15 Step by Radiohead
Odd Meters for Not-Odd Fellas
Austin Eamnarangkool here! Today’s review will be on Radiohead’s song, and opener to their album In Rainbows: 15 Step.
Radiohead has always been a favorite of mine: combining interesting cerebral musical concepts with haunting lyrics within the alternative rock genre/ensemble-type that I feel is often unfairly (well actually sometimes fairly… looking at you, Nickelback) associated with simplistic structural and musical elements.
15 Step is no exception to Radiohead’s knack for crafting amazingly accessible music using diverse and contextually odd tools that few within their sound world learn to use. Straight off the bat we hear nothing but a strange processed drum kit that commands attention and sets the pace (quite literally I suppose) for the rest of the song. The drum beat, though catchy, is likely to throw you into a LOOP (BA DUM TSS/pun intended and wow I use A LOT of parenthesis [do I talk like this in real life?]) and this is because the piece is in 5/8 (or 5/4 depending on how you wanna cut it) instead of the standard 4/4, 3/4 or 6/8 which makes up precisely 124621.436% of western popular music (which is totally chill! I ain’t no elitist ‘bout it).
For the uninformed, for a song to be in the meter 5/8 simply means that there are 5 beats in a measure as opposed to the typically 4 or 3 beats. Often odd meters asymmetrically divide a measure into 2 or more parts. In the case of 5/8 one could think of a measure as a set of 3 beats and then a set of 2 beats of a set of 2 beats then a set of 3 beats, both of which add up to WOW WUT COOL 5. In the case of 15 Step I would argue that it divides the meter into 3 beats then 2 beats, though to be honest I would also argue that it retains much more of a “true” 5 beats per measure vibe because to my ear there is not as much of a push-or-pull feel to the music/percussion as I would expect from music written in an odd meter with implicit asymmetrical meter subdivisions (well THAT was a mouthful and very unnecessary). Anyway, I argue that the implied division, if any, would be a push/driving 3 beats into 2 beats due to what my ears perceive as an cadence (harmony implied) on the last 2 beats of the second measure of each melodic phrase, where a melodic phrase is approximately two bars in this song. TRANSLATION: I think the song divides its 5/8 bars into a group of 3 beats then 2 beats because when the singer comes in and sings “how come I end up where I started” and “how come I end up where I went wrong?” the words started and wrong are at the end of the meter, last 2 beats and are given a strong square beat within the melody. This paragraph is relatively unimportant, but heres a transcription in case it helps.
In my opinion the distinct sound of the processed drums is an effective and elegant way for Radiohead to throw a spotlight onto the underlying anomaly of this songs meter through timbre. Timbre, aka the the character or quality of a musical sound or voice, is an element of music that most people have a much stronger grasp in being able to feel/describe explicitly (barring describing timbre through waveforms and the overtone series for you nerds out there who are about to shit on me for my inaccuracy). What Radiohead achieves here is an important quality that I feel many who attempt to write more cutting edge music (including myself) fail to produce consistently: clarity and accessibility.
The harmony and tonal center in this song stays pretty consistent throughout, almost to a point where I’d consider the song ostinato driven (much like the average film score aka how I write film music when I’m not getting paid). 15 Step is in Ab or G# minor, though I believe its mostly due to the fact that the guitar and bass are tuned a semitone down (a common trope in rock music because it makes the strings a little slinkier/easy to play, etc.) so they play as if they were in A minor. So for that reason but also because I’m too lazy to type flats and sharps, I’m gonna pretend we’re in A minor while talking about this song ( sorry to people with perfect pitch but also screw you lucky bastards). To get even a little more accurate, this song seems to be more modal that tonal, more specifically in A Dorian due to raised 6th.
To elaborate, the harmonic progression implied by the guitar line that enters at 0:40 comprised of: Am — D Dsus2 — Em Esus2 — D Dsus2 making a 4 bar phrase. The lack of the high tension dominant function harmony which in this case would be E major or E7 cues us into the fact that this song might be more modal. Typically music that uses major or minor keys and functional harmony is highly reliant on the dominant chord to create the tension and release that modern western ears are used to due to centuries of development and dare-I-say indoctrination. However this is not always the case especially in a world where looped chord progressions are the norm and even the popular I V vi IV progression doesn’t utilize that juicy dominant to tonic resolution, and one could argue that the D to Am is simply a sort of plagal (IV to I) cadence. I disagree mostly on the simple grounds that the D major chord is not naturally occurring in A minor or A harmonic minor. The F# raises the typically flat 6 of A minor which in turn creates A Dorian. Most importantly, note the lack of tension and release. There isn’t as much of a satisfying magnetic pull towards A as there would be with tonal music. Rather than a push and pull towards a center, you hear shifts around it, and thats something that tends to happen more often with music that is modal in nature as opposed to tonal music. For a great example of how modal music came back into the zeitgeist again, check out Miles Davis’ So What which literally uses like 2 chords and shows how you can establish a modal center without relying on the dominant chord.
The progression Am — D Dsus2 — Em Esus2 — D Dsus2 continues for awhile, presenting different combinations of drum loops, vocals, and guitar lines as the song solidifies its modality within the 5/8 4-bar phrases. At about 1:12 while Thom changes the melody to a drawn out set of long notes (“one by one…” the chord progression changes to Am — D — Am9 — Dadd13 maintaining a similar harmonic feel while employing color notes (the add 9 and the add 13) as the guitar climbs up a register. The next section at 1:38 introduces a bass line underneath the harmonic progression Dm — C#m — Am which further supports the 3 beat to 2 beat division of 5/8 as the bass line performs a series of 4 notes within 5 beats, the first 2 attacks are comprised of 2 evenly spaced sets of dotted eighth notes (3 total beats) while the last 2 attacks are comprised of 2 eighth notes. This is one of my favorite ways to divide 5/8 and (fun fact) is an structurally essential part of the song From Eden by Hosier. We return to the original elements from the first third of the song until 2:23 where we exit A Dorian and enter A Aeolian, as the progression is now Am — Dm — Em — Dm, an A Aeolian mirror of the 1st progression. Even though A Aeolian is comprised of the same notes as A minor, I argue that we aren’t in A minor as there is still no dominant-based tension and release in that specific moment nor within the structural momentum of the song. Even though harmonically this may be the most bland portion of 15 Steps, its timbral interest through the reverse tape echo effect and the subtle shift in modality make a good bridge as the song picks up for a final and more intense return to the opening materials at 3:11. The song outros at 3:24 as the reverse tape effect begins to blend and mush the music and meter until the end.
15 Steps is in my opinion a strong opener to Radiohead’s album. The sound of the processed drums hits you immediately and forces you to concentrate on the metric irregularities of the song. It is relatively cerebral in structure yet does so in a way that is in my opinion elegant and accessible for listeners of the alternative rock genre. Its incorporation of modal shifts, odd meter play, and cohesive timbral elements reveals what sounds mostly like 4 minutes of alt rock jammin’ as a solid part of Radiohead’s innovative legacy.
As you know this blog is shared between the talented Albert Nguyen as well as myself I, so stay tuned for more releases every Friday by him and Sunday by me! Hit me up on Twitter via @austinkool94 or DM my Instagram @austineamnarangkool if you wanna talk more about music, share thoughts/ideas for future reviews, correct me, blah blah blah.
