followup to earlier thread:
was listening to 'night and day' by ray charles today. the coda is very close to modal cos first of all the bar lines dissolve as the singers start drowning and ray plays the three chord figure over and over without resolution. he starts whooping atonally. singing in tongues.
let's talk some more about pop/dance/hip hop songs that seem to have the qualities we associate with the term 'modal', that we discern in kind of blue [miles called it 'voodoo music' cos the lack of chords turns you into a zombie], ravi shankar, prelude d'apres-midi d'une faune...
― mig, Sunday, 27 July 2003 07:48 (twenty-two years ago)
Sorry mig, I didn't mean to kill the thread yet, the question is actually interesting. (And of course it's "repetitive"--the word, not the question.) Still, when you're talking about
the qualities we associate with the term 'modal', there's little safe ground left. The 'blues scale' for instance is actually a mode, and lo, 80 percent or something of pop/dance/etc. enter the arena.
ravi shankar, prelude d'apres-midi d'une faune...
...and yet another 15 percent. But I'm stumped as to how the question might be asked.
― nestmanso (nestmanso), Sunday, 27 July 2003 13:24 (twenty-two years ago)
There's definitely a confusion of terms here, it seems, because Ray Charles' "Night and Day" , as nestmanso pointed out, is not strictly modal -- it is repetitive and somewhat trancelike, admittedly. "Meandering and repetitive" doesn't equal modal either (a lot of Asian and Middle Eastern musics are indisputably modal but hardly merit this description).
By a few of your touchstone references, mig, it seems that your definition of modal isn't the same one that a musicologist would use, but those references do give a sense of what you're talking about.
So, as to your original criteria, namely, "pop/dance/hip hop songs that seem to have the qualities we associate with the term 'modal'":
A lot of techno and hip hop would fall into this category due to a lesser emphasis on "lead" melody than one finds in pop/folk/some classical music. In the former category: call me old-fashioned (or worse), but I've always liked the way that Orbital establish modes and then play with layering rhythms and counter-rhythms to bring them out -- in my mind, they're the closest in their genre to a Steve Reich sort of approach. I can't comment on hip hop because, frankly, I don't listen to it (unless DJ Shadow counts, and he's not particularly "modal" in his approach).
As far as pop songs go, a few which come to mind and might meet your criteria: "Venus In Furs" by the Velvet Underground (modal in "feel" although there's one dramatic modulation in it). "Heroin" and "Sister Ray" by same.
Also definitely some earlier Dr. John (eg; "Walk on Gilded Splinters"); now THERE's yer voodoo. Certainly Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Spiritualized, Flying Saucer Attack, Faith Healers, Can, Faust, Avrocar, To Rococo Rot/Kreidler, My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, Calla, and Hawkwind, to name but a few, use/used a modal approach in a lot of their work.
― Nom De Plume (Nom De Plume), Sunday, 27 July 2003 18:59 (twenty-two years ago)
And "Jolene" -- I never understood what was going on with that song until I learned to play it (I love 3-chord songs) and realized that the minor never resolves to a major chord, it just folds back in on itself. I have no idea if that meets any scholarly definition of modal, but it sure
sounds modal to me; the lack of resolution is what makes the song work, gives it its dread.
― JesseFox (JesseFox), Monday, 28 July 2003 06:39 (twenty-two years ago)