If you’ve just read the heading and said to yourself, well there’s precious little of that, then I’m with you. Most contemporary popular music is staggeringly deficient, and the same goes for musicals. The imagination is in ridiculously short supply, and the will to differ virtually non-existent. No-one seems to know the difference between tonic and dominant, and interrupted means someone spilled their coffee in their lap while they were deciding whether to write in F or in C.
But I am going to give two examples where I think the musical craftsmanship is of the highest order, and argue that the composers of these selections deserve to be taken seriously as genuinely creative artists. The first is from Elton John, and the second from Prince.
Now neither of these artists worked consistently at the top of their game; whole albums of particularly the later work of Prince are forgettable, and Elton John changed with fashion to create some mind-numbingly ordinary work. But when everything was going right, well, look out.
Elton John’s ‘Tiny dancer’ wasn’t a raging success when first released, in part at least because at six minutes and seventeen seconds it is quite long for a pop tune. In Cameron Crowe’s wonderful picture Almost Famous the song plays in a bus as the band is touring across America, and everyone sings along. This appearance actually gave the song a second life, and took everyone by surprise. When Mr John played it in Melbourne on his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, he had modified the melody because his voice apparently no longer reaches the high C. It still sounded fabulous.
The thing about this piece that strikes me is the patience demonstrated by the composer. The piano introduction is only two chords, and these are the foundation of the verse that follows. It consists of an AABA structure, that is then repeated when the rhythm section joins in. The piano introduction is reprised before the song goes to another section, and only after this do we hear the chorus. The time spent getting there has not been wasted, and the satisfaction of its realisation is genuinely moving.
Don’t you wish that people had the wherewithal to resist going straight to the chorus, to give everything away as soon as possible? That perhaps they had something else up their sleeve to postpone satisfaction and to make the resolution that much more worthwhile?
My favourite – and I actually think it might be his best – album by Prince is Sign o the times. I’ve written about it before because it was so important to me when I was verging on adulthood. The film was a revelation, as I’ve said in the past, and it’s one of the few things from that part of my life that I remember fondly. Meeting Sall in 1988 was far and away the best thing that happened in that decade, but a lot of the rest of it was trash.
The title track was written about in the notes to the Prince boxed set as one of the few times you had an inkling of Prince’s politics. He sang about sex all the time, and some of that was miraculous, but rarely did he deal with current events. The lyrics here are extraordinary: ‘Sister killed her baby cos she couldn’t afford to feed it and we’re sending people to the moon; September my cousin tried reefer for the very first time – now he’s doing horse. It’s June.’
The spareness of the orchestration is an object lesson: the use of the bass drum with is repeated figure and less frequently the snare drum, the marimba-like upper part volleying between Cs and the sensational bass figure – I’ve no idea how any of this was done but it is so staggeringly original. And again, there is a patience here that is absolutely superb. To work with only a single chord, if it even is that – a tonality of C, let’s say, with the suggestion of a flattened seventh and a minor third in the bass – is so restrained, and when this is left for F minor and a very brief V chord the effect is extraordinary. And the first time this happens we don’t know yet but it’s incomplete; on its second iteration it is extended so that the title of the song can be enunciated. This is quite marvellous; when Prince actually utters the words ‘Sign o the times’ the gratification is simply wonderful. He could simply have repeated himself but he had more to give. Craftsmanship. How I wish he hadn’t died.
When I wrote about Jarrett’s Sun Bear Concerts I spoke of hearing them as though that were the first time, although that only happens once and for the audience that attended his concerts in Japan they had the irreplaceable experience of hearing the music birthed in real time. I can’t recall the first time I heard ‘Sign o the times’ and it may actually have been when I saw the concert at the Kino. It has however become something I rely on. Prince’s way of leading up to the tune, with the dramatised passage outside the auditorium, is breathtaking. The chords that precede the song’s opening are not on the album, but they make such a lot of sense. Every time I see this I am amazed.
If I had a third choice it would be Talking Heads’ ‘Life during wartime’, performed live in the Stop Making Sense concert, because of the way the two chords are played against each other, the ‘This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco’ on the V of the verse’s I, repeated so that you expect it but then in the last instance it doesn’t appear. This is restraint, patience, awareness of an uncommon kind in popular music. I travel in the car with my third kid and always they want to listen to Smooth FM. It’s ghastly and I hate it, and most of the music they play comes from the 1980s so I’m already too familiar with it, but I long for moments when someone has made a wise, a decent, choice. Too rare but so precious.
28/vi/2025