procrastinaters.com

Gorillaz' "Sweepstakes"

As I alluded to in the footnotes of last week’s music pick (because, you know, I am in fact deluded enough to believe that not only is everyone opening my music picks, but they’re reading my critical blurbs therein and they’re reading the footnotes), I’m prone to making pretty disparate comparisons with music in my mind.

This song is maybe the best example of that.  Its unique shape, rhythm construction and layering just gets my structure aficionado juices pumping (God, aren’t I like the coolest person ever?).

The second comparison that comes to mind—the one I’m starting out with to put off being written off as crazy for as far into the post as possible—is Radiohead’s “The National Anthem.”  I think this comparison makes a lot more sense to normal people because, for one, it’s a rock song—an electronic alternative rock song at that—so the genres lineup nicely.  Also, the sounds aren’t too incongruent with the brassy sounds entering for a prominent role in the chaotic climax.  It’s the progression toward that climax that’s the biggest similarity to me: the driving opening that repeats throughout the piece while everything else around it piles on their parts until what was once a driving opening is now just some part that’s somewhere in there, reminding you that it’s the same song.

The cacophony of free style at the climax sets the two songs apart, though, and the climax is what made me think of the original comparison: Mozart’s “Introitus” to hisRequiem.  There’s just a much cleaner, more resourceful style to the respective climaxes of “Introitus” and “Sweepstakes” that’s impossible for me to not marvel at.  It’s not like these are the only two pieces to’ve ever introduced several parts that the listener may not have expected would be combined later in the song only to, you know, combine them later in the song.  “Introitus” just happens to be the one of which I think as an impressive execution of it, the once-gentle string intro being reprised as a heavy, dooming dirge to reintroduce all the vocal parts in a steady climb to the apex, only to leave you solemn again at the end.

Enter Mos Def and a cast of cartoon musicians with a misspelled moniker.  The first time hearing this song I was probably even more shocked by my reaction than you may be (because I didn’t have the benefit of the incredulousness and eye rolling to which my reader is welcome).  A mish mash of rhythms and time signatures and instruments (everything from the electronic to the brassy to the rapping) and verses and refrains just continue to layer and layer in increasing improbability until the piece finds a way to exi--at which poinnt, all of the sudden we’re fading out on whistles and techno riff and whispered refrain.  And my most prominent resonance was relating to 220-year-old funeral mass.