January 06, 2010
top 25 songs of 2009: song 3
"Battlefield," Jordin Sparks. Perhaps its deadening to try to show rigorously how a song pulls of its non-rigorous effects, but this song sure does a lot of heavy lifting in a compact space, and the trick it uses its pretty neat. Here "heavy lifting" is twice-meant: in the three minutes of main action, there are an implausible number of lifts. This is achieved largely within the confines of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus; indeed, it's exactly because the song offers itself as the most familiar version of American Song Form, the one we know in our marrow, that it's hard at first to notice its eccentricities, and for the same reason its variations are so so effective.
The first variation is the length the prechorus, the passage that repeats itself as each verse leads into the chorus. The prechorus is longer than the uneven quatrain it follows, and in fact has two parts, lifting first from the verse at Both hands tied behind my back for nothing... and then again at I never meant to start a war — so the ascent to Why does love always feel like a battlefield, a battlefield, a battlefield? (x 2) is actually the third ratcheting-up of melodic intensity. So: four melodic parts, in a systematic climb. That's not including the quatrain of bridge in its familiar spot in place of the third verse, ("We could pretend that we are friends tonight...").
This fills the three minutes before codas and fade. Well, not quite, and that's the drama part. There is yet another part packed in there, an extension of the second and third choruses; call it the postchorus. It's brief, but it allows yet another lift, queued by a dramatic shift to a capella and an obvious multiplying of the vocal. Four climbs while maintaining the lineaments of the American Song Form is really extraordinary , and gives the song its powerful sense of surfeit, which is itself in tension with the martially regulated beat that always registers a little weird in love songs anyway (cf. Alicia Keys, "No One," itself a rendition of Whitney's "Your Love Is My Love"). The rhythm and the basic shape say control, structure, limits; the sheer number of ascents and the surplus of hooks signal excess, profligacy, unconstraint.
Of course this wouldn't matter so much if they weren't good hooks, but they are, and the songwriters (a combine called "The Runaways" plus the OneRepublic frontman) must have known it; you don't waste that many hooks unless you know the song is a killer. And of course it wants marking that the postchorus, the moment of excess that marks and makes the song, is the only moment Sparks throws down, the song's moment of truth which obliterates the apologetic and regretful disavowal of remainder: better go and get your armor.
As if anything could stand against a song with enough hooks to batter down all Chinese walls.
Posted by jane at January 6, 2010 12:52 AM | TrackBack