Pentaholics

Tags

Animals, Beatles, Craig Brown, Daft Punk, Kinks, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon, Pentatonix, Steely Dan

I have, over the last week or so, found myself obsessively watching YouTube videos by the a cappella group Pentatonix, and perhaps even more obsessively watching reaction videos to Pentatonix videos. I don’t think I’m yet obsessive enough to be a Pentaholic (which is what fans of the group call themselves) but it must be getting close.

Reaction videos are a very strange phenomenon, which I tend to watch as a guilty pleasure because I find them either sociologically mystifying or amusing. Am I showing my age when I react with amazement as someone says they have never knowingly heard Steely Dan or The Animals or, God help us, The Beatles? And you have to admit it is funny, in a shocking kind of way, to watch two educated and musically aware American kids listen to “Lola” by The Kinks for the first time and (a) think it is describing a sleazy nightclub in somewhere like Havana, and (b) completely miss the cross-dressing references. I mean, I remember when the song first came out in 1970; I was still a fairly naive teenager, but even so I knew it was set in “a bar down in old Soho”, and I couldn’t miss the fact that “I know I’m a man, and so is Lola.”

But reaction videos to Pentatonix seem to be a very different sort of thing. For a start, there is a curious pattern to them. If you happen upon the very first time the person is listening to the group (for some reason it is almost invariably to their version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”), their script is pretty well identical. They start by fumbling the name: “This is a group called Pen … Pen … Pentonicks? Is that how you pronounce it?” (I’ve heard musicians, who should know about the pentatonic scale, have the same problems.) Then you either get: “I’m told this is an a cappella group, and I don’t really like a cappella”, or the video is stopped within the first few seconds with: “Woah! Is this a cappella? Nobody told me it was a cappella.” From that point on, comments follow a very familiar course, they get goosebumps within the first minute, they exclaim at how deep that guy’s voice is, they complain that they can hear a drum so they must be using instruments, they get orgasmic over the girl’s voice and then are stunned into awed silence by the guy with the high voice (“I didn’t expect that!”),and they wonder why they haven’t heard from the black guy who’s banging his chest and stamping his feet. The end is always the same: “Wow!”

After that, there will inevitably be a second Pentatonix reaction (usually, this time, to their version of Paul Simon’s “The Sound of Silence”), and often recorded within a day or two of the first. But this is very different. By this time they know the names of everyone in the group, as if they’ve been best buddies since childhood: “Oh, that must be Matt who replaced Avi, isn’t his voice a perfect fit for the rest of the guys.”

While I was on holiday, I read One, Two, Three, Four by Craig Brown about The Beatles. When discussing the fan reactions to the group there are constant references to the girls who were convinced they were going to marry one or other of the Fab Four. The thing is, The Beatles were so fresh, so innovative, so exciting and so engaging that those who heard them felt drawn into a strange intimacy with them. I think there is something similar with Pentatonix, that same sense that the beauty and the novelty of what they are doing speaks to each listener individually. We are not observing a group, we are being drawn into an extraordinary family. Those sounds are addressed to me, to me, to me, they give me goosebumps, they make me gasp. The only way to respond to the group is to know them, even if only vicariously.

* *

I first came to Pentatonix like, it would appear, so many of the makers of reaction videos, through “Hallelujah”.

I wouldn’t say that I love the song, it is by no means one of my favourite Leonard Cohen tracks, but it fascinates me. Part of this fascination lies in the mutability of the song. There are a huge number of verses (I seem to remember Cohen saying at one point that he had written something like 20 verses for the song), and each version picks different verses, so that each version is, in effect, a different song. I am wondering if there are verses that have never been sung. Thus, of the four verses sung by Pentatonix, for example, three are familiar (the first two are in just about every version you will hear), but they also choose one of the less familiar verses, and one which thus gives a slightly chillier, haunting affect to their rendition.

One of the fascinations of the song is that the lyrics in the first verse of the song actually lay out its musical structure. The first five lines of the verse are as follows:

I heard there was a secret chord

That David sang and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do ya?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth,

The minor fall and the major lift

Okay, a little basic music theory. Each key runs through the seven letters of the musical alphabet from the note for which the key is named. The key that is invariably used as an example of this is the key of C, because it is the one key in which there are no sharps and flats. The key of C thus runs: C D E F G A B. The chords that belong in any key always follow a particular pattern: major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, diminished. The chords that belong in the key of C, therefore, are: 1st – C major (usually just C), 2nd – D minor (usually Dm), 3rd – Em, 4th – F, 5th – G, 6th – Am, 7th – Bdim.

