key: A major
mode: A B C# D E F# G#
melody: S d r m f s
form: strophic
meter: duple
English function names: tonic dominant
Tagg (modified): home counterpoise (away)
Riemann: T D7
Scale degrees: I V7
Chords: A E7
A E7
|:/ / / / |/ / / / :| loop
I was never much of a reggae fan, but when soliciting ideas from friends for two-chords songs, one of my comrades-in-klezmer told me when it comes to two chords, reggae is where it’s at. And boy howdy, was he right! I’ve found a bunch of wonderful songs, much like this one, that are very simple and very powerful.
Yet here’s another controversial one. Since I primarily teach middle school kids, I'm required to be vigilant about lyrical content. This is not a song I would use with middle school kids. But if you are an adult following along at home, you can take responsibility for dealing with the lyrical content yourself. I guess that's a content warning: the lyrics require an ability to parse socio-political nuance. The reason I wouldn’t use this with children is “smoke him pipe in peace.” It’s easy to say, “Relax! It just references a pipe!” But I fear too many parents would make the very obvious connection between reggae, pipes, and weed and not be happy about condoning such things.
There is another fear, and perhaps this one is worse. The vocal delivery and slang that makes this song so enjoyable to sing would probably just be perceived as ridiculous nonsense by most kids, thereby missing the really important part of the song: the message. The police, and therefore, the government won’t leave a regular joe in peace because he lives in the projects (i.e., there are worse things than smoking a pipe, weed or no…). This is always an issue to be vigilant for. It's actually a rather clever move lyrically and musically, to turn a song about surveillance into nonsense — too much watchy-watchy is nonsense, is it not? And that’s why I keep going back and forth about whether I green-list this song for teaching.
In somewhat less controversial areas, this is one of our increasingly many examples in which the whole song is a shuttle.1 While shuttles are common, they are most often with tonic-subdominant pairs and less so with tonic-dominant pairs (the only other tonic-dominant shuttle we have examined up to this point is Therefore I Am). It's a kind of loop, of course, but with a back-and-forth sort of rocking nature, as opposed to a circular nature. These kinds of repetitive structures are good for dancing, but combined with a strophic melodic structure, there's an emphasis on the lyrics, too. The dance hall might seem an unlikely place for a political protest, or at least complaint, yet it's also a place where like-minded people will gather and, as long as there's no trouble, the police will not.
other recordings:
The Jolly Boys, Beer Joint and Tailoring, Funzalo Records. F major. Even more rootsy than the original.
Mystic Roots Band, Constant Struggle, Stay Positive Productions. G major.