A modern song that finds ways to explode into heaviness. Excellent time signatures. Engrossing guitar harmonies. A spectacular vocal performance. Minimal but opportunistic drumming, finding their best moment in the heavy four-beat.
The melody phrasing and chord choices are bold - they're in the rock tradition but something refreshingly evolved.
They're an indie band from Montreal that could use a break. The drummer plays keyboard simultaneously with his left hand.
I just got to see LCD Soundsystem play last week, my first time! I was surprised at the explosion of applause when "Tribulations" emerged. It's not a song I ever heard on the radio, but it's absolutely one of my favorites. Apparently the feeling is very mutual!
This song is everything that's great about LCD Soundsystem: Very little chord variation - just a quick, juicy 4-beat, a fantastic bass line, superb repeated singing lines - but the key is in the development of the instruments as the song drives on and on. Performed live, you cannot imagine the succulent saturation of that bass line. It possesses.
The difference between "Tribulations" and most LCD Soundsystem songs is the commitment to a dark, minor mode. It's spooky good. And for as many quick, fun 4-beats as the band produced/produces, most employ funky syncopation; there really isn't another one that stomps down so directly on the beat, making it so impish and insidious. I'm not sure if I should be dancing or headbanging. (I really didn't do either, just more listened and concentrated and savored into the deep recesses of my mind, because I had to work in the morning and didn't want to fatigue myself. The calculus of Adulthood.)
What's this song about? Social Security? Not a bad argument, actually. After this latest stretch, the nation is really gonna owe us.
Trenchtown is a neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica's capital city. The neighborhood looms in world culture as the birthplace of reggae and rocksteady music. It's also the birthplace of Bob Marley.
Location can matter! Many greats have benefitted from being in the right place at the right time. Bob Marley grew up in the birthplace of reggae and rocksteady as they were gaining commercial force. Kurt Cobain grew up in Aberdeen, near the Seattle scene that would develop grunge music. Steve Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California, the epicenter of the Silicon Valley revolution. He used to bike over to Stanford University with his childhood buddy Steve Wozniak to play the world's first video game on a computer that could only be found on the Stanford and MIT campuses. Emily Dickinson barely left her house, but she happened to live in the midst of some of the greatest minds of early American Transcendentalism - with Ralph Waldo Emerson paying visits to members of her family.
All these people likely wouldn't have had the gusto to force themselves into these scenes if they hadn't been born within them.
And yet, even as local residents, all those people I listed were also outcasts or outside the norm. Marley was a cultural outcast due to his bi-racial background. Cobain was a small town kid who was consistently bullied in school. Jobs was an adopted orphan. Dickinson was an intelligent, ambitious woman in male-dominated Antebellum America. They all sought higher identities in work that allowed their talent to transcend their practical limitations. Location and motivation meet.
Bob Marley found music. He was so talented at it, it's hard for me to comprehend how naturally it came to him. I think we can get caught up in his image and miss the foundational artistry of his work. To say it came naturally to him is not to say he expended no effort. He liked to kind of cast himself as this primal person through whom music just flowed out perfectly. Maybe that's true on some level. But like Wolfgang Mozart before him, though he seemed to make music effortlessly, and its sublime joyfulness reinforces the feeling of no effort, the music he made wasn't just cheap and sentimental.
For as light and free as they sound, there are changes and nuances in Bob Marley's songs that require stubborn, detail-focused rehearsal. I've been in bands where people just want to have a good time and thus the details in many places are never hashed out with enough communication and negotiation to bring songs to their best potential. These bands were relaxed but the music suffered from the generosity.
So look at "Trenchtown Rock." Bob Marley used to open his shows with this song. It is just a goddamned luminous mission statement for the transcendent effect of music (and in his case, a vehicle of personal salvation).
When music hits, you feel no pain.
But that's when good music hits. To get to be good music, there is a good pain in making it.
You don't get there without figuring out how to start with those joyous major-key verses, soul-enlarging choruses, and anthemic post-choruses and then transition into the tough minor-key bridge. You don't get there without stopping and explaining and practicing in detail all the changes, all deviations from standard four beat throughout the song. You don't remove people's pain until you figure out those excellent little repetitions of "one good thing" as a way to pivot out of the minor key, back into the major-key verses. You definitely don't raise people to bliss without all the beautiful lead and background vocal variations that had to be dreamt up, prioritized, and then assembled into a final, radiant order.
This is the good pain of music. And then when you play it all back, it is medicinal sound for our damaged species.
Thanks to one kid who happened to grow up in Trenchtown.
Holy god, I used to despise this song when I was younger. It sounded like a big, stupid joke. Just a grating, insulting attention-craving stunt.
It took me a while to love it for being exactly all of those things.
Acceptance.
Occasionally we need to stop it, and shelve the intense reactions. Let somebody muss up your hair, tweak your nose, call you grumpy, then give you a big, smothering hug. Sag into the hug, forgiving and smiling because there is nothing to forgive.
This song is about taking acid. John Lennon appropriated much of the wording from the The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a counterculture page turner by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. Their book helpfully adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead for a new hypermodern chemical intoxication experience. The song's original title was "The Void." The droning that permeates the song is a tamboura, traditionally used in Indian modal drone. The vocal effect is an attempt to imitate the famous overtone throat singing of Tibetan monks.
Simplistically, the theme of the song is the ideal of "ego death" that both Buddhists and LSD practitioners seek via different methods. At this point of his stratospheric fame, John Lennon also began seeking ways to pare down the expectations and pressure that came with his notoriety. "Ego death" was all too attractive to someone for whom ego had already made its maximum impact.
It's the final song on the Beatles' 1966 album Revolver. Revolver was the peak of the Beatles as tinkering songsmiths, a collection of short, brilliantly efficient recordings, almost all well under three minutes in duration. There was no overriding concept connecting the songs like their next album Sgt. Peppers would have, no indulgent expansion of song structures and run times as became more common.
Each song was its own mini-concept, its own prototype. Each song was a new lesson in musical ambition. And yet none of the rest compare to the revolutionary impact of "Tomorrow Never Knows." John Lennon had a knack for developing one special song per album that looked forward to the next frontier.
"Tomorrow Never Knows" pulled out all the stops, pairing a simple chord structure (a single droning chord with short two-chord interludes) with boundary-smashing instrumentation and tape effects. It cooks at a great pace, with an underrated heavy Ringo drum part. On the album, the run time is less than three minutes, but I see the potential of improvisation to extend it far longer. It's a trance of a song for a performer.
The song ends on the line "the end of the beginning." Lennon's talking about the possibility of life after death, with life being only the beginning. And yet, positioning this as the last song of the last traditional Beatles album, he is also predicting the end of one stage of the Beatles' career, with this very song portending the advanced concepts yet in store.
Besides taking the Beatles new places, the song became a model for many later drum and bass masterpieces. In the '90s alone, both Beck's "New Pollution" and the Chemical Brothers' "Let Forever Be" are confident re-imaginings. It is now a genre unto itself.
Link: https://genius.com/The-beatles-tomorrow-never-knows-lyrics