Most (though not all) of the transcriptions of “Hallelujah” I have seen put it in the key of C. Therefore, the chords for the last two lines I quoted follow the lyrics exactly. The line starts in C; with the words “the fourth” the music switches to the fourth chord, F; for “the fifth” it switches to the fifth chord, G; “the minor fall” is in Am; and “the major lift” takes us back to F major. It’s a fairly common chord progression, but I find it endlessly fascinating how Cohen fits together words and music in this way.

One of the other fascinations about the song is that it is, like anything by Cohen, very wordy. It demands attention to the lyrics which means that the diction has to be clear. Yet at the same time it demands a slur, “ya” not “you” in order to rhyme with “Hallelu-JAH”. When I was working at Canary Wharf, I once came upon an outdoor concert by a singer who was clearly classically trained and had a very fine voice. But at one point he started singing “Hallelujah” and when, in the first verse, he sang “But you don’t really care for music, do you?” I turned and walked away. By his careful, precise, correct pronunciation, he had destroyed the rhythm and pattern and hence the sense of the lyrics.

* *

The Pentatonix version begins, as so many of their songs do, with Scott (yes, I know, forgive me and bear with me) stepping forward to sing the first line or two unaccompanied. He has a warm baritone, though he can sing a very resonant bass (as in, for instance, “The Sound of Silence”), and here he sings quietly with a little vocal fry (the crackle that you get at the back of the voice) that makes this an intimate whisper, from which the volume will subsequently soar.

The harmony as it comes in is also quiet, ooo’s and mmm’s. But as the verse ends the group starts to arpeggiate the chords, that is, each individually singing one of the notes of the chord. This starts to change the dynamic of the rendition. Avi, the bass, takes the second verse – “Your faith was strong but you needed proof / you saw her bathing on the roof” – singing in a very creamy, sweet low baritone.

As the verse ends, Kevin starts thumping his chest and stamping his foot and creating all sorts of rhythmic noises in his mouth. This is what some people have heard as a drum kit, but it is just a very skilled example of beatboxing. To get the full effect, try their video of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in which, at one point, he perfectly emulates a full drum kit, snare and hi-hat and tympani and so on. This again increases the pulse of the song, making it more urgent, more powerful.

Kirsten takes the third verse – “I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch / but love is not a victory march / it’s a cold and its a broken hallelujah” – and I may be mistaken but I think there’s an effortless key change at this point. Her voice soars as the harmony vocals get louder and more urgent. Then, suddenly, it all falls away and in the abrupt silence we get Mitch singing the final verse – “Maybe there’s a God above / but all I ever learned of love / was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya.” Mitch is a wonder, he has a crystal clear high tenor almost verging on the countertenor. He has a range of somewhere in the region of four octaves, and I have never heard this part of the song without a shiver.

Then all the voices start to merge for the ecstatic climax. For a while Scott’s voice is dominant, then, as it climbs higher, Kirsten takes the lead. Meanwhile Avi rumbles out a low counter-melody. Just as it seems it can get no higher, it all falls away again, ending on a low, soft hum that echoes the quiet of the opening. The last note you hear is a bass note from Avi so low it is almost subliminal.

The thing about this video is how controlled it is, the timing is immaculate, and the voices, all very different, blend perfectly together. Of course, this is a recording made in a studio, but if you search YouTube you will find film of live performances that are pretty well indistinguishable from this recording.

* *

Kirsten, Mitch and Scott were friends at school in a small Texas town. They had been singing together for years when they decided to form a group. But to do that they realised they need some lower notes to underpin their own voices. A friend introduced them to Avi, and another friend showed them a YouTube video of Kevin playing cello and beatboxing at the same time (which strikes me as like patting your head and rubbing your stomach simultaneously). Kevin and Avi joined the group and they entered a TV talent show called “Sing Out”. I’ve no idea if this is still a thing, but it seems to have run for several years, with vocal groups competing for a big cash prize and a recording contract. Video of most if not all of their performances from the show can be found online. There are a couple duff songs, but in the main they strike me as every bit as clever, inventive, and musically sophisticated as any of their later work. The stand-out, for me, is perhaps their version of “Video Killed the Radio Star”.

They won easily, of course, but the record company broke the contract before they even saw the inside of a recording studio. But they decided to stay together and put their stuff out on YouTube to get attention. At some point they recorded a medley of songs from Daft Punk which, according to rumour, they recorded in a kitchen cupboard for less than $400. Nevertheless, the effect is stunning, and it won them the first of their numerous Grammy Awards.

