12tone

A funny thing happens when you mention the 1995 Oasis hit Wonderwall. It warps whatever conversation it's brought up in, transforming it into a debate about the song's merits, its meaning, and what a "wonderwall" even is. It occupies a near-unique place in modern music culture, the poster child for the overplayed, a deeply controversial song that everyone seems to have an opinion about. Here's mine.

I am very serious about this. I'll be honest, I don't really have a good explanation for this one. I just wanted an excuse to do an excessively thorough deep dive through every possible three-note chord and I needed a framing device and this sort of happened from that. Sometimes that's how art works, y'know?

Never change, AC/DC. Do you ever just stop and think about AC/DC? I do. They fascinate me as a band because they simply figured out what they wanted to sound like early on and then just, like, stuck with it. Over the years, they've actively refused to evolve their sound, with Angus Young even openly mocking the idea that they'd want to, and yet they still made a huge mark on the world of rock, because the sound they were so stubbornly committed to was really, really good.

Who is the Devil? As a longtime rock and metalhead, I've heard hundreds of songs trying to answer that question, and the thing that strikes me most is how varied those answers are. As an artist, the Devil is whoever you need him to be, a symbolic chameleon taking whatever shape best fits the song. He's one of our most ubiquitous folklore characters, as slippery as he is powerful, and to better understand him, Polyphonic and I are turning our attention to one of the most definitive depictions of the Devil in rock: Sympathy for the Devil, by the Rolling Stones.

This was a... surprising experience. I'm always looking for ways to become a more engaged music listener, and one of the best ones I've found is listening games. I do these fairly often in my personal life, picking some restriction and making myself do it for a while to see what happens, but now that it's become a part of my musical practice I wanted to talk about it in a video, and to do that I had to pick something really ambitious, and long story short I wound up listening to a single song, over and over, every day for a month to see how that repeated exposure changed my experience of it. I did a lot of active listening exercises along the way, approaching it from every angle I could think of, and in one of my longest videos ever, I want to talk about what that was like and, more importantly, all the things I learned.

The early '80s were an exciting and scary time in the world of music. The first wave of truly affordable electronic instruments were just hitting the market, and pioneers from across the musical spectrum were trying to figure out what to do with them. These new machines were bulky and unreliable, but they offered powerful new ways to create and conceive of sound, and they turned out to be a lifeline for a struggling pair of artists who had just watched their musical dreams go up in flames. The remnants of the pop rock band The Tourists, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart knew they had just one shot left, so they swung for the fences, and the result was Sweet Dreams.

Sequels. They're everywhere, from TV, to movies, to books. But not music. It's not that it never happens, but it's really rare compared to most other mainstream art forms, and as a true believer in the narrative potential of music, I find that kinda disappointing. So I set out to understand what makes them so uncommon, and what, if anything, we can do about it.

Rage Against The Machine are musical arsonists. They're loud, angry, and always ready to break stuff. But in all the noise, it's easy to loose track of the deeper messages that run through their work. So I want to pull one of those messages out. I want to look at Testify, a song that, perhaps more than any other in their catalogue, perfectly captures the hope of Rage Against The Machine, and see how they make something so jagged and jarring to listen to also feel... important.

A great song is about more than just having interesting parts. That's enough to make it good, but to become truly great, you need cohesion: Each part should flow seamlessly into the next, properly managing listener expectations and crafting a dynamic journey, but that's... I mean, it's hard. How do you do that? The answer depends a lot on genre, style, and what the song is trying to say, but there are some general techniques that get used a lot, so let's pull back the curtain on section transitions and see if we can find what makes them work.

Few songs are as misunderstood as Ironic. Or maybe few songs are understood as correctly while still missing the point. It's a straightforward song, but one fateful choice has made it the subject of decades of pedantic debate and mockery. Which, don't get me wrong, I love a good pedantic argument, but I do think it's a shame 'cause once you look past the word choice, there's a lovely song there waiting to be discovered. Plus there's one really cool chord that I want to talk about. Can I please just talk about this one chord?

When I first started studying music, there were a lot of things that confused me. It felt like there were whole languages of practice that musicians all knew, and I had no idea how to speak any of them. With a lot of work and some very patient teachers, I eventually got fluent, but one problem that stuck with me is, in hindsight, a fairly simple question: What's the difference between 3/4 and 6/8? It feels intuitive now, but in order to understand it you have to really understand meter, and that's a lot harder than it sounds.

It's hard to pick just one song to pay tribute to the Prince of Darkness: With a career spanning over 50 years, Ozzy Osbourne has touched so many lives and made so much incredible music. But to me, and to a lot of metal fans, his greatest works were set in motion in 1979, when he met his greatest collaborator, Randy Rhoads. Though the two of them worked together for only a few short years, their innovative collaboration helped change the face of metal forever. Even among just those couple albums, there's so many great songs to choose from, but the one that best captures who Ozzy was to so many of his fans has to be Crazy Train.

The history of metal music can be broken up into a couple distinct periods, and the early '80s saw the beginning of one of its most important phases. The Neoclassical movement would become one of the most influential ideas in metal, with its focus on elaborate, technical guitar work making it a clear forebear to subgenres like tech death, djent, and mathcore, and leading the charge was a young virtuoso named Randy Rhoads. Though his career was short, he left an indelible mark on the genre, and decades after his passing, he remains one of the most important figures in metal history. Let's look at some of his solos to see why.

The New Wave movement is a fascinating cultural moment to me, with new technologies merging with older practices to create some truly weird and wonderful music. But within that scene is the Neue Deutsche Welle, a specifically German take on the genre that grew up in a country living more than most in the shadows of the Cold War, and perhaps its most famous members were the band Nena. A surprise breakout hit that crossed language barriers to rise up the charts, 99 Luftballons is a fun, accessible piece that still manages to tell a very personal and important story of the struggles of living in West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by Soviet forces. Even if most people who heard it didn't know that's what it was about. The blending of exciting, upbeat synthpop with dark, dangerous stories is a staple of New Wave, and few songs do it better than 99 Luftballons.

Recently, I got called out. Or, ok, not called out exactly. More like called in. Another music youtuber, Michael Jesse, made a whole video about this bizarre mystery surrounding Linkin Park's Breaking The Habit, but he couldn't come to a satisfying conclusion, so at the end of his video, he asked for my opinion. Like, me, specifically. A lot of people forwarded the video to me and there seems to be a lot of confusion, so it seemed like a perfect opportunity to not just solve the mystery, but show how I attack these sorts of problems in general!