chip n dale rescue rangers: a harmonic analysis
posted on Mar 16, 2007 at 3:10 PMunless you're taking some severe steps to avoid it, cheese is a significant part of your musical diet. not the sappy, maudlin sort of cheese; the generic, overused kind. a cheesy song is a song that's already been written dozens or even hundreds of times before. there's a reason why it's so ubiquitous in the world of modern music: it sounds good. it's a lot easier to enjoy a song when it already sounds familiar on the first listen.
this fact puts the modern songwriter in an awkward position. you need originality to sustain your artistic integrity, but you need cheese to sustain accessibility. well-rounded songwriting means finding a balance somewhere in the middle, which can sometimes be a lot more difficult than it sounds.
different artists deal with this problem differently. one common approach is to focus all the innovation on some components of a song, leaving the others cheesy; for example, if you have bizarre lyrics, or a unique texture, you might make the chord progression and melody extra-familiar to even things out. plenty of artists have found success doing things this way (whether intentionally or not), but in my opinion, the best songs use a more complex approach, balancing each aspect of a song individually. unfortunately, this makes things a lot harder.
balancing originality and accessibility in chord progressions can be particularly challenging. the goal here, in general terms, is to bring a unique dimension into familiar chord progression elements. (in his book, 'tunesmith', jimmy webb recommends stealing the progression from a song you like and just moving one or two of the chords around. here's a hint: don't do that.) there are plenty of techniques for doing this, but one of the most powerful involves using modulations to reinterpret familiar chord changes.
the theme from 'rescue rangers' makes a perfect demonstration of this tactic, since it's small but still densely packed full of well-executed modulations. here's the analysis:
(verse)
[g:] i i6 iv VII viiο i i6 iv(ii/III)
VII(V/III)
(pre-chorus)
[B♭:] I VI(V7/II)
(chorus1)
[C:] I ♭VII I ♭VII [c:] iv VI(IV/III)
VII(V7/III)
(chorus2)
[E♭:] I ♭VII I ♭VII [e♭:] iv VI(IV/III)
VII(V7/III)
(chorus3)
[G♭:] I ♭VII I ♭VII I
as you can see, for such a short song, there's a lot going on here. that's five tone centers in 55 seconds (seven, if you count parallel minors)! the chords in parentheses are what we're interested in for the moment. these sequences occur right at the point of modulation, and can be interpreted as belonging to either key-- and that's what makes them useful. look at the two chords at the end of the chorus. if they resolved back to the tonic of the first key, they would form the sequence VI/i VII/i I, which is perhaps the cheesiest progression of the past twenty years. however, in the context of the second key, it becomes IV V I.. which is the cheesiest progression of the twenty years before that. but by making the sequence function as both simultaneously, you're making it sound like neither-- in effect, the listener is hearing an extremely familiar and easily-digested sequence placed into a new and more elaborate context.. rendering it both accessible and unique.
in this example, most of the relevant modulations are from a minor key to its relative major. this is one of the easiest ways to make use of this technique, but it's by no means the only way. there's no modulation that a cheesy progression can't facilitate if you experiment with it enough. also, the modulations don't need to be this permament-- many 'real' songs that use this technique revert back to the first tone center after only a measure or two.