the singer asserts, but the music diverts.
The Four Tops, Reach Out (I’ll Be There)
The lyrics of the Four Tops’s “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” and the music move in opposite directions.
Levi Stubbs shouts out that he’ll be there, a dependable connection, a rock, but the music, composed by Holland-Dozier-Holland and performed by the now-famous Funk Brothers, sounds distant and ghostly, like it’s coming to us through a wind tunnel, miles away. It’s full of odd time signatures, ominous wind instruments, and weird, twisting progressions of minor and augmented chords. These create a sense of isolation, dread, and lonely disconnection.We find ourselves with Stubbs, tense and almost delirious, calling out into a dense lostness, an unrelentingly frightening murk of sound.
You almost get the feeling that Stubbs is not singing to someone else, but in fact to himself. He’s not the one reaching out assuredly; he’s the one calling out in despair for someone to reach out to him. He’s asking for help, not offering it. In the face of bleakness and fear, deep in the ominous jungle of sound (I always picture the singer as an American GI suddenly fighting in the disorienting, scary jungles of Vietnam…and, after all, the song came out in 1966, as the US buildup in Vietnam was accelerating), he’s the one who feels like he can’t go on, whose hope is gone, who feels lost and about to give up, whose best just ain’t good enough.
It’s the music’s incongruousness with the lyrics that makes it seem like Stubbs is not the singer, but the “singee,” the receiver of help and solace, not the giver. That is, the music undercuts the singers’ words. Confident assertions of connection and community in the lyrics are continually negated by the music’s fraught hesitations and queasy dissonances. If this were a poem, it would be a cliched assertion of companionship. But if the song were just an instrumental, it might have to be retitled, “Reach Out (Oh My God, I Thought Someone Would Be There, But Maybe Noone Will Be There For Me).”
Who will extend a hand to the protagonist of this song, who will penetrate the foggy murkiness of the music to establish community and connection? Who will reach out and be there for him?
Somehow the song always says to me: maybe we, the listeners, have to step up for Stubbs, maybe we will be the ones to turn solitude to solidarity.
An interesting ’empowerment’ of the old ‘sound and sense’ argument. I wrote something about it, a little clumsily, here:
http://sometrajectories.com/article/40/sound-and-sense
(Though now I regret the “insufficiently explored” part, which someone pointed out was skewered hilariously in Lucky Jim.)
Could you be more specific about time signatures and tonality? I remember the song as in fairly straightforward duple meter (though rhythmically enriched by what one Top 40 DJ in San Francisco caled “galloping guitars”); the tonality starts out in B flat (though not on a tonic chord) and migrates via the mediant (D) to G major, an unusual move, but weird? queasy?
zbs – I will read your article and mull it over, for sure.
rootlesscosmo – sounds like you have a better sense of the musicological reading than me, I haven’t actually sat down and thought through the chords and the arrangement in those terms, but I think you are right that that shift is jarring…I like your word “queasy.” It doesn’t quite fit with — in fact almost works against — the assertion of “being there” if someone reaches out, right? Instead the music emphasizes that feeling of not being sure someone will be there when you reach out…since the tonality of the song is shifting in surprising, disorienting ways. The other part of the song I noticed was the weird break when the bassist (I’m assuming Jamerson) steps to the front of the song…I could be wrong about this, but it sounds like the break extends longer than the steady duple meter. Or at least Jamerson is playing something syncopated enough to give it that feel for a moment. It’s another off-kilter effect in the song. The lyrics say we’re on solid ground, but the music undercuts that stability.
Thanks both of you for your comments!
Culture Rover
Thanks, but actually “queasy” was your term, which I think exaggerates the strangeness of the chords–I associate the word with motion sickness, which Motown never gave me. But unstable, yes, with two tonal centers and some major-minor uncertainty, and I agree that makes an odd fit with the staunch promise of the lyric.
No wonder I liked the term “queasy” so much! Oops. Actually, I really mean the word as a compliment. Agreed that you wouldn’t typically think of Motown and queasy together, but if you can ever use “queasy” to signal a song’s power to stir emotion, then this would be the song to do so, precisely because the lyrics want to steady you but the music delivers a body blow.
I think the musicological underpinnings are crucial here, but only if we take that explanation of musical parts (major-minor, tonal center, bassline, meter) and translate them into cultural meaning (but then again I’m a cultural critic, not a musicologist, and I’ve sometimes had this very fight with my musicologist friends, whose analytic “chops” I really admire, but who I think sometimes end their analysis too soon for me, stopping with a compositional rather than a cultural interpretation — we should have both!).
That said, I admit that I wish we could get Holland Dozier Holland to weigh in on the writing of the song!
’m a cultural critic, not a musicologist, and I’ve sometimes had this very fight with my musicologist friends, whose analytic “chops” I really admire, but who I think sometimes end their analysis too soon for me, stopping with a compositional rather than a cultural interpretation — we should have both!
