by Vijith

Look, I'll freely admit that I still struggle a lot of the time when I play jazz, proper voice leading in walking basslines being one of the absolute hardest things I've ever tried to wrap my noodling noodle around. Still, as I've grown more comfortable with it over the years, I've come to realize that a lot of the jazz theory classes I took in college were somewhat misguided in a way, involving to a substantial degree these retrospective analyses which attempted to wrap stuffy-white-dude rules of harmony around a school of music that's inherently improvisational, and in the most egregious cases, around specific solos which were spectacularly so. That's just not the way it works, at least not in my head -- which, I'll admit, is only partially functional with this stuff, but still. It's complex music, for sure, but the dissonances aren't always as calculated as we sometimes made them out to be, and as I learned through blood, sweat, homework and student loans, picking things apart on a staff doesn't have much bearing on your ability to play competently. And, of course, Coltrane seems like an even bigger badass once you realize he was winging it all along.

But even if improvisation is mostly just seat-of-pants on-the-fly composition, there's something different about looking at the same elements as they appear in a piece that's totally, or at least largely, prescribed. Even in jazz, even in the very same jazz tunes which I was just trying to dissuade you from analyzing, it's very different to closely consider theory in the harmonic progression. It's OK to ascribe deeper intent there, because even if the soloist was too caught up in the moment (also: drugs) to reconsider each step, the guy who wrote the piece definitely had plenty of time to contemplate his choices as he was teaching it to the other dudes in the band.

So that's why I don't think the Overthinking It blog is, you know, overthinking it when they map out the specific mechanisms by which several iconic pop key changes unfold. Writing technically challenging tunes that are still artistically compelling is hard, damn it -- especially in pop, where challenging material of any sort will rarely get you anywhere -- and the things that work do deserve to be nitpicked in a manner of which I'd rather see Coltrane spared the indignity. There's also a longer list circulating that's perhaps a little better for the theory-averse; you can still learn a lot from either article by just listening for transitions in the embedded YouTube videos, but the latter includes several instances of the bicuspid-mashingly trite last-chorus-whole-step-up routine in which there really isn't much worth studying since, as Overthinking It says, it's "as cheesy a modulation as you could hope for." But all the same, with regard to the particular offense in the Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way": hell yes, Nick Carter, you magnificent simpleton.