hey, welcome to 12tone! about a year ago, I started doing this occasional series where I
go back and look at my old song analysis videos and correct the mistakes. you might think this
was inspired by a general desire to learn and improve, but no. it's because of Hurt. it's
because of one mistake I made in one video that has haunted me for literal years. it's the most
embarrassing thing I've ever published, and I think it's time I set the record straight.
(tick, tick, tick, tick, tock)
this video is sponsored by CuriosityStream!
normally, in these videos, I try to look at three or four songs, but because of my complicated
relationship with this analysis, I'm gonna do something a bit different and just focus on Hurt.
before we get to the big mistake, though, there's some other things I want to address first,
starting with the verse riff. (bang) or, at least, that's what I said it was in the original video,
but the reality is a little more complicated. don't get me wrong, this is the basic structure,
and I think my analysis of it holds up, but I don't think Reznor ever actually plays it
exactly like this: almost every statement includes at least one of three variations.
the first variation is one that I did actually mention in the original video: he adds a D near
the end of the first bar. (bang) this makes it clear that the underlying chord is B minor,
and moving to a more consonant note helps release some of the tension generated by the tritone.
it sort of brings the riff home. he does this on most of the statements after the first one,
but he plays around with the volume of it a lot, so sometimes you get a strong, satisfying release,
and other times it's more like a faint whisper.
I couldn't pick out any discernible pattern to it, and in the context of the song,
this unpredictability serves as a powerful metaphor for the numbness of addiction. you just
keep playing the riff because you never know if the next time will be the one where it resolves.
the second variation, though, is more structured. on the last note of the riff,
he alternates between playing it in the same octave as the rest of the notes, like this: (bang)
and playing it really high: (bang) this sudden jump puts it in an uncomfortable register: this
is where things like screams and predator howls sit, so an unprepared leap to such a piercing high
note is unnerving because it sounds like danger. the interval is also important: it's D over an E
chord, the minor 7th, which to my ears at least is an incredibly hollow sound. back in ear training
class, this was the hardest interval for me to recognize because it just sounds like nothing.
it's a blank slate with no real character of its own, and here, that deep sense of emptiness is
exactly what the song needs. so why doesn't he do it every time? to preserve its power. what makes
this leap so effective is that it's unprepared, but if he keeps doing it over and over, that's
preparation. the low version lets you cool down so you're never quite ready for the next high one.
this brings us to the third variation, and this is where my transcription actually was a little
off. I had an E on beat 4, but most of the time he doesn't actually play anything there. (bang)
in fact, the only time he does play a note there, it's another D. the structure of the bar implies
an E, though, to match the shape of the D power chord in the first half, so you sort of mentally
insert it yourself, or at least I do. it's pretty subtle, and I didn't notice it at all the first
time through, but it adds a bit more uneasiness to the song: you keep expecting an E and not actually
getting it, like a hole in the fabric of the music. that said, I do still think it's fair
to analyze the riff as if it's there: after all, the effect relies on you believing it will be.
I also want to talk about the rhythm a bit. the first bar is dominated by these long, held notes,
while the second bar is using all the 8th notes, or at least all of them except for that missing E.
this creates a beautiful push-pull dynamic that they further accentuate in a couple ways. for
starters, there's the chords: the fast bar has two, while the slow bar has one. this
change in harmonic rhythm creates a deeper, more all-encompassing sense of slowness. but also,
the slow bar isn't immediately slow: it starts off with that same 8th-note power chord walk-up,
so it feels like it's got the same energy, but then it just hits a brick wall and stops,
leaving you hanging in the middle of nowhere. and what notes do they leave you hanging on?
it's the tritone, one of the most dissonant intervals in Western music. taken together,
this creates a sense that you're starting to rise out of whatever hole you're trapped in, building
up momentum to put your life back together, but in the end you always fall back down. it's a musical
ode to the destructive cycle of addiction. if he'd ended on something bright and happy, maybe
this would feel like an escape, but he doesn't. he ends on a tritone, and the message there is clear.
