Weekly Billboard Theory — Bad Things
The title says it all. This song sucks. Let’s do it.
Machine Gun Kelly x Camila Cabello
Tempo: 138 BPM
Key: D Major
I guess I shouldn’t speak in absolutes by saying that, “this song sucks.” I find “Bad Things”to be incredibly boring. I’ll explain later how it does a bad job with certain musical ideas. Hopefully, this doesn’t take too long.
Above, you’ll see the bassline for the majority of this song. If you can’t read music, each one of those circles above means that a note sounds for four beats. These are called whole notes. When analyzing music, I often just use whole notes as a placeholder to figure out pitches without diving into the complex rhythms of a bassline. Did I have to do that for “Bad Things?” Nope. The chorus consists of whole notes for its entirety and the verses are pretty similar. I firmly believe that music (and most things, really) doesn’t need to be complex to be good. However, the lack of movement in the bass is too rudimentary to be exciting. The verses seem to pick up because of an increase in percussion but there is very little space added in between bass notes. As a result of this, the verses seem almost as low energy as the chorus. “Bad Things” utilizes more bass pitches than the other songs we’ve looked at so far but that doesn’t make it any less boring.
“Wahhh! There’s more chords than all of the songs we’ve looked at so far! That should make it more interesting right?” Nah. Although this is where this analysis will start to get more intense in explaining why this song is unsuccessful. If you’ve heard this song before, you’ve probably noticed how familiar the chord progression sounds. Also, ya might have realized that the melody is ripped straight from Fastball’s “Out Of My Head.” I was only really familiar with one Fastball song prior to this (okay, I know The Way too).
The additional chords used in “Bad Things” don’t make the song particularly interesting because we’ve heard them a billion times before. They are VERY close (although not QUITE the same) tothe chords found in Pachelbel’s Canon in D. “Bad Things” is even in the same key. Every been to a wedding? You’ve heard it. I’m not gonna waste too much time writing on it because other people already have. So yeah, this bassline and chord progression has been a part of collective conscious for roughly 300 years.
I gotta warn ya, this is where stuff will start to get a little heady but it will help you as a listener understand why certain things sound the way that they do. Last week I started talking about how to build chords and the functions of them. Now might be a good time to review that. I had mentioned the word cadences and that these are essentially the endings of phrases. There are several types of cadences and they are described by the chords utilized in them. USUALLY (but not always) they will resolve to the I chord to cement or establish us into a particular key.
This is another aspect of how classical music and pop music are different. I’ve found that pop music mainly utilizes plagal cadences (or none at all, like in “Closer”), meaning a phrase ends by the IV chord going to the I chord. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more clear cut example of a plagal cadence than “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” The majority of classical music will use authentic cadences. This means that the V chord resolves to the I chord. There’s too many examples of this, but I’m sure you’ve heard the first movement of Mozart’s, “Eine Kleine Nacthmusik.” I should reiterate that these don’t just happen at the end of a piece, they tend to happen over and over again as they help to signify when phrases end and to establish NEW KEYS (this is relevant to “Bad Things”).
Okay, one last thing before I get to talking about why “Bad Things” is a stinker again. Remember how chords are at least three notes and we briefly went over how to build them last week? Sometimes in classical music (and most times in jazz) they’ll use more than that. This most commonly happens on the V chord (that’s why I circled the A above). Also, I’m not sure if I’ve stated this for but the V chord is also know as the dominant chord and y’all know that the I is the tonic. The way we find the next note to add to the chord is by following the same process and skipping over a note. If you count up, we’re at the seventh note so we’ll call this chord a, you got it, seventh chord. These sevenths work very well with V (dominant) chords because the seventh can resolve by a half step down to the third of the I chord. TL;DR V7 to I sounds very stable and secure.
I should mention that building a seventh chord off of the tonic will sound differently because of slight interval discrepancies. As a result of this, V7 chords and chords that use the same intervals are referred to as dominant seventh chords.
Alright, alright, alright. I know I just attacked you with a ton of info but I promise that all of it will tie together unlike the season finale of The OA. The chorus from “Bad Things” is lifted directly from Fastball’s “Out Of My Head.” Right? Right. However, “Out Of My Head” does a way better job. If you scroll up a bunch to where I have the melody written out, you’ll notice a circled measure. In that measure, you’ll notice a C natural (it’s the note with the weird symbol next to it). Notes that don’t normally belong in the scale like this are called accidentals. USUALLY, accidentals will have some sort of function to lead us to a different chord or something. Sometimes, people are dumb and just write wrong notes and things sound bad. The C natural in “Bad Things” is an accidental that DOES have a function but it is executed so poorly that it sounds like a wrong note.
That C natural transforms our tonic chord and the function of it. With that seventh on top, the chord becomes a dominant seventh and acts as the V of the IV chord. For a brief second, the music revolves around the IV chord instead of the one because of that C natural. Again, that C natural turns the I into a V of the IV chord. It’s almost like a mini authentic cadence (finally came full circle with that). This might be very confusing, but for a brief moment the music revolves around the IV chord instead of the I chord. When a chord acts like this it is known as a secondary function. Go back and listen to “Out Of My Head” by Fastball. It is VERY clear when listening to that song. The C natural sounds out of place in “Bad Things” because the chords are so sparse and the accidental is only found in the melody, nowhere in the accompaniment. Without the reinforcement in the background, Camila Cabello sounds like she doesn’t know what she’s doing. I’m not one to live in the past when it comes to music, but stick with the original version of this hook. Don’t bother with “Bad Things.”
Wow, that was a lot to get through and I really hope it all made sense. The cool things about boring songs like this is that it allows me to lay the foundations for concepts that I’ll write about later. Like always, lemme know if ya got any questions about anything and I’d be happy to try and clear stuff up. Ed Sheeran is back on top for next week followed by the Migos boys so we’ll be moving to the third place song of the week “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” by Zayn and T-Swift. I haven’t listened to it yet but I’m assuming the song will be number one eventually so hopefully we’ll have a winner. Does this song have secondary functions? Probably not, but we’ll find out next week.