Why Don't You Come a Little Closer?

Rihanna's "Umbrella" doesn't seem unusual at first, just unusually good, a series of four-bar melodic lines that perform small swoops in the air before settling down with a reassuring pressure, all over a loud acoustic drum loop and a watery synth in the chorus. These things are not out of character for recent R&B, and the song's status as the jam of late spring (which is the summer of the 00s) feels, if not preordained--the song's not as brash as other car-stereo conquerors, with its mood of weirdly banal affection (i.e. "when shit goes bad I'll take care of you") taking the place of others' evocations of ecstacy, revelry, or craziness--at least like it fits the color scheme, sonically and lyrically.


But the most interesting thing about this otherwise uninteresting (but still great!) song is the thing that makes it different from its peers: there is almost no harmony in it. In contrast not only to female R&B singers like Mariah or Beyonce or Ciara but also male-sung hits like "Crazy" and "Hey Ya" and "Yeah," "Umbrella" consists of an uninterrupted melodic line, unharmonized. Some may crop up in the chorus, but that also may be pitchy double-tracking creating the illusion of harmony. There aren't any secondary vocals doing counterpoint parts (i.e. singing the same words but with a different rhythm) or backup parts (i.e. totally different words, "shoop shoop shoop shoop" while the lead singer goes on with her lyrics and melody), nor are there harmonized lines, even where the melody would seem to scream out for them, like at the beginning of the chorus.

This wouldn't be unusual in most genres, but in R&B, it's like having a rock song without guitars: you can pull it off without people noticing, but it's quite a trick. (It's arguably a similar move, musically and semantically, to Prince's eschewing bass in some of his biggest hits, which we'll get to later.) Of course, it's a little different in the present context, since Rihanna was originally a dancehall artist, and that genre has little use for R&B's trademark delicate, pitch-sensitive voices puffing out tone clouds. Dancehall's vocalists are expected to be powerful rather than pretty, and Rihanna makes a striking contrast with the breathy voices that have dominated female R&B. You hear it not only in the lack of harmony, but in the tough inflection that allows her to rhyme "together" with "umbrella."


It's also what makes the song so effective. The track isn't lush, with a lone synth line making up the high point of its wall of sound, and the verse is mainly vocals and drums, which are themselves playing an uncluttered beat with no real polyrhythm to speak of, so the lone melody line becomes the focus. Without a dense instrumental backing, it doesn't need harmony to stand out. But this simplicity isn't reflective of simple creativity, as it requires quite a leap of faith to put out such an unadorned song. You have to be really confident in your melody line to make it the only hook in the song, and it pays off.


Still, just as Price's breaktaking removal of bass left him open to charges that he was abandoning his roots and watering down his sound for mass consumption, the popularity of "Umbrella" among pop nerds--i.e., people who don't pay attention generally to R&B--could make one a bit suspicious about this lack of harmony. R&B has made a real study of harmony in recent years, and arguably its sophisticated use of multitracked vocals is what defines it in an era when hip-hop and R&B sound more and more alike. But this also tend to complicate songs, and to bury the melody into a dense vocal texture, which, as is the case with most genre signifiers, can make songs difficult to differentiate for dilettantes. It's notable that she's merged two genres, dancehall and R&B, by taking out the most problematic elements of each: patois and provincialism for dancehall, dense vocals for R&B. If it weren't so hard to do effectively, it'd be worrisome, but it's unlikely to spawn a trend.


Harmony is perhaps so prevalent in R&B because it signifies a particular kind of sexiness, and sex is what modern R&B is mainly concerned with. Consequently, it's developed a way of using harmony that depicts a sort of mysterious sensuality, one that lets every kind of power dynamic feel included. The massive multitracking puts the singer in multiple locations and at multiple timestamps, taking them out of the realm of the real or even the representational and making them a sort of ghost on the track, an unreal, fantas(y)tic presence. At the same time, harmony demands an obvious level of technical prowess that's part and parcel of the performance itself, which signifies control: the listener sits at the center, and the singer moves around, with total power over what she's going to do (it's almost always a she), as well as over what the listener hears. And so it offers an entry point for everyone: as an idealized sexual being with total control, or as the sole consumer of an unreal fantasy object able to do anything.

Unfortunately, and I say this as one of the aforementioned pop nerds, this is frequently not very interesting; as God-Man reminds us, total control is boring over the long run, and while it's very pretty, modern R&B's use of harmony to fill in the gaps also takes away a lot of the tension that drives great songs. It's no accident that a lot of songs have been trying out more direct melody lines lately, like "Ring the Alarm."

But there's also been people pushing toward other ways of using harmony, and there's no better example of this than Amerie's new album, Because I Love It. It's the best album of at least the last three months, due almost entirely to Amerie's voice and the incredible variety of things she does with it. There's belting, there's breathy, there's talk-singing, and then there are the background vocals, so varied that you lose track. It's a bravura performance over the course of the album, and it throws the gauntlet in a much different direction than Rihanna does.