I suspect musicians and musicologists are wary of cultural interpretations, because, while we mostly agree music has meaning, we know (as non-musicians tend not to) that there’s a musical semantics, or rather several (see for example the Affektlehre, or Doctrine of Feelings, that was part of the vocabulary of German Baroque composition) that has to be learned, not just conjured out of a particular listener’s subjective impressions; there’s also a musicological semantics that non-specialists often misuse. (I read an article that referred to John Coltrane’s “stop-time” solos; from the context, the writer clearly was thinking of his long, rhythmically free cadenza-like solos, during which the other players fell silent, but that’s not what “stop-time,” in jazz terminology, means.) Finally there’s a history, often an unlovely one, of shoehorning music into meaning for extra-musical purposes; as Prokofiev said, “It’s the same piece whether you call it ‘Symphony No. 3’ or ‘Salute the Opening of the Baku Electric Street Railway.'” Beethoven wrote a Sonata quasi una Fantasia in C# minor; “Moonlight” was some publisher’s bright idea.
I see, so maybe one way to say this is that what’s on your mind as troubling is starting with a cultural analysis (a “subjective” analysis) without moving to a musicological one, whereas for me what’s at issue is starting with a musicological analysis without explaining its larger stakes. I’m wondering this: once we grasp the tools that Holland Dozier Holland use to create their song, then what? What do we make of the results?
I agree absolutely on getting it right if one employs a particular terminology (stop-time, etc.), but just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, what is wrong with a musical analysis “conjured out of a particular listener’s subjective impressions”? Why is that approach any less valid then sticking to the notes? I see how music has at times been shoehorned for sociological ends and distorted or reduced as a result, but that does not mean that it exists outside of subjective or social contexts and locations (those particular cases were just bad contexts and locations). To me it is precisely the “subjective impressions” that matter most.
At the risk of posing a real lemon of a metaphor, to me the notes and semantics offer a peek below the hood at how the engine works, but they don’t explain where the car goes, what it’s like to drive it, who it picks up along the way, what kind of accidents and adventures it makes possible.
I am enjoying this conversation very much. Thanks.
I’m enjoying it too; glad the pleasure is shared.
I’m wondering this: once we grasp the tools that Holland Dozier Holland use to create their song, then what? What do we make of the results?
I agree absolutely on getting it right if one employs a particular terminology (stop-time, etc.), but just to play devil’s advocate for a moment, what is wrong with a musical analysis “conjured out of a particular listener’s subjective impressions”?
I think H-D-H (or whoever) generally use musical tools as expressive tools; that’s where something like the Affektlehre comes in. You can say, “Well, Bach is using a lot of chromaticism here,” and so he is, but he’s using it as a conventional way of expressing dread or grief. So while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with giving a purely subjective response–a nice example is E.M. Forster’s riff on the slow movement of Schumann Piano Quintet–it’s important to make clear that may have nothing whatever to do with what the composer was seeking to convey. Utterly unfamiliar musics–the Japanese court style Gagaku is one such, for me–can be beautiful, evocative, even moving, but I’m clueless about what they mean to the composers or players or knowledgeable listeners, and about how the music conveys this meaning via musical resources. So where I get leery is where someone asserts, not “the music here makes me feel unsettled or anxious, which is inconsistent with the lyrics,” but “this music is composed this way in order to set up a tension with the meaning of the lyrics.” The first assertion is indisputable; the second, I think, needs support from some set of expressive conventions that the composer is known to have been drawing on.
it’s important to make clear that may have nothing whatever to do with what the composer was seeking to convey
Yes, and it’s also important to question the importance of whatever that may be. The intention of the artist is a sticky point; and whereas “conveying meaning via musical resources” serves as an important determinant to a given piece within its context, the point at which the usage of one particular device for one purpose or for another becomes generic or remains specific, and at what point the aesthetic function for the listener / reader / viewer is finally more important is notoriously difficult to finally settle on. Denis Dutton wrote an excellent essay on this subject more generally,
http://denisdutton.com/intentionalism.htm
I agree completely that authorial intent is a difficult question, and thanks for the Dutton link. I do think, though, that music with lyrics presents a special case, because typically the text is written first, and the music added afterward, in most cases by another person. (There are certainly important exceptions to this general rule.) So an argument about how the music works in conjunction with the text’s meaning–to emphasize it or cast doubt on it or whatever–seems to me necessarily to entail an appeal to the composer’s intention, because the composer starts with the lyricist’s meaning and then has to decide what to do with it, given an inherited set of expressive conventions. I don’t think authorial intent is the last word here or anywhere, but this specific kind of artistic project, I think, has to take it into account. (In genres where performers have some composer-like latitude, this applies to them too; remember Barbra Streisand doing “Happy Days are Here Again” as a doleful ballad? The irony only worked because we knew the original material was cheerful, lyrically and musically both.)