7/2/2023 0 Comments Hold the line chords![]() In this paper we will advance the thesis that this model also underlies the remarkable chord progressions of the Beatles' songs and therefore it is no small wonder these songs could articulate the vocabulary of the rising youth culture so well. The youth culture of the 1960s promoted its own language, the egalitarian idiom of the peer group, as a general and valid model for civil conversation. Was the coalition of this particular kind of music and the uprising, autonomous youth culture just a coincidence? Was it the result of a historical contingency, or did the songs themselves really have to say something new to their listeners? Indeed, there seems to exist a close connection between the cultural revolution of the sixties and the Beatles' music. Remembering their first Beatles' song, many baby boomers heard and interpreted the sound of the Beatles as a signal for social and cultural change (Tillekens, 1990). In oral history reports on the cultural revolution of the 1960s one can easily find the same kind of reflections. One just has to look at some old film fragments of Beatlemania to see the Beatles' fans of those days, though less intellectually, responding in a similar way. He certainly was not the only one to do so. We might not have entered without a little help."Ī cultural awakening? On first hearing the Beatles' records, rock critic Greil Marcus (1969) reports to have experienced the sensation of a cultural awakening. "The best songs the Beatles write add dimensions of experienceĪnd imagination to our lives, revealing new realms into which This correlation between words and chords offers a flexible way to shift emotional meanings in conversational contexts. As the meaning of the words in a song does shift along two dimensions, the chords will shift along the same lines. In each song there is a tight relation between the clusters of these stand-in chords and the semantics of the lyrics. Closer study of the early Beatles' songs reveals yet another point of support. This principle of diagonal substitution helps the listeners to understand the songs musically. Separated by minor third intervals, the tones of these stand-in chords show a diagonal relationship. In the Beatles' songs each of the basic chords can be replaced by several other types of chords. There is, however, some kind of harmonic structure beneath these remarkable chord progressions, preventing this to happen. Often there are more and sometimes the chord sequences even come close to endangering the songs' musical comprehensibility. The semantic shifts of the Beatles' chordsĮvery typical Beatles' song has at least one rather unconventional chord progression.
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