The 1978 action comedy film "Drunken Master" features Jackie Chan training in the style of Kung Fu known as
'drunken boxing'.
It's based on a more or less real martial art which mimics the haphazard and chaotic movements of a drunk person
with the aim of confusing opponents.
It apparently requires a huge amount of core strength and concentration to pull off the drunk act convincingly.
Now, personally, I can't help but think of the parallel there to the aims of modern drummers
who practice in the so-called "drunk" style or "J Dilla" style of drumming, which aims to replicate the glitchiness of early hip-hop production.
Questlove: "'How did he make it sound so messed-up?' He's like, 'Eh, 'cause he didn't read the manual in the book.'"
Drummers like Chris "Daddy" Dave and Questlove were some of the early pioneers of doing this style live on a drum set.
Questlove: "I managed to turn, like--"
Questlove: [drums]
Questlove: "into--"
Questlove: [drums drunkenly]
This particular style of drumming is most associated with late 90-s hip-hop collective The Soulquarians,
who included people like Erykah Badu, J Dilla, D'Angelo, and Common, but nowadays it's, well, it's everywhere.
So, one way to do this is to take a basic backbeat pattern and then slightly uncouple the snare or the kick drum from the high-hat
to create a sort of a flam. What you can then do is take the second high-hat, the upbeat high-hat, in a given beat and move it over to the right,
delay it a little bit to give it a little bit of a swing.
Congratulations, you're now ready to make lo-fi hip-hop.
There's a little bit more to it than just that. If you wanna go deeper, there's a great blog post from Brooklyn Rose Ludlow
that analyzes specific pieces of the hip-hop repertoire and drum programming--link is in the description.
It's pretty thorough.
Okay, so why does this work?
The music is off the grid. By some accounts, it's 'out of time', the rhythmic equivalent of playing out of tune, so, what's the secret?
The secret, of course, is repetition. Repetition legitimizes. You play something wrong once, it's a mistake; you play something wrong twice,
it's music.
Twice, it's music.
Repetition legitimizes.
Twice, it's music.
Repetition legitimizes.
Twice, it's music.
In a great article on music cognition in Aeon Magazine, Elizameth Hellmuth Margulis wrote:
The intent here is of course capturing that particular feeling of being off-kilter and maybe a little off-balance.
And, after all, what is more human than not feeling centered?
"The sloppier that you deliver it, the more heartfelt and human it is."
So, the way that a lot of drummers do this live is they feel out exactly how much each beat gets pushed ahead and pulled back,
which can require a phenomenal amount of concentration to do regularly enough to make a convincing groove.
However, instead of approximating, you can divide the distance between the kick and the snare into precise odd-numbered groupings
known as "tuplets".
Quintuplets divide that distance pentamorously into five evenly-spaced pulses; because there is no way of dividing five evenly,
the groove will naturally feel lopsided, giving you that sort of drunk feeling.
Groupings of five are very much "in" this season.
You can also divide the distance between kick and snare into groupings of seven called septuplets for a different lopsided feel.
That guy is, like, really obnoxiously good at music. Anyway--
There are other ways of dividing the distance between the kick and the snare into tuplets for a drunk groove that, well,
they haven't been explored all that much, although you heard a little bit of it at the beginning of this video. It's a tune called, appropriately enough,
"Drunk".
This is an example of a 9-tuplet groove, or a nontuplet groove. You divide the distance between the kick and the snare into nine pulses.
Another interesting thing is that the music can be represented the way that it was just transcribed,
but the way that the band was actually feeling it was actually in 3/4--
triplets in 3/4, which add up to nine pulses per measure rather than nine pulses per beat.
Check it out.
Phrasing musical elements sparsely within this fast triplet subdivision gives the impression of 4/4 even though it's not,
which is why last week, when we released the music video for "Drunk", somebody left this comment:
[reads comment mockingly]
It's not. It sounds like 4/4, but it's being conceptualized as triplets within 3/4.
The blurred lines between the two can confuse the listener.
Not unlike how the unusual movements of Jackie Chan's drunken boxing can confuse his opponents.
I think this is an example of the exciting grey regions of music where conception, perception, and execution don't neatly align with one another.
In this case, it's all for the purpose of it sounding... drunk.
So, it'd be hard to call this track hip-hop, right, even though its main compositional conceit is that sort of sloppy drunk rhythm that comes from that style,
but we borrowed other compositional elements from this style, including things like, for example, vocal sampling.
[assorted vocal samples play]
The samples largely come from a live recording of Peggy Lee's 1969 nihilistic anthem "Is That All There Is?"
about a woman disillusioned with the banality of life, falling in love, and all what we are told are important, meaningful things.
"Is that..."
"...all there is?"
I love how the song captures malaise--or ennui--so well.
♪ If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing ♪
So, when Sungazer performs live, there's track playback--things that we don't play live. But there are a lot of elements that we can control,
like, for example, the vocal samples. We can control Peggy Lee's vocal phrasing, which adds a degree of improvisation, interaction,
and human-ness to an otherwise electronic texture.
Neely: "What is this thing? What are thoooose!" [laughs]
Shawn Crowder: "This thing is the centerpiece of all of my electronics. This is the Roland SBD-SX Sampling Pad. There's this MIDI cable coming out of here, going into the computer.
Crowder: "The stuff that I play on these pads is triggering sounds in the computer."
[vocal samples get triggered]
"So, we have some vocal samples-"
~is that all~
"I use these sounds kind of interspersed with some of the grooves I'm playing."
~all there is?~
~is that~
We can also get pretty crazy with it.
We can trigger 808 samples directly from the drums.
