixture
    Modulation
    Muddy Waters
    Multifunctional Harmony
    Muse
    Neapolitan Chord
    Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
    Organic Development
    Out On The Tiles
    Physical Graffiti
    Picardy Third
    Pink Floyd
    Pivot Chord
    Plagiarism
    Rhythmic Displacement
    Rock N Roll Animal
    Secondary Diminished
    Shapes Of Things
    Smokestack Lightning
    Something
    Sour Girl
    Stairway To Heaven
    Steve Marriott
    Stone Temple Pilots
    Structure
    Sweet Jane
    The Hunter
    The Small Faces
    The T-Bones
    Tom Waits
    Tragedy
    Welcome To The Machine
    What Becoems Of The Brokenhearted
    When The Levee Breaks
    Whole Lotta Love
    Willie Dixon
    Wish You Were Here

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Beatles Minute
  • Pop Goes the Theory
  • Calendar
    • Upcoming Events
    • Past Events
    • Newsletter Sign-Up
  • Blogs
    • Beatles Blog
    • Pop Music Blog
    • Star Wars Blog
    • Origami Blog
    • Shakespeare Blog
  • Contact