When it comes to analysing music, you can look into a lot. A multitude of factors go into producing a record and delving into specific aspects of a piece can help you to identify the conventions of the genre that you are looking into. While not all songs in a specific genre follow the same patterns and features, a lot of what makes a track a certain genre comes down to these conventions.
Through discussion in class involving a lot of back and forth of differing opinions, I realised that it is very difficult to not become biased based on your personal taste. It is important to understand that all music is subjective and it is not helpful to decide whether a song is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when participating in critical listening. Instead, we must look into objective elements of the track, for example, structure.
We spent a while discussing song structure and we listened to some songs with a very concrete song structure such as Doja Cat’s ‘Paint the town red’ which was as simple as intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, outro. We then realised that in some cases it may be difficult to label certain sections when the shift between them is quite vague.
We looked at ‘Strangers’ by Kenya Grace and in groups were tasked to write down the structure of the song and what we found was that different groups had written different song structures, specifically when it came to the post-chorus section. While the section acts as a transitionary stage between the chorus and following verse, some groups decided that this was simply a continuation of the chorus.
We then looked into songs that break the expected song structure of the genre they are placed in. We looked at a track by Kendrick Lamar in which the structure was made up of no real repeating sections. While dynamically there were highs and lows and the song built up to certain sections and dipped in others, the song contained no real verses or choruses.