¿Por qué no te aburre una canción de un solo acorde?

We ask ourselves

• If the song never changes chord, why don't you get bored?
• What does the bass play when it no longer has to hold up the chord?
• Why does the same note, moved half a beat, sound like something else?
• If seven people play at once, why is it not a mess?
• Can you write down on a score the thing that makes this sound like funk?
• Why is a song from 1967 built the same way as one from 2015?

Don't answer yet. We come back to these at the end.

The fragment

Before playing any song all the way through, we build the Uptown Funk loop with the whole class. Two chords, D minor and G, one per bar. The chords are not the interesting part.

Count out loud: 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Eight slots per bar. The numbers are the beats; the "ands" are what sits between them. Now we share the bar out, two pairs at a time, with one rule: nobody plays where the previous pair plays.

• Feet stamp on 1, 2, 3 and 4. Never on an "and". That is the floor.
• Hands clap only on 2 and 4.
• Guitar says cha only on the "ands". Never on a number.
• Bass says bum on 1 and again on the "and" of 3. Two notes a bar, and the second one lands off the beat.
• Horns go pa on the "and" of 4, right before the bar starts again.

When the five layers hold together, you have the whole loop. Notice that no single layer is hard on its own. The hard part is not stepping into your neighbour's slot.

Now do it wrong on purpose. Same chords, same tempo, but everyone plays only on the numbers, nobody on the "ands". Same notes, same harmony, and the thing collapses. What just went missing is what this unit is about.

Now play Uptown Funk, all of it, with nobody talking over it.

What changed

You have just built four minutes of music out of two chords, and neither of them accounts for anything that happened. A harmony textbook tells you music moves forward because chords pull on each other. These two pull nowhere. They sit still.

The change has a date. In 1967 James Brown records Cold Sweat and the band spends the whole verse on one chord. That same year Aretha Franklin records Chain of Fools, which never changes chord at all. Once the harmony freezes, the interest has to come from somewhere else.

Mostly it comes from the split. Every instrument occupies specific slots and leaves the rest alone. The guitar plays where the bass is silent, the hi-hat fills what the snare leaves, and it sounds full without anybody playing much. You have already tested this: when everyone takes the same slots, it dies.

And it comes from syncopation, which is putting the accent where you were not expecting it. Your ear predicts a hit on the strong beat, it arrives half a beat early or late, and that small mismatch is what moves your body. It is not decoration. It is the material the song is made of.

A score writes the note values down accurately, but it does not write how far ahead or behind each hit sits, and that is half of the job. Which is why this is learned by playing it with other people rather than by reading it, and why we built it before talking about it.

The most concrete consequence belongs to the bass. If the harmony never moves, the bass loses its old job, which was telling you the root of the chord. So it stops doubling that root and starts playing a tune. In Levitating the bass line almost never repeats the same way twice, and it is the only part of the song that is telling you anything.

La Gozadera shows the same idea from the other side. There the bass and the percussion divide the bar between them, over a five-stroke pattern underneath that organises everybody. Four chords on a loop, and none of them resolves anything.

Foto: slgckgc, CC BY 2.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Hard facts, and watch the count: Chain of Fools, November 1967, one chord, 117 BPM. Uptown Funk, single in November 2014, two chords, 115 BPM. La Gozadera, April 2015, four chords, 95 BPM. Levitating, March 2020, three chords, 103 BPM. Fifty-three years, four different countries, and not one progression that goes anywhere.

The same device elsewhere

Freezing the harmony and letting rhythm carry the interest was not invented by funk. These three are worth hearing back to back:

• Levitating, Dua Lipa (2020) — three chords looped from start to finish. The only thing that never repeats identically is the bass, moving on its own underneath the voice.
• Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) — the movement that starts right after the solo bassoon at the opening: one chord hammered by the whole orchestra, and the only interest is where the accents fall. The Paris audience hated it.
• Gnawa music from Morocco — the guembri, a three-string lute acting as the bass, repeats a short figure; the qraqeb, iron castanets, fill the gaps the guembri leaves. Chords: none.

