"Dance music and DJs never believed they belonged in this room before. Now we have a role model."
Now when someone mentions "dance music" I generally think of the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, so I'm probably not the best person to comment. Fortunately music critic Neil McCormack is a bit more up to date:
"But is Harris actually a songwriter at all? He has been one of the most successful hit-makers of recent times, building techno-electro club pop tracks that smash it in the charts and the on the dancefloor. But if you strip his hits back to melody and lyrics, you’re not left with very much."
And strip back he does:
"If you take We Found Love back to its basic musical structure what you are left with is the same four-chord sequence repeated ad infinitum (D sharp minor / B / F sharp and C sharp), over which floats a sweet verse melody which shifts to the single repeated chorus phrase, with some vague impressionistic verses about “yellow diamonds in the light” and feeling “the heartbeat in my mind”. There is no bridge, no middle eight, nothing but rhythm, verse, chorus, sound and that incessant two-note keyboard hook. It doesn’t take anything away from its effectiveness as a sonic experience. But as songs go, it’s about as basic as they come."
The charge here is that there is a distinction to be made between the song and the production. Producers are essentially knob-twiddlers with an ear for hooks, backing tracks, instrumentations, textures, balance and so on. But the song material itself is the basic building blocks: melody and lyrics. By law:
"The legal definition of a song (as tested in many plagiarism suits) is melody and lyric. Everything else is track, or production."
I hadn't appreciated the legal issue before although if I were ever hauled before the courts I'd be tempted to argue that the harmony (or chord structure) was an integral part of the song as well.
So how do we tell a good song from a merely well-produced one? Composer/songwriter David Arnold has the answer:
"A lot of the time the litmus test of a song’s worth is how it plays when being performed just at a piano. It's not the only test but it's a very good one.”
This is interesting and certainly true for musical theatre songs. The only downside is that you can end up with very "pianistic" songs, i.e. songs which sound good on a piano. That's fine as far as it goes but it's also limiting and can be a big problem if you're trying to make new musical songs that sound different from the old musical songs.
Mr McCormack continues:
"Is there a higher plane of songwriting? A place where melodic complexity and lyrical depth combine to create an emotional or philosophically transcendent experience? I would like to think so. It’s the corner of a record collection where you will find Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello, Kate Bush and many, many more, the kind of musicians who approach songwriting as an art, not a craft."
Alas, here I suspect that we must part company. If the art of songwriting is reaching up for some transcendent beauty or truth, then the craft is the step ladder that helps you get there. In other words, it's not either/or. From a craft point of view, Calvin Harris may be no Bob Dylan; but then Bob Dylan is no Cole Porter.
Or even an Ivor Novello.
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