speaking of dissonance, another thing I didn't really talk about
is the noise. this track is full of non-harmonic noise elements:
there's something that sounds like wind running throughout, and the verses also
have this weird distortion to them that seems to sit on top of the music itself. (bang)
it's a deeply unnatural sound that almost makes you wonder if your speakers are broken,
but they're not, that's just how the song goes. it's disturbing on its own,
creating this low rumbling that makes it hard to focus on the music, but it gets even more
disturbing when viewed in the context of the album as a whole. The Downward Spiral is a
concept album about addiction, depression, and self-abuse, and in the second-to-last track,
also called The Downward Spiral, the protagonist shoots himself in the face.
this is followed by Hurt, the final track, which is a reflection on that action. in this context,
the distortion takes on a much more literal meaning: if you listen closely, it's more
prominent on the left side. it's the loss of hearing from firing a gun so close to his ear. he
literally can't hear the music to his left, and thanks to the distortion neither can you.
but ok, I've put it off long enough, let's talk about the pre-chorus. (bang)
this is where things went wrong. the first thing I noticed here was that he's playing a drone:
every chord voicing he plays includes an A and E on top, even if they didn't make much sense
with the rest of the notes. together, these form an A power chord, so every chord has a
touch of that A tonality to it. combine that with the fact that the first chord he plays in
this section is a full A power chord, the only chord this drone feels stable over,
and I naturally decided to read this section in that key, but I really shouldn't have.
everything else that went wrong in this analysis stemmed from that initial mistake.
you see, the problem is, the options for analyzing this in A
kinda suck: the best I could come up with was that it was like a harmonic trill that
got interrupted by the IV chord, but then to justify that reading I had to go back and make
an argument that the verse was secretly in A too because the melody ended on that note sometimes,
which isn't really how keys work. it was kind of a mess.
fortunately, the comment section was quick to point out my mistake: I'd assumed the drone had to
be on the I chord, but it's not unheard of to have a drone on the V instead. that would put us in D,
and there's plenty of good evidence that that's what's happening. for starters, the D chord is
the only one in the section that has an actual chord quality: the rest are power chords with
the drone on top, but on D he adds an F# above the E, giving us a clear major triad. plus,
the verses were in B minor, and D is what's called the relative major of that key, which means it has
all the same notes, it just uses them differently. shifting between relative major and minor keys is
really smooth, but it can have a significant impact on the emotion of the piece. in fact,
I'd say this pre-chorus almost sounds hopeful: the protagonist is in a dark place, but he's
starting to understand his situation. that hope doesn't last, but don't worry, we'll get there.
but the best argument for reading this in D is that if that's the root then this is
actually a really common chord loop, called the axis progression: (bang) you may have
heard me call this the four-chord progression before, but theorist Mark Richards proposed
the name axis progression and I like it so I'm switching to that. same chords,
though. point is, if we view it in D then we have a ready-made analytical framework
we can just drop it right into, and I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't notice it at the time.
but, well, is this in D? 'cause here's the thing about the axis progression:
it can rotate. because of the way the chords fit together, it can support a couple different
roots depending on its use. if D is the root then we're playing the major axis variation,
but there's also the minor axis variation, which in this case would start on B,
keeping us in the same key as the verse. there's also the dominant axis variation, starting on A,
which is what I initially said it was, and even the lydian axis variation, which would start on G,
but those are less common and they're probably not the best lens here.
because of the F#, I'd say this section is probably better viewed as the major axis
progresion, but it seems worth considering the minor as well, because of the rhythm.
I said the first chord he plays is the A chord, and that's true, but I'm not sure
it's actually the start of the loop. after the verse, the vocals lay out for almost 30
seconds while he plays through the loop twice on guitar, and when he starts singing again,
it's over the B chord. that becomes the start of the loop, even though it's not where the
loop started. this has a really interesting effect: he's playing even sets of four bars,
but because he's managed to trick you into hearing the second bar as the first one,
all the transitions feel like they're coming early. the chorus has a pick-up bar, and then
it cuts back to the verse a bar before you expect it to, even though on paper it should all add up.
