lively up yourself (1974)
Bob Marley & the Wailers. reggae, Jamaica.
key: D mixolydian/blues
mode: D E F# G A B C / D E F G# A C
melody: R F s l ta t d r / S TA d r me m f s
form: intro-verse-chorus-interlude
meter: duple
English function names: tonic subdominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T7 S7
Scale degrees: I7 IV7
Chords: D7 G7 D7 G7
|:/ / / / |/ / / / :| loopI mentioned that we would see many reggae songs with plagal shuttles, and here is another one.1 Here is also another song that is not blues, but is definitely blues-influenced — the ska/rocksteady/reggae spectrum being the Jamaican answer to what was going on contemporaneously in American early R&B/rock/soul. By the mid-1970s, of course, reggae is well out of the shadow of American rock, but it hasn't left its blues roots behind.
For us classically-trained theorists, however, we can be a bit stymied as to how to talk about the tonality of this song. We love things to be clear-cut. That said, we do love something to argue about. Is this song blues? Is it mixolydian? Yes? If we are improvising, both scales work. There are definitely major thirds in both chords and the guitars and keyboards are just playing major chords, not dominant 7 chords. D is definitely the tonic. But, when I think about other mixolydian tunes, there isn't much borrowing from other modes, like you do in classical music; nor is there a more expansive pitch space like there is in the blues. In the verses, the bass line is diatonic to mixolydian (D major, even), but in the chorus is where it brings in both C-natural during the D chord and F-natural during the G chord, cementing that bluesy dominant-chord flavor in.
All that said, one can certainly play D7 and G7 throughout the song as indicated above and it will sound fine. You may see other people's attempts at incorporating the chorus' bass line into chords, using C major and F major, but that is a) unnecessarily complicating things, and b) not what is happening. What is happening is that the horns and the bass are playing the same melodic bass line in octaves (a countermelody, if you will), the keyboards continue playing those two major chords, and the guitar does that ka-chk-ka rhythm thing that we love in reggae and disco and any other place it comes up.
Let's talk a little more about that genius bass-and-horns riff, which beautifully plays against the sense of meter. It's made up, basically, of one idea, both rhythmically and melodically. Melodically, of course, it's transposed to fit the chord of G within a blues-diatonicity. But to be very, very exact, the D iteration is a major third and a major second, but the G iteration is a minor third and a major second. But we can talk about this in terms of contour, too, and it is close enough in terms of contour that we perceive it as the same or extremely similar. It's only a half-step difference. The sameness of contour helps draw your attention to the rhythmic phrasing, which is where it gets interesting. The interest is created purely with space — that is what we call rests in notation. Including the space, the first D iteration lasts 5 microbeats, the G iteration lasts 3 microbeats, and the second D iteration lasts in effect 8 microbeats because there is no second G iteration. What does this all mean?
Everything else that is going on — the harmonic rhythm alternating every four microbeats, the keyboard chords on every other microbeat, the pattern played in the drumset — is signaling paired duple meter. But not that bass & horn riff! Not with a group of 5 microbeats followed by a group of 3 microbeats. It messes with your sense of where and what the macrobeat is.2 Even weirder, and deliciously so, is that this pseudo-downbeat isn't on the root of the chord, but on the seventh, what in classical music we call a retardation — we're going to put off that resolution to the root just a wee bit longer and make it land in a weak rhythmic position.
This 5+3+8 phrasing with a retardation continues in the bass in the verses, but in a lighter, subtler fashion. It feels lighter partly because without the horns the instrumentation is less dense. But it also feels lighter because the root of the chord is not on the macrobeat of the tonic D chord. While it does fall on the macrobeat for the G chord, the 5+3 phrasing works against that sense, just like the chorus.
other recordings:
Gilberto Gil, Kaya N'Gan Daya, WM Brazil. C blues. in Portuguese!
Plagal is a classical music term meaning oblique or side. What it is about coming from the subdominant is coming from the side? Thinking in C for a moment, we can place the tonic C symmetrically between a G below — the usual dominant-tonic movement — and an F above. So it could be that the idea is that we are approaching the tonic from the other symmetric side. But this is only a guess on my part. Others better versed in the history of theory can feel free to chime in. Yet another case where the use of ancient Greek musical concepts as filtered through medieval central European thought is a very old habit that obscures what is happening a bit. And yet again, it's hard to fight centuries of habit.
If it were the only phrasing, it would be, in Gordonian terms unusual — because the macrobeats are different lengths; we have to divide 5 into a group of two and a group of three. And unpaired because we now have three macrobeats. We can say that there is polymeter going on between the unpaired unusual meter in the bass and horns and the usual paired duple meter going on with everyone else.