Neely: "So--"
[drums with bass]
Crowder: "And in this case, you're hearing a bass sounds that is connected to the drums, and I have these triggers here, maybe you can see--"
Crowder: "Uh, which detect the vibration and the hits on the drums, and this all, again, comes into the drum pad and out as MIDI."
[drumming with the vocal samples]
It's kind of like a power chord...
...played by the drummer.
The chord harmony in this section alternates between Fmaj7 and G♭maj7, which, when you combine it with that power chord,
I guess equals a Dm9 followed by a...
[clears throat]
Dmaj7♯9♭13?
I guess?
Probably a better way of understanding the 808s is by thinking of them as a form of pedal point.
Pedal point's a technique which goes back to the baroque era where a sustained note, usually in the bass, is juxtaposed against meolodies and harmonies.
There's a different harmonic ambiguity in the verse.
The chords are C7♯9 to D♭maj7.
Which is a little bit tonally ambiguous, right, we don't quite know where we are. But you could analyze it in the key of Fm.
Those chords would be the V7(♯9) and the ♭VImaj7.
The third time we hear the progression, though, it's not C7♯9 to D♭maj7, it's D♭m(maj7). This is a strange color in the key of Fm.
You could think of it as, like, a Caug over D♭ or the V chord over its ♭9, but it's not that common in the key.
That progresses to a little bit more familiar of a color in the G♭13 chord, the subV/I for the V chord, and finally the progression repeats with C7(♯9) to D♭maj7.
At the very end, though, we shift to a pretty startling Dm9.
We shift directly from the key of F minor to the key of D minor.
This direct modulation to D minor from F minor-ish is three flats away, or three positions to the right in the circle of fifths.
This direct modulation from the verse to the chorus was inspired by a similar shift in Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is?"
"Is that all there is to love?"
♪ Is that all there is? ♪
The chord at the end of the verse is a B♭ major, but the chorus starts unprepared on a G major, three notches to the right in the circle of fifths.
It's not the exact same modulation--
--but there is a certain jolt that comes with it.
"'Cause I know...
"...just as well as I'm standing here talking to you that when that final moment comes...
"...and I'm breathing my last breath, I'll be saying to myself:
♪ Is that all there is? ♪
So, listening back to this, I-- I can't help but think:
What's the point of it all?
I mean, not the existential question, I mean, what's the point of the key shift?
What does it actually do?
I mean, yeah, it does help propel us forward from one section to the next, and on the studio album recording, Zach Zinger takes an awesome EWI solo.
WOOOO!
But, shifting even further back from that, what does the key shift ultimately make us feel?
Shifting to a distant key center without warning makes us feel temporarily off-balance; we don't know where we are...
Briefly.
And, I think it's the same sort of feeling that's associated with things like the 9-tuplet groove. Odd groupings naturally, mathematically,
are going to be lopsided. And, I think we kind of like that feeling.
Or, at least, I do, anyway.
Okay, so if we take a look at the literal transcription again of the nontuplet groove, it looks like this.
But, we're not really perceiving it this way, are we? We're perceiving it, probably, closer to
this; we're caught up in the familiar pattern of the kick and snare.
And so, we relish that microrhythmic blurring that occurs between the downbeat and the backbeat in the drunk groove.
I really like the feeling that comes with this perceptual blurring, and I think a lot of people do, too, to the point where the drunken groove
has kind of become oversaturated and honestly a little bit of a meme by this point.
Guy behind camera: "Modern drummers be like--"
"Just tryna get it to swing more."
[cameraman laughs]
Neely: "The name of the tune is "Drunk" and we've just done like five takes."
Crowder: "Get in the mood." Neely: "The name of the tune is "Drunk" and we've just done like five takes."
Neely: "Get in the mood." [sighs] "Okay."
Crowder: "Okay."
Neely: [smacks lips, exhales loudly] "Let's do it."
Cameraman: "Coming out, rolling."
Neely: "Testing!" [claps]
So, it's a little bit strange for me to show that vlog footage because a couple weeks ago, I made a vlog talking about
how I didn't really want to perform that much anymore under the influence.
But at the time of recording this live version of the tune, I was really inside my head.
Doing five takes in a row will do that to you. As the tape rolls, every mistake that you make compounds inside your head, and so it can be very difficult
to let go as a performer, and almost impossible to reach that same state of letting go as you hope your audience will achieve.
There's a disconnect between the state of execution and the state of perception. How I'm feeling while I'm playing the music
is going to be very different than the feeling that you feel while you're listening to it.
So, there's this story that I heard that's probably definitely apocryphal that's attributed to the late great jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon, I think.
One night, Dexter Gordon was playing absolutely drunk out of his mind, but also playing brilliantly well, and really connecting with everybody in the room.
Somebody came up to him after the gig and asked, "Dexter, man, how can you play when you're so far gone? How can you do this?
"How can you play such beautiful music?"
Without missing a beat, Dexter Gordon replied,
"Mother!@#$er, I practice drunk."
"I'll be saying to myself..."
The final take of the shoot, the one that we recorded after...
chugging the wine, classy move, Adam, was the one that we actually ended up using.
It was a little sloppy, but I guess kind of like, the point of it all, right?
After all:
Questlove: "The sloppier that you deliver it, the more heartfelt and human it is."
If you wanna check out the full session that we did, it's all over on Shawn Crowder's channel, so be sure to go over there.
We also recorded another session that's going to come out in a week or two.
Be sure to subscribe to Shawn, because it's gonna be of "Dream of Mahjong", the septuplet groove, so plenty of tuplet grooves to go around! Hope you enjoy them.
We have an EP coming out on January 7th, be sure to stay tuned for that.
Uh, there is a presave link in the description, and also the comments, so thank you so much for watching, and, uh,
STAY TIPSY.