None of them is better than the others and there is no ranking here. All three solve the same problem: how to hold attention for minutes on end without moving the harmony.

And here at home?

In Madrid it arrives early. Barrabás is founded in 1971, put together by Fernando Arbex as soon as Los Brincos break up, and in 1972 it releases Wild Safari, subtitled Música caliente, with "Woman" on it. That is funk with Latin percussion made in Spain four years after Cold Sweat, and it worked abroad.

The Spanish record that travelled furthest is from 1977: "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie", by Baccara — Mayte Mateos and María Mendiola — number one in the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and half of Europe. The rest is worth saying too: it was written by two Germans, Frank Dostal and Rolf Soja. The voices were Spanish; the song was not.

Foto: Fotógrafo desconocido / Anefo, CC0, vía Wikimedia Commons

In Aragón, in the seventies, there is none of this. What there is is the Nueva Canción Aragonesa, led by Labordeta, and in the eighties the guitar rock of Héroes del Silencio. The honest answer to "and here at home?" is that here, for thirty years, groove was not the point.

It arrives through rap, and it can be dated. On 11 June 1999 the Zaragoza group Violadores del Verso release Genios, and on it there is a track called "Yo tengo el funk", with music by R de Rumba. Thirty-two years after Cold Sweat, somebody from here says it out loud.

And eventually it gets played live. In 2009 Kase.O tours with a jazz band — saxophone, guitar, bass and drums — under the name Kase.O Jazz Magnetism, and in 2011 he puts it on record. It is the first time this repertoire sounds in Zaragoza with people playing it on stage instead of a sample.

Classroom activities

• While Chain of Fools plays: raise your hand the moment you think the chord is about to change. It never does. The interesting part is how many times your ear was wrong, and why.

• While Uptown Funk plays: half the class stamps only the numbers, the other half says cha only on the "ands". You have to last the whole song without stepping into the other side's slot.

• While Levitating plays: follow the bass with one finger in the air, up and down. What you are drawing is a melody, not an accompaniment.

• While La Gozadera plays: count how many different percussion instruments come in. Then work out who plays on the numbers and who plays between them.

• Play: we build Uptown Funk with the band. The full-band chart and the tab are attached to its own article.

• Create: take one chord, any chord. Share eight slots between five pairs, with the rule that nobody may play where somebody else plays. One minute straight without changing chord once.

Key vocabulary

• Groove — la sensación de empuje que produce cómo se reparten los golpes entre los instrumentos
• Syncopation — síncopa: un acento que cae donde el oído no lo esperaba
• Offbeat — contratiempo: el hueco entre dos tiempos, lo que contamos como «y»
• Vamp — un bucle de pocos acordes que se repite sin resolver en ninguna parte
• Bass line — línea de bajo: en esta música, una melodía y no un acompañamiento

Resources

The songs in this unit are in the library, each with its own article, full-band chart and tab: Chain of Fools, Uptown Funk, Levitating, La Gozadera.

The song we build — Uptown Funk, Mark Ronson with Bruno Mars (2014-15). Its article, with the full-band chart and the tab, is in the library.

One chord from beginning to end — Chain of Fools, Aretha Franklin (1967). Also in the library.

The bass on its own — Levitating, Dua Lipa (2020), in the library.

Bass and percussion sharing the bar — La Gozadera, Gente de Zona with Marc Anthony (2015), in the library.

Where this starts — Cold Sweat, James Brown (1967). The whole verse on one chord.

Frozen harmony in the orchestra — Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), London Symphony Orchestra with Simon Rattle. Listen to the movement that begins as soon as the solo bassoon finishes.

A bass that is the melody, with no chords at all — maalem Mahmoud Guinia with guembri and qraqeb, recorded in Marrakech.

Funk made in Spain — "Woman", Barrabás (1972).

Funk with an Aragonese name on it — "Yo tengo el funk", Violadores del Verso, from Genios (1999).

• The machine that freezes the rhythm — "Who plays the drums on this song?", the unit on the drum machine, in the library.
• What you don't hear here — "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie", Baccara (1977), the best-selling Spanish record in this whole story.