Plateau Loops and Hybrid Tonics in Recent Pop Music

Abstract

This paper investigates harmonic progressions built around two major chords and one minor chord, all related by step. In many pop/rock songs, these chords can be analyzed as Aeolian progressions—VI, VII, and i—(Moore 1992; Biamonte 2010; Richards 2017a). Recent songs by Bon Iver, The Chainsmokers, and others, however, use chord loops where the harmonies can be interpreted as IV, V, and vi, which I call the plateau loop for its plateau-like activity: a constant hovering above Roman numeral I or i tonic chords, while retaining an overall consistent pitch-based topography. I interrogate the tonality of these songs, advancing the notion of a hybrid tonic. Hybrid tonics occur when a song or song section lacks a salient Ionian or (less often) Aeolian tonic on which both the harmony and melody concur. Instead, IV or (less often) VI or vi chords can function rhetorically as tonic, especially when the chords sound simultaneously with a melodic ".fn_scaledegree(1)." and occur in a metrically strong position, or initiate a plateau loop. The paper defines plateau loops and hybrid tonics, and explains the theoretical framework that supports them, consulting work by Harrison (1994), Nobile (2016), and Doll (2017) that decouples scale degree from harmonic function. Song examples by The Chainsmokers, Bon Iver, Jónsi, Astrid S., and M83 show how hybrid tonicity operates in varying degrees of prominence in popular music, and can also be contextualized with Spicer’s (2017) theory of fragile, emergent, and absent tonics. By building on prior scholarship, this paper aims to stimulate further inquiry into how tonal structures of recent popular music subtly differentiate themselves from conventions of common-practice tonality.

Mainstream popular music research: a musical update

“…Somewhat similarly to Attas and Spicer, Ben Duinker (2019b), Kyle Adams (2019) and David Forrest (2017) identify ambiguities in the sounds of post-millennial hit records. Duinker illustrates hybrid tonics and plateau loops within the Chainsmokers’ ‘Something Just Like This’ (2017) and Sam Smith's ‘Dancing with a Stranger’ (2019), among others.…”

“…Instead, the term mainstream mostly functions additionally, as an attribution to more specific, and diverse, kinds of popular music. In relevant contemporary literature, for instance, one can find (albeit mostly vaguely defined) terms such as ‘mainstream hip-hop’ (Hansen and Hawkins 2018, p. 168; Duinker 2019a, p. 430), ‘mainstream rap’ (Singh and Tracy 2015, p. 98), ‘mainstream 1980s music’ (Traut 2005, p. 57), ‘mainstream rock’ (Christenson et al . 2018, p. 3), ‘mainstream contemporary R&B’ (Danielsen 2017, p. 12), ‘mainstream EDM-pop’ (James 2015) and ‘mainstream pop’ (Bradby 2017, p. 35; Brøvig-Hanssen and Danielsen 2016, p. 56) 2…”

Metric Accent Affects Perception of Key Center in Pop-Music Chord Loops

“…This modal option has led to several commentators discussing instances of modal ambiguity within popular genres. These are examples in which the notes of the scale are stable, but multiple notes could potentially function as the key center (de Clercq, 2021;Duinker, 2019;Nobile, 2020b;Osborn, 2021;Richards, 2017;Temperley, 2018). Indeed, Figure 1 shows what is perhaps the most frequently-cited type of this ambiguity, the potential for hearing the first degree of a scale (in this case "C" in C major) or the sixth degree (here, "A" in C major) both as plausible key centers.…”