The Beat And the Dance: Rock Or Roll?

"It's got a good beat and you can dance to it."

On American Bandstand, Dick Clark had a segment called “Rate-a-Record. During the segment, two audience members each ranked two records on a scale of 35 to 98, after which their two opinions were averaged by Clark, who then asked the chosen members to justify their scores. This segment gave rise to the catchphrase above.

The rock beat has been said to inspire everything from devil worship to teen rebellion to sexual behavior and violence. From its inception, rock has relied greatly upon its rhythms for mass appeal. The surging, pulsating energy of rock stems largely from the 4/4 time signature, although some rock classics have been penned in triple meter like 3/4 and 12/8. Rock tempos vary immensely, but many rockers favor a range of 100 to 140 beats per minute. 

He used to carry his guitar in a gunny sack
Go sit beneath the tree by the railroad track
Oh, the engineer would see him sittin' in the shade
Strummin' with the rhythm that the drivers made
The people passing by, they would stop and say
"Oh my, but that little country boy could play"

Go go
Go Johnny go!

Johnny B. Goode!

– “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry

The “beat” works pretty much like this:

Syncopation occurs when a rhythmic pattern that typically occurs on strong beats or strong parts of the beat occurs instead on weak beats or weak parts of the beat. Most rock songs have a mixture of syncopated and “straight” rhythms. In rock, syncopation typically involves taking a series of notes of equal durations, cutting the duration of the first note in half, and shifting the rest early by that half duration.

For example, a series of four quarter notes, all sounding on the beat, can be transformed in this way by making the first note into an eighth note, and sounding each successive quarter note on eighth note early – all on the offbeats.

Ready for some music theory? A little more technically …

“This process (syncopation) can occur on any metrical level. If the duration of the series of “straight” notes is two beats, they will be syncopated by changing the first note to a single beat and shifting each other note early by a beat. If the duration of the straight note is a “beat,” the notes will be syncopated by a division (one half beat in simple meter). If the straight notes are each divisions, they will be syncopated by shifting each note by a subdivision. The unit of syncopation (the duration of the first note, and the amount of shift applied to the following notes) is always half of the duration of the straight notes. All of these syncopations are relatively common in contemporary pop/rock music.”

(“Syncopation in pop/rock music.” Open Music Theory. http://openmusictheory.com/syncopation.html.)

Is all of that straight note syncopation talk too confusing? Never fear. It all comes down to the ever-familiar beat and groove we know so well. We are all born with a predisposition for music, one that develops spontaneously and is refined by listening to music. You have the music “in you.”

What do you feel? The popular notion that TWO and FOUR are the strong, or accented beats in rock is due to the overwhelming success of the rock-n-roll style. This is the famous “backbeat” – referring to emphatic percussive accents on the so-called weak beats of the measure, typically played on the snare drum.

In 4/4 meter, the most common meter in rock-and-roll, the 2nd and 4th beats are defined in standard music theory textbooks as the weak beats, while the 1st and 3rd beats are considered the strong beats. The backbeat is an inversion of this fundamental convention of Western music as the nominal weak beats are emphasized. It is used to create rhythmic tension and anticipation, eliciting more active and participatory listening

Do you want to hear it for yourself?

Just check out seminal and classic rock like “Rock & Roll Music” or “School Days” by Chuck Berry, “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, “Twist and Shout” by the Isleys or by the Beatles, “Tequila” by the Champs, “Money” by Barrett Strong, or “You Can't Sit Down” by the Phil Upchurch Combo … the list is never-ending.

We associate this pattern of stresses, this way of marking and sculpting time, with blues, jazz, rock and roll, funk, hip-hop. These styles of music don't exist without it.

I've got no kick against modern jazz

Unless they try to play it too darn fast

And lose the beauty of the melody

Until they sound just like a symphony

That's why I go for that that rock and roll music

Any old way you choose it

It's got a back beat, you can't lose it

Any old time you use it

It's gotta be rock and roll music

If you wanna dance with me

 

– “Rock And Roll Music” by Chuck Berry

How the Brain Perceives Rhythm

It turns out that the Rate-a-Record teens were right all along. They knew innately what scientists have proven about rhythm and music. “Beat” and “dance” are just so “human.”

When it comes to perceiving music, the human brain is much more tuned in to certain types of rhythms than others, according to a new study from MIT. You'll never guess what rhythm is most popular. That's right – 4/4 time.

A team of neuroscientists has found that people are biased toward hearing and producing rhythms composed of simple integer ratios – for example, a series of four beats separated by equal time intervals (forming a 1:1:1 ratio).

This holds true for musicians and nonmusicians living in the United States, as well as members of a Bolivian tribe who have little exposure to Western music. