*welcome*
1979 was an inflection point for both popular music
and for who in the next decade would become pop music's biggest star -
Michael Jackson.
♫ Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough ♫
It's hard to think back on that period now to a time before Michael Jackson became
Michael Jackson,
a world-famous megastar whose work is so ubiquitous, it's less like music and more like the air we breathe.
But 1979 was before all that
It was before Thriller and Beat It and Billie Jean and Smooth Criminal.
It was four years before the world first saw Jackson do the moonwalk on Motown 25
and critically for him at the time, it was ten years after I Want You Back and the hits of The Jackson 5.
In the intervening years as Michael entered adolescence
and outgrew the cute little boy that the world wanted him to be forever
he released four solo albums that tried to bridge the gap from his Motown roots to
whatever was supposed to come next.
The last of those, Forever, Michael, failed to crack the top half of the Billboard 200.
♫ Michael Jackson - Push Me Away you push me away ♫
♫ you push ♫
♫ you push me away ♫
In the late '70s Jackson's pop domination was far from a foregone conclusion.
But behind the scenes he was paying attention to the changing trends in music
and in the mid to late '70s there was one trend that was growing faster than any other
♫ Bee Gees - Saturday Night Fever ♫
In 1977 the disco subculture was juiced by an unlikely hit film - Saturday Night Fever
of course disco had been around for almost 10 years by then
growing out of soul and funk music and out of black Latino and LGBT cultures,
though you wouldn't know it watching John Travolta dance to the Bee Gees for an all-white crowd.
But a year later Jackson and his brothers had a disco hit with Shake Your Body Down To The Ground
and at that point the stage was set for what would become Michael's
re-arrival as a show-stopping solo artist.
in August '79 Jackson released Off The Wall
the first of three partnerships with producer Quincy Jones.
The first single off that album was Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough
a song that Jackson wrote himself and co-produced and his first number-one in seven years.
The song was a worldwide smash - one that still has legs forty years later.
I think it's been played at every wedding I've ever been to.
For Jackson it was the crossover hit that helped him turn a corner in his career.
It was number one on the soul charts,
but more importantly it was a pop hit. It was inspired by disco and funk
but it was more than that.
When we listen to the song now it doesn't carry the historical baggage of disco.
As music professor N. Danielson says:
"In the popular imagination Don't Stop is pure dance music."
There are reasons for this beyond Jackson's undeniable charisma as a performer. That certainly plays a big part,
but if you look closer at the musical DNA of Don't Stop you can see why the song has such appeal.
The first place to look is the rhythm,
grounded by bass drum and bass guitar and richly layered with snare drum
shakers, guitar and Jackson banging on a glass soda bottle.
This is the part of the song that makes you want to dance.
As Danielson notes, the rhythm is taking a lot of its cues from funk music
which emphasize the first beat in every measure of 4.
Something that was made famous by James Brown.
This emphasis is one thing that makes the song more dance-able.
Another is syncopation, or something that disturbs the regular flow of the beat.
Syncopation creates tension in music that you want to resolve with your body
In the case of funk, that syncopation can be very complex and very noticeable.
But in Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough, Jackson minimizes the distance between the beat
and it's syncopated sound,
which comes only a handful of milliseconds before.
Danielson calls this micro rhythm.
The beat still has funk, but it registers subconsciously,
resulting in a cleaner feeling sound, something that attracts a mainstream pop audience.
A cleaner sound is also a feature of disco
and Don't Stop's rhythm is incorporating those elements as well.
The shaker for example is sounding consistently every 16th note.
and the main pulse though emphasizing the first beat in every measure,
is designed to combine the bass guitar and the bass drum to create the same sound every time,
as opposed to funk or rock, where you can mostly hear the difference between instruments.
On top of this undercurrent of rhythm which is balancing the features of funk and disco
Jackson spreads a tapestry of sounds
that fill in the gaps between beats and help to smooth everything out
(strings and horns, electric piano)
again, reaching for that clean surface that defines the pop sensibility.
The icing on the cake is the harmony and Jackson's falsetto.
As Ethan Hein points out over at his blog,
The song only has two chords: A and B,
which alternate back and forth to create a trance-like modal groove; something
more associated with Eastern music than Western
and above this Jackson sings a melody marked by the first two notes in the first two syllables in every line.
These notes are D sharp and A.
and the interval between them is what's called a tritone
As Hein says the relationship between these notes is somewhat off-kilter and
your mind notices that and that infuses the song with an urgency that it wouldn't otherwise have.
As I said before Jackson's charisma here is unmistakeable.
This is where the world was introduced to the grunts and tics that would become a signature of his style.
Don't Stop is effectively the birth of a new artist;
one who would take over the world in the decade to come,
and this song goes a long way to explaining how and why that happened.
You can see Jackson and Jones taking the syncopation of funk, the pulse of disco, the vibe of Eastern music
even the structure of a rock song with its verse-chorus verse-chorus pattern
complete with a euphoric bridge by Greg Phillinganes.
Jackson recalibrates all these elements toward the end of pure pop music
and electrifies them with the power of his voice.
The song is greater than the sum of its parts. It's something new and exciting:
it's the sound of Michael Jackson.
[interviewer] Do you wanna stop?
- No. Don't stop 'til you get enough.
[interviewer] And you haven't had enough...
- I had... No way!
No way.
Hey everybody~
thank you so much for watching
So I turned 30 on Saturday, which is just
unbelievable to me
So this is the official first video of my 30s
I can't believe I'm saying that and it was a great one to work on for the past few weeks just
because I got to jam out to Off The Wall for my birthday
Anyway, thanks again for watching
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I'll see you guys next time <3