Weekly Billboard Theory — Tunnel Vision
I was going to start this week’s review/lesson/writeup/whatever with something poignant and ~deep~. Something along the lines of how we often witness two opposing cultural movements at the same time. One could say that Kodak Black’s “Tunnel Vision” being a garbage song is a counterpoint to the complexities of someone like Kendrick Lamar. Despite a mysterious tonal concept throughout the song, “Tunnel Vision” falls very flat and obviously I’m going to ramble and tell you why.
Kodak Black
Tempo: 86 BPM
Key: D major/B minor (more about this later)
I’ll get the simplest info out of the way first because some of the other concepts will need some further explanation. One of the first things I noticed while listening to “Tunnel Vision” was the lack of a consistent kick drum. Pretty much all pop music (ballads don’t count) use some form of kick drum as a driving factor in keeping a beat. EDM music will use kicks on almost every strong beat while hip-hop tends to be much more rhythmic. But the kick drum in “Tunnel Vision” seems to appear randomly. Now, if you listen to the bassline throughout the song, you’ll see that each bass note has a very strong attack. This is often used to replace a kick drum. As a matter of fact, one of the hit songs we already looked at goes this route.
So this should be nothing out of the ordinary, right? Not quite. What makes “Tunnel Vision” so strange is that it adds an additional kick drum in. Okay, so the kick drum occurs at the beginning of phrases for emphasis, right? Nope, not really. Sometimes it does, but other times it doesn’t. Just listen carefully to each chorus and you’ll notice that sometimes it happens and then sometimes it…just…doesn’t, I guess? I feel like every week I write about how too much of the same thing is boring and what makes music interesting is the little differences. However, this seems without purpose and is therefore just as boring. A good writer would establish a pattern and then take it away to create tension and to play with our expectations, but without any real patterns that cannot happen. Ultimately, ya gotta follow the rules to break em!
Okay, so the key in this song is definitely super weird. Previously, I had talked about how keys relate. Read up on it. I also had talked about how to build chords. Read up on it. So if you look at that first arpeggio you’ll notice that the notes are G-E-B. You might notice that those chords make up an E minor chord when they are put in the order of E-G-B. If the E was the lowest sounding pitch of the chord, we would call it a root position chord. However, in this instance it is not. The G (which is the second note of the chord) is the lowest sounding pitch. In this case, we would call this an E minor chord in first inversion. What if the B was the lowest sounding pitch? That would be an E minor chord in second inversion. Whew, I know that kinda seems like a lot. Essentially, when a chord is in inversion it might not sound how we’re used to it sounding.
Let’s look at the next chord. F#-F#-D. We only have two different pitches but if we take the smallest distance between those two then we’d usually build a chord going D-F# and something else. This chord is what makes the key of “Tunnel Vision” so confusing. I know I’ve said many times how important the relationship between the root and the fifth are in scales and when going from chord to chord, but in the actual practice of building a chord it is not as important as the root and the third. The third is where we get most of the information from. It is what tells us whether a chord is minor or major. So, with this logic we can think that the chord is just omitting the fifth and it is a D major chord, and there’s our key to making this the tonic chord in first inversion. This can be further supported by the fact that A is the last pitch in the bassline, right? Well, kind of. That A happens very quickly and is more likely an upper neighbor that leads back to the G rather than an actual chord tone. Also, if we are actually in D major, then the chord progression is just ii-I over and over again which isn’t unheard of (especially in this type of hip-hop) but doesn’t give us a stable feeling.
If the key isn’t D major, then what? Well, the enharmonic option would be B minor, making that E minor chord function as IV. Take those notes from the second measure again, D-F#. This time instead of adding the most logical note on top (A), let’s go the opposite direction. If D is the third, and F# is the fifth, the root of the chord would be B, meaning that this would be a B minor chord in first inversion. A B minor chord obviously being the tonic of B minor, the progression in this reading would be IV-i. This doesn’t really make any more or less sense than it does if we read it as ii-I in D major. I want so badly for the bassline in the second measure to move from F# to B because this would cement us in B minor but of course it doesn’t work out this way.
I know this is super music theory heavy stuff, which I don’t like getting deep into, but here I am and here we are. When the chords don’t give us a clear cut answer for the tonality the melody should, right? WELP! We don’t really get any answers here either. The melody sort of lies in between each key. F# in that second measure either functions as the third in D major or the fifth in B minor. We don’t really get any help. Ultimately, this song doesn’t sound “major” so I’m just gonna give up and claim this is B minor. I want there to be a B in the bass of that second measure more so than I accept the D that is there.
“Wait didn’t stuff like this happen with ‘Bad and Boujee’ and you were cool with it?” KINDA but not really. The difference here is the amount of variation in “Bad and Boujee.” Migos’ hit would present longer ideas with more variety that were countered with an incredibly rhythmic chorus. “Tunnel Vision” doesn’t accomplish this same feat. It just repeats the same stuff over and over again with probably one of the most annoying hooks I can think of. I didn’t even mention how the entirety of the song utilizes hemiola but because everything is so repetitive I feel that it loses any interest that it could have garnered. Despite all of the negative feelings I have towards this song, I do LOVE the music video.
On to next week. Ed, Bruno, the Chainsmokers and The Weeknd are still up top so we’re going down to the number 5 spot for something new: “iSpy” by KYLE featuring Lil Yachty. Can’t lie, I LOOOOOVE some of the stuff that KYLE has done but I can’t really remember much of this song off the top of my head. Doesn’t matter, we’ll get into it next week. See ya later!