Now, their videos routinely get millions of views (“Hallelujah”, at the time of writing, has had 564 million views), they have a shelf full of awards, and they have, of course, a recording contract.

But here’s the thing: I’m not sure I want to have any of those records. But I will give anything to see them live.

folk rock

Tags

Al Stewart, Aleister Crowley, Amazing Blondel, Beatles, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Cecil Sharp, Danny Thompson, Davy Graham, Donovan, Ewan McColl, Fairfield Parlour, Fairport Convention, Ghost Box, Jackson C. Frank, Jacqui McShee, John Renbourn, Magna Carta, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Paul Simon, Pentangle, Planxty, Ralph McTell, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rob Young, Sandy Denny, Simon Nicol, Steeleye Span, Terry Cox, The Dubliners, The Spinners, Vashti Bunyan, William Blake

I grew up with folk-rock, that curious hybrid which took (so-called) traditional tunes and added rock instrumentation. For a decade or more throughout the 1970s, the most-played record I owned was Basket of Light by Pentangle, one of the first folk-rock outfits (though I’ve never been convinced that the term rightly applies to them, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee certainly came from the folk tradition, but what Danny Thompson and Terry Cox brought to the mix was more a jazz infusion than a rock sound). And then there was Leige and Lief by Fairport Convention, which certainly was folk rock, and Below the Salt by Steeleye Span, which always sounded to me like an outfit that wasn’t really convinced by what they were doing and thought the rock stuff was a little infra dig. Anyway, by the time they got to All Around My Hat and the abysmal Rocket Cottage, they had pretty much given up on being anything but a pop group.

There were others, of course. One of the things that first drew Maureen and I together was that I was the only other person she’d met who knew who Mr Fox were. But those three, Pentangle and Fairport in their pomp, with a little bit of Steeleye on the side, were the great triumvirate of folk rock. There were a couple of live albums by Fairport, Live at the LA Troubadour and Full House, that you don’t seem to get any more. There’s a version of Full House that has been released, but it’s not quite the same as the original; Simon Nicol’s version of “Matty Groves” is different, and the original was superior (in the original, Nicols sang: “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck the floor”; the other version, more familiar but less dramatic, goes “Lord Arnold struck the very next blow, and Matty struck no more”). But those albums were ones I always listened to with amazement, even though it would be many years before I ever saw a Fairport line-up on stage.

I had grown up on the Beatles, (I was 11 when I watched their first ever appearance on British television), and my musical taste continued to be informed by what were then known as beat groups. So I never had any particular interest in or liking for the old finger-in-the-ear traditional singer, but when the folk song and the rock music merged, suddenly my ears pricked up. For a while my record collection held some real oddities (anyone remember Magna Carta, Fairfield Parlour, Amazing Blondel? No, me neither, not any longer.) but as the folk-rock wave of the 70s began to recede, my tastes began to shift back to the rockier side of things. Though with some variations: the astonishing and idiosyncratic songs on Sandy Denny’s The North Star Grassman and the Ravens and Sandy, certainly had a folk heritage, but they were hardly what I’d call folk songs, and the new direction they were opening up was one I was very interested in pursuing.

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to talking about Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music by Rob Young. I was drawn to the book because it is largely a history of British folk rock, and in so far as that is what the book is, it’s a good book. Unfortunately, Young tries to cast his net wider than that, and that bit is problematic.

He starts with a chapter about Vashti Bunyan, which is a mark against him right from the beginning. Really! Surely, she had the most anaemic singing voice ever recorded, and her album, Just Another Diamond Day, justifiably sold about 20 copies. But in the decades since then, she has somehow been transformed into an iconic figure in the history of British folk music. I don’t understand this, but Young is far from the only person to put her up on that pillar. This chapter does tell us some things about Young’s book. In the first place, when it comes to actually writing about music, Young is crap. But then, there are very few people who are able to write well about music, though not many of them reach for the sort of extravagant and laboured metaphors that Young employs. In the second place, Young is largely uncritical: if the song or album or group can be squeezed into his history, then it is by default good. Okay, as the book goes on there are a couple of albums which he doesn’t greet with unalloyed praise (Rocket Cottage, of course, being one), but this is not exactly a work of criticism. Thirdly, the book is only accidentally about folk music; the clue is in the sub-title, “Visionary Music”, though he never actually explains what visionary music is, and for much of the book he blurs the boundaries so that folk rock is inevitably equated with visionary music. So Vashti, setting off in her gypsy caravan for Donovan’s Scottish island, which he has already left, is of interest because she is visionary rather than because she is a folk singer.

