Hiding the downbeat
April 29, 2010
Here are the first few bars of “Drive My Car” by The Beatles.
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Could you find the meter? If not, don’t feel bad; this is a notoriously difficult passage to process. Musicologist Alan Pollack once called it “two measures-worth of the Beatles most rhythmically disorienting music ever.”
What you’re hearing (without bar divisions) is something like this:
If you’re like most people, your natural inclination is to hear a downbeat when the bass riff ends on the low D — in other words, that sounds like the place where the “one” of a new measure should go. Working backwards, that means that the opening guitar lick should start on the downbeat of the previous measure, since it began four beats earlier.
Here’s what that idea looks like, transcribed along with the next couple of bars:
The first six beats feel all right, but the end of the second measure is problematic — Ringo’s drum fill starts on a nonsensical offbeat, and there’s an extra eighth note before the verse that is unaccounted for (see the end of the first line). It seems like Paul’s low D isn’t actually a downbeat, even though it felt like one!
We can fix this by shifting the intro’s bar lines half a beat later:
It admittedly takes a bit of mental effort to hear the first measure correctly here. Once you get to beats three and four of the second measure, though, the meter is unmistakable; the quarter notes in the guitar and the aforementioned drum fill reinforce the “real” rhythm.
All right — moving to video games, here’s the intro to the Labyrinth Zone theme from Sonic the Hedgehog:
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And here’s a transcription:
Like “Drive My Car,” the Labyrinth intro seems to have a pretty clear downbeat at first listen — in this case, the first kick drum hit. The opening three snares combined with that descending harmonic progression have the effect of a dotted quarter-length upbeat.
Here’s what that looks like written out with the next two bars for comparison:
Again, the most logical rhythmic interpretation is demonstrably wrong. Just two and a half beats after that first kick drum there’s another one to start off the “verse,” giving us two incomplete measures in a row.
If we fix the bar lines, we find that the ostensible three-note pickup is itself the real downbeat:
As with “Drive My Car,” this is not the rhythm that your ear wants to hear — what we initially thought was the downbeat is actually between beats two and three!
Nothing groundbreaking here, but an unlikely connection: both pieces use clever rhythmic and melodic figures to temporarily disguise the meter in their introductions.
8 comments
I heard Drive My Car the wrong way for 30 years, and in fact went over to Patrick’s office to bug him because I thought we had it authored wrong in the game. It took a few listens to overcome decades of mishearing!
On the other hand, the Labyrinth Zone theme always sounded to me like it started on the downbeat.
I’ve had a couple of really long-lived mishearings of Led Zeppelin songs – I thought the place where the riff repeats in “Black Dog” was in some crazy mixed meter for a while, somehow ignoring Bonham’s massive half-time beat underneath it. And I keep hearing the “Oh”s in the “Oh yeah” part as being on 1-and, although I’m almost sure they’re on 4-and.
My favorite instance of fooled-you-meter in rock is probably “Once in a Lifetime”, where it sounds like they throw in a measure of 2/4 on the way into and on the way out of the chorus, but the bass keeps going as if nothing has happened. Which is the right way to hear it? I’m still not sure.
The hardest one for me is XTC’s “That Is the Way”, in which I still hear the entire verses displaced by an eighth note, even knowing intellectually how the song works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7erx3tjyN4
by dfan on April 29, 2010 at 9:34 am #
Nice, man – one of my favorite tricks. It’s amazing how my ear can get so used to hearing a tune in an utterly counter intuitive way. I remember the third track on Sufjan’s “Illinoise” got me that way. I had to sit down, reassess where one was, and just force myself to stop feeling it backwards.
And the bridge to Black Dog used to do that to me, too! It wasn’t until I actually learned the tune that I finally figured out what was going on. The x-factor there was that the riff is doing that hemiola, right, and Bonham’s in half-time, but then they rush the hell out of the last bar before the main riff (the first time through in particular).
So I’d be counting, and then that last bar would make me think that maybe I’d been counting it wrong. But no, they were probably just drunk and running out of tape, heh.
by Kirk Hamilton on April 29, 2010 at 1:29 pm #
dfan: I’m impressed that you’ve always heard Labyrinth correctly! Even after writing this post it still doesn’t sit quite right with me to start it on a downbeat. Maybe I internalize rhythm a little strangely.
I’ve always thought that the intro in “Cecilia” by Simon & Garfunkel was odd. Those guitar strums in the first few bars before the vocals feel like downbeats to me, but they actually land half a beat earlier. That’s kind of a ridiculous rhythm to be fooled by, but there you go.
by Dan Bruno on April 29, 2010 at 6:20 pm #
Great analysis! Mark Butler (music theorist at Northwestern U) makes some similar observations about dance music in his book _Unlocking the Groove_: http://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Groove-Musical-Electronic-Profiles/dp/0253218047
My favorite example (which he gave in a talk; I forget whether it’s also in the book) is “Televised Green Smoke” by Carl Craig, which opens with a 3 3 2 rhythm (kick kick snare) that sounds like a “Cuban triplet,” or a stripped-down Reggaetón beat. Then after a minute or so, it becomes clear that the snare is actually the downbeat: the opposite of what you’d expect.
If I understand it correctly, Butler’s argument (and that of my friend Luis-Manuel Garcia, who illustrates this with a more spectacular example: “Deck the Halls” by Akufen) is that dancers take pleasure in the cognitive and physical disorientation of these initial sections, and in the subsequent realignment when the beat drops. Could there be an analogy here to the challenges and rewards of gameplay?
(As always, your blog is the best. Thanks for keeping up with the analysis posts!)
by Peter on May 1, 2010 at 1:38 pm #
I also get confused with Wanda Wanda from the game Katamari Damacy (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD3LDEHuaxo). Even now, after I’ve listened to it many times, I get confused at the start until a few measures in, and again in the middle, when the offset seemingly changes again. I can’t make sense of it even if I listen from the start with the goal of making sense of the rhythm, and tapping my foot all the way through.
by Rory on May 22, 2010 at 10:14 am #
Gotta love Ringo’s fills – dude always starts them in a weird-ass place in the measure.
The way I’ve always heard the intro bars of “Drive My Car” is a little different from your transcription, which speaks to the craziness of the passage. In the second measure, where you have quarter notes on 3 & 4, I hear them on 3e & 4e. In my head the drums and guitar are off by one sixteenth note, which is incredibly disorienting. And also awesome.
The opening guitar riff of Nirvana’s “Very Ape” always confuses me in the same way.
by JP Grant on September 2, 2010 at 12:35 pm #
I’ve gotta say, the intro to Mushroom Hill Zone act 1 has the same effect, I can’t ever hear just what beat it’s starting on, or if it’s even in a different time signature for the first two bars before settling into 4/4 for the rest of the tune.
At the loop there’s even a weird spot where the bass drum kicks on beat one and the bass line starts on the and of 1. Which definitely resets the mind when thinking about it.
by Ryan Miller on September 24, 2010 at 2:26 pm #
As a video game music composer, I’m inclined to think the idea for the intro of the Labyrinth zone theme had this eighth rest at the beginning, rather than at the end. As in (pause) C A F G, GG (bass drum, begin). Then something went funny on the sequencer and they thought – “Hey, that’s even cooler!”.
To be honest, I think if I had to play this song impromptu on the piano without considering all of this, I would play it that way. Anyway, awesome article as always :)
by Rafael Langoni Smith on September 29, 2010 at 7:36 am #