In retrospect, this should be obvious. Amerie's breakthrough hit, "1 Thing," was, like "Umbrella," a spare track with slightly off-kilter live drums, but Amerie managed to attack the vocal line with a real fierceness while also stirring in a surprising amount of harmony, which colored the chorus in a way that upped the tension dramatically. Interestingly, the first instance of harmony in the opening track comes on the word "rain," and the usage nicely sets up the way harmony will be used in the rest of the album: deliberately and with a clear purpose. Here, it both eases the transition into the chorus and, with its mournful cast, emphasizes the singer's view on rain (negative!). When it's followed with a certain amount of standard R&B harmony-clouds, again, there's a reason: those clouds are raining. It's even out of time when it repeats, producing a veritable April shower of vocals.

The harmony serves a totally different purpose on the first freestyle track, "Some Like It." It's a barren track at first, and then some backing vocals crop up, but seemingly more in tribute to its musical inspiration. As the track progresses, though, and the backing vocals develop, you realize that they're not really backing vocals as they'd conventionally be used. Instead, Amerie is actually singing horn lines. Take a listen, and then try and imagine the exact same parts played by a horn section. Those little bursts in the verses and the quarter-note descension in the breakdown: if this was a different track, you'd hear sax and trumpet there, but because Amerie's able to work her voice like this, the backing can stay spare (drum machine, keyboard-bass, and piano) while still delivering the impact of a fully-arranged track. But of course, this way she can put words to the horn parts, and the backup vocals end up functioning as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action as a wise aggregate.

Harmony really becomes a central character in "Take Control" and "Gotta Work." (Although it pops up most explicitly later in the album, in "When Loving You Was Easy," when she belts, "And I didn't need to bring my choir to let you know you were wrong!" The choir appreciates the acknowledgement, one imagines.) In both of these songs, the lead vocal is singing, in part, about the backing vocals, the melody serenading the harmony.

"Take Control"'s central riff is a guitar part that's one bar of on-beat notes and one bar of syncopated, off-beat notes. The lead vocal deals with this by being consistently straight, on-beat, but it creates a fundamental instability in the song. This could have been dealt with a number of ways. It could've been left as-is, with the resulting tension creating space for dancing. It could've been patched over with more on-beat parts, straightening the whole thing out. But instead, Amerie decides to increase the instability with backing vocals that dart in and out, tripping over themselves, changing meter, sometimes even dropping out of rhythm entirely, as they do at the song's most thrilling moment: "you're never in a rush" in the lead part is echoed by a Destiny's Child-like trio of backing vocals singing a descending motif of "never, never, never" that, in perfect synchronicity, decelerates the tempo as the rest of the track cuts out for a second. That makes sense--if you're never in a rush, why not just stop the song for a second?--and those other off-beat backing vocals make sense too, since the song itself is about Amerie being out of control. She has to be, if someone's going to take control of her, and that's exactly what those harmonies are: out of control. It's consequently the polar opposite of the very controlled way harmony is used in most modern R&B, without being ostentatious about its difference in the way that, say, "Ring the Alarm" is. There are still pretty close harmonies, but they're being used to augment a much different mood than just sexiness. (Which ends up being pretty sexy.)

"Gotta Work," in contrast, explicitly mentions being out of control: "show me somebody without a goal / show me somebody with no control," the background lyrics say, but they're not applying that to the singer. Rather, they seem to suggest that you can't find anyone like this. Everyone has a goal, everybody has some control, you just have to use that. It's an amazing song, for the lyrics if nothing else, which are a pep talk not about self-esteem or romance but ambition, just pure simple ambition, and it's incredibly effective. "Some people think I'm aggressive / cause I know what I want / but that never mattered too much to me," she sings, and it doesn't sound like what she wants is luxury goods or a guy. It sounds like she wants something bigger than that, an idea reinforced by the fact that she says "when you're feeling low / and you can't get much lower / that's when you know you're close / sometimes you gotta work hard for it." It's a marked diversion from the triumphalism that usually accompanies this kind of sentiment, not "get paid" so much as "make it happen." And then, of course, comes the key line: she yells "I do it cause I love it!" The ambition's not to be just successful or comfortable, it's to do what you love. It also helps that the track barely contains her energy and her exuberence, and the harmony here is surgical, precise, purposeful. They're there to back up the lead vocals, to serve as engines of desire, and they push it along with perfect self-assurance.

People seem to be saying with more frequency than normal that this is a bad time for music, which is probably why I'm enjoying it so much. These in-between periods are always the best, because the old formulas have failed, and everyone has to figure out their own way forward if they're going to survive. The control that typifies an established sound is loosed, and the componant parts fall to the ground, maybe to be picked up and rearranged and added to, as Amerie does, or maybe to be mostly discarded, as Rihanna does. Either way, surprise becomes a requirement again, and ambition serves a key purpose. Rihanna creates a broadly appealing sound by simplifying R&B's vocal scheme, and in the process comes up with a fantastic song. Amerie pushes against her bounderies and finds her voice's full potential, branching off in new and, in the case of freestyle, largely-forgotten old directions. It's an exciting time when things aren't going great--at least when ambition pokes its head up--and, honestly, I'll be sad to see them go.

Labels: Amerie, music, musicology, pop, production, Rihanna, vocals

posted by Mike B. @ 9:41 AM