Tyrice Hester | Vox

Where Sicko Mode’s weirdest moments came from

2019-08-20T10:19:24-04:00

“Sicko Mode” by Travis Scott was an unexpected chart topper. It sounds more like three songs than one. Its disjointed otherworldly effects, echos, and song structure are a far cry from the pop songs we’re used to, but it’s in these off-kilter moments that we get glimpses of a musical culture built on sonic experimentation that has had a massive impact on nearly every genre for the past 50 years: Jamaican dub.

In the 1950s, American popular rhythm and blues music spread overseas to Jamaica, and the sounds had a massive impact on the culture of the island. DJs in Kingston, the country’s capital, loaded up their trucks with powerful speakers, stereos, and stacks of records to play for partygoers who wanted to hear new sounds.

By the 1970s, Kingston was filled with recording studios churning out reggae hits. One of those studios was Treasure Isle, and it’s here that reggae’s earthy vibe started to sound like it came from outer space. The person responsible was King Tubby, an electrician turned sound engineer who radically changed the sound of reggae.

The video above breaks down the classic sounds of Jamaican dub and chronicles the creative ways King Tubby achieved them. The playlist below mixes dub music old and new, with the songs that were influenced by the genre.

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We measured pop music’s falsetto obsession

2019-08-13T10:06:35-04:00

It’s nearly impossible to turn on the radio and not hear a male artist singing really high. Likely he’s a tenor, and more often than not, he’ll sing in falsetto. Think Justin Bieber, the Weeknd, Bruno Mars, Drake, Charlie Puth, Shawn Mendes, Adam Levine, Sam Smith … the list goes on and on and on.

This isn’t a trend — it has been the status quo for decades.

Falsetto, which comes from the Italian word for false voice, has been around for a very long time. However, there have been few attempts to track its popularity in pop music. We teamed up with the Pudding to change that. We analyzed 20,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 using vocal data sourced from Pandora’s Music Genome Project to figure out just how popular falsetto singing actually is.

The video above reveals the biggest trends in men singing high, from the chart-topping falsettos of ’70s disco to the belting high notes of ’80s hard rock. And for extra credit, here’s a 65-plus-song playlist of some of the best falsetto moments in music.

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How Chicago built house music from the ashes of disco

2019-07-16T08:55:37-04:00

On July 12, 1979, in the middle of a packed baseball stadium in Chicago, an event happened that would go down in history. It had nothing to do with the baseball game that was about to start and everything to do with a disgruntled rock radio DJ named Steve Dahl, a man who hated disco. It was Disco Demolition night, a radio promotion Dahl dreamed up where he encouraged fans to bring disco records to the game so he could blow them up in center field.

It worked. The baseball stadium, which typically held around 40,000 spectators, was filled to the brim. After Dahl’s ceremonious explosion, thousands of fans rushed the field, inciting a riot. It goes without saying that the baseball game never happened.

In the weeks following, newspapers around the country proclaimed the death of disco. But a young group of DJs and amateur music producers in Chicago had other plans. Over the next few years, these DJs reinvented disco by playing those records over hard-hitting electronic drum machines. They called it house music, and within a decade this new genre had traveled the globe.

The video above dives into the history of the classic house track “Ride on Time” and how its three main ingredients — a disco sample, drum sound, and uptempo piano — help tell the origin story of house music.

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Stevie Wonder’s irresistible ode to jazz, explained

2019-07-05T10:56:43-04:00

Stevie Wonder began his musical career at just 11 years old, and from the get-go, his love of jazz became a central part of his sound. In 1962, a year into his contract with Motown Records, he released The Jazz Soul of Little Stevie, on which he played bongos, harmonica, drums, and the organ. At age 12, he sounded like a jazz veteran.

A little more than a decade later, Stevie Wonder would proclaim his love for jazz in one of his most iconic songs, “Sir Duke.” The track was released on Songs in the Key of Life — an album that is considered a landmark achievement in American music.

“Sir Duke” is an ode to Stevie Wonder’s biggest heroes, Duke Ellington and the jazz artists who shaped his musical education. Wonder illustrates his love for jazz not just in the lyrics but also within the arrangement, melody, rhythm, and harmony. To break down this song and dig into the jazz theory that defines “Sir Duke,” I talked to Stevie Wonder’s greatest fan, musician Jacob Collier.

Collier is a songwriter, composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist from the UK who, like Wonder, uses jazz as a tool to surprise and delight his audience. In the video above, Collier explains just how Wonder pays homage to the jazz pioneers that came before him.

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