Now it is when we come to that term, “folk singer”, that things become interesting. Leaving Vashti to wander off stage, never to return, Young now goes back in time to the early collectors, Cecil Sharp, the Child Ballads, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and so on. This is where the book becomes interesting, because you start to realize how problematic the whole thing is. The whole collecting thing was tied up with a strand of late-19th century nationalism that echoed similar movements in Europe, and therefore inevitably has a rather dubious right-wing vibe. It was also rather indiscriminate, the collectors picked up on anything that grizzled country folk liked to sing, whether traditional ballads or music hall songs or something they had extemporized themselves, but because of where they came from they were all deemed authentic. “Authentic” became a nonce-word that plagued folk music for decades after, everything was geared to digging back to find the most ancient and therefore most authentic version of every song. The truth is that there is nothing authentic about folk music: tunes are remembered and forgotten, lyrics get changed constantly, lines are misremembered and new lines are cobbled together, and one set of words could be put to a different tune then the words would be changed to fit the tune. But for the panjandrums of Cecil Sharp House, the songs were set in stone, their authenticity an earnest of their importance. By the 1950s, Ewan McColl (or Jimmy Miller from Salford, as he was originally) was so insistent on authenticity that singers at his folk club had to employ the accent of whichever region the song had been collected from. Folk music was associated with various popular, left-wing causes, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass in the 1930s, the Aldermaston Marches in the 1960s, and yet the traditionalists were extraordinarily authoritarian.

The guitar, for example, was not an authentic instrument, and so it didn’t start to creep into the folk music scene until the late-50s and 60s. But the young masters of the guitar who came on the scene around this time, Renbourn and Jansch, Davy Graham, and so forth, began to change the scene. They brought a more fluid, fluent style to the traditional songs they played; they began writing their own pieces in the style of their vamped-up traditional songs; and they were listening to other popular music around at the time. After all, if guitars aren’t common in your chosen area of music, who do you listen to for techniques and ideas? The folk guitarists who came on the scene in the early-60s brought influences from jazz, from classical music, and from rock ‘n’ roll; and in time they brought in electric guitars.

One of the things that comes across in the longest and best part of the book is how eclectic folk music became between the mid-60s and the mid-70s. Failing rock groups reinvented themselves as folk groups; most of the drummers who played in folk groups had originally started in rock bands. The folk musicians were listening to jazz and classical and rock; rock musicians were listening to folk; and from all of this new hybrids emerged. And thus were born Fairport and Pentangle and their ilk.

So far, so good. This is, of course, a partial account of British folk music during the period. There is no mention, for instance, of groups like The Spinners, The Dubliners or Planxty, though they were all very successful (The Spinners never seemed to be off British television screens throughout the 60s). No mention, either, of other performers who arose on the folk scene, like Al Stewart or Ralph McTell, even though these would go on to have very successful careers in ways that played very adroitly with the borders between folk and rock. And though there are nods to Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank, the ways that the British folk scene interwove with the American folk revival of the 50s and 60s isn’t really developed. Nor, given the whole issue of authenticity that plagued folk music, is there any real discussion of whether folk musicians who wrote their own songs (which is the case with practically all of the performers I’ve mentioned so far, including the austere Ewan McColl) could be said to be part of the folk tradition. Can things like “Pentangling” by Pentangle or “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” by Sandy Denny really be considered folk songs? And if so, what is it that makes them folk?

But we come back, yet again, to that subtitle: “Visionary Music”. It is undefined; sometimes it means a songwriter who read William Blake, sometimes a song that refers to the landscape, sometimes a piece that pays homage to Aleister Crowley, sometimes it seems to be just a band that Rob Young happens to like. And over the course of the book, it transmutes into something called “acid folk” (don’t ask, I’ve no idea), or psychedelic folk (ditto); and by the end of the book he’s talking about obscure experimental musicians whose work, so far as I can see, bears no relationship to folk in any way. Which is another problem with the book, it is unfocussed, the subject drifts. It may be that those who like Ghost Box will find the final chapters of the book enthralling, but for me they have moved away from the area I was particularly interested in. Which to my mind makes the book over-long (660-odd pages) and rather bitty.

But the bits that I was interested in are very good indeed.