The Private Canon: The Lilting Discord of 'Babylon'

With his early success with the pointed but tuneful The Threepenny Opera, German composer Kurt Weill sealed his fate with some critics and modernist aesthetes: He was a sellout who, as ballet impresario Diaghilev put it to a colleague, "simply follows in Donizetti's footsteps, but camouflages the fact by inserting the appropriate amount of discords at the right moment."

That quote has always stuck in my craw; it's uncharitable and catty, certainly, but I admit feeling a little bit called out by it. Both in my listening and composing tastes, isn't it true that I sometimes do what Weill is accused of here—that is, favor off-kilter flourishes on otherwise straightforward music? Do I sometimes overcomplicate my own songs to sound fancier than strictly necessary, and gravitate to the same tendency in the music I like? Aren't the "fruity" sixth chords that Sondheim laments in Weill a symptom of this very affliction, of the compulsion to paper over derivative ideas with superficial embellishments (an irony, given that Sondheim has confessed to his musical biographer Mark Eden Horowitz that his fear of square harmonic choices sometimes leads him astray)? The double criticism implied here is that this kind of lily-gilding leads to the worst of both worlds: It produces neither truly form-breaking original music nor delivers the pleasing tunes it's too embarrassed to wear proudly.

Well, there's no accounting for tastes, and I've spent a lot of this blog anatomizing harmonies that stretch tonality without breaking it. This is just my kink, I guess. And few songs land in that pocket quite as neatly and satisfyingly as "Babylon," a self-consciously oddball carnival waltz by the Denton, Texas band Little Jack Melody and his Young Turks. I was sent their 1991 CD On the Blank Generation because I'd written about their fellow Denton-ites, polka rockers Brave Combo, and was on the mailing list (though I wasn't really reviewing music anymore by then). I resonated with a lot of the record, even if its eclecticism seemed on occasion a bit effortful (a Sinatra riff here, a Beethoven cover there).

But there was nothing quite as mesmerizing as the push-pull harmonium breath of the opening track, "Babylon," with its self-consciously perverse yet utterly pleasing dissonances, delivered by Steve Carter's soft, unassuming bari-tenor and a band that included tuba and clarinet. Picking it apart (with the help of a chart Carter shared with me), I see that it's driven by a simple-looking chromatic chord progression. But look and listen at how gracefully the melody dances up and down and around those chords! It has a seamless lilt to it, even as the downward slip of the harmony arrests the ear:

That B(b5)/Bm figure deserves a mention; its slightly drunken alternation and lurchingly offbeat bass pattern opens the song and returns insistently. Here's Carter's chart:

The final cadence of the verse continues the artful threading of the melody around the chords, ending on a delightfully ear-bending half-step:

The song's chorus almost jumps the shark, taking the melody of "Ring Around the Rosie" and putting it through a disturbing gauntlet of squashy discord (it's at 1:17 in the video above), as if to say, "Look how weird I can make this!" But it's so masterfully done that I can't begrudge it, and all told it fits beautifully into the song's puzzle-piece aesthetic.

In an email, Carter told me the song came about "from what I'd call a doodle—you sit down at the piano without much in your head and just start doodling around, trying to find something to amuse yourself, hopefully something that isn't already overly familiar." There's that don't-be-a-square tic! How well I know it. The song's seed, he said, was the opening figure's "consistent slip between major and minor," which suited the lyric he'd written about "a non-specific minor-league existential crisis, one that visited me after the band I'd been married to for 12 years finally had the decency to beach itself. Now what? A good thing? A bad thing? A major thought? A minor thought?"

Little Jack's other records ride a similar line, albeit with more reference to jazz and Big Band sounds, as on this sweetly sinister breakdown from the album World of Fireworks:

Chords, schmords. I like what I like, and I happen to like a lot (not all!) of my music served at odd angles, recognizable but distressed, dirty and with a twist. One man's Verfremdungseffekt is another man's Gemütlichkeit.