and let's talk about the chorus, because basically
every transcription I could find says the pre-chorus progression continues through,
but it doesn't. the D chord disappears, replaced with another A chord instead. check it out: (bang)
that's supposed to be D major, but I can't find a D anywhere. I mean, I suppose I might
have missed it, but I looked real hard this time, and even checked with some friends,
and no one could identify a D. this means we're going A-B-G-A, which… hold on, that looks like
the harmonic trill I was describing the first time. was I secretly right all along? eh…
no. not really. or, I mean, it's a fair analysis of this section, but as I mentioned earlier,
I think it's better viewed as going B-G-A-A, basically adopting the minor axis variation
and avoiding the major root altogether to make it clear we've left that hope behind.
in its place we put the bVII chord, which is fairly unstable, and we just sort of hang there
for a while before sliding back up to the I and starting over. it has a similar kind
of push-pull to the verse, with short bursts of energy running into long bouts of stasis.
and finally, there's the ending. we get the chorus one last time, then the section
ends with a sudden introduction of this huge distorted guitar: (bang)
which as far as I can tell is just playing power chords. it starts on A, our original drone, which
resolves to D, the key we tried to escape to in the pre-chorus, and then it continues down to B,
the key we've actually been in the whole time. it's one final humiliation for our protagonist,
trapped forever in this downward spiral. from there it spends like
a minute and a half sitting on a bunch of extreme distortion and feedback that they
fade in and out to create a harsh, brutal soundscape before finally ending on that
lonely wind sound that's been sitting beneath everything the entire time.
and I think that's pretty much it, but before I wrap up, I want to address one more thing:
how did this happen? how did I wind up publishing a video with such an obvious
error in it? honestly, I hate to admit this, but I rushed it. the video was supposed to
go up on the first week of January, but I was traveling for the Winter holidays that year.
I was gonna be away from my equipment for three weeks but I only wanted to take two weeks off,
so I spent the December beforehand working ahead to try to prep an extra video that I
could publish remotely before I got home. this meant that I couldn't give it the time it needed,
and since I couldn't cut down on production time, that meant cutting back on research
instead. my analytical process usually involves listening to the song a lot to try to pick out
all the nuances I can find, but here, I kinda skipped that and worked more from my
transcriptions 'cause it was faster. I thought I saw something on the page, so I just went with it,
and I got burned. I'm sorry. in the years since, I've taken a lot of steps to reduce the risk of
that happening, including cutting back on the number of videos I make per month and building
better protocols for working ahead when I have to, and a lot of that came from the lessons I learned
from the mistakes of this video. of course, that doesn't mean you'll always agree with my analysis,
and that's fine: that's how music theory works. song analysis is a chronicling of personal
experience, and everyone experiences music differently. but at the very least, these days,
I try to make sure that I agree with my analysis, and looking back at the old Hurt video, I really
can't say that I do. I'm glad I got the chance to correct it, but I'm still sorry I had to.
I've actually been thinking about this song a lot lately, thanks to my podcast on Nebula. and yeah,
I have a podcast! it's called Ghost Notes, and it largely consists of me and Noah from
Polyphonic aggressively agreeing with each other about music. it's been a lot of fun to make:
Noah and I both spend a lot of time thinking about music, but we approach it from such different
angles. I've learned a lot from talking to him, and I hope he's learned something from me too.
our most recent episode is all about lyrics, so of course we had to talk about how Johnny
Cash transformed this song in his cover, and we even got so into the topic of cover songs that we
wound up dedicating a whole nother episode just to them that's coming out in January,
so make sure to subscribe and watch out for that if you want to hear us talk about Hurt even more.
Ghost Notes is a Nebula original project, which means all the episodes go up a month early over
there: the lyrics episode is up exclusively on Nebula right now, and if you want to check it out,
we've worked out an amazing deal where, if you sign up for CuriosityStream with the link in the
description, not only will you get their best holiday discount, with 41% off an annual plan,
you'll also get Nebula free for as long as you remain a CuriosityStream member. that's two sites
of great educational content, including awesome documentaries on CuriosityStream like the Frank
Sinatra biography America's Golden Age, for under 12 bucks for the entire year, if you act now.
and hey, thanks for watching, thanks to our Patreon patrons for making
these videos possible, and extra special thanks to this video's Featured Patrons,
Duck and Howard Levine. if you want to help out, and help us pick the next song we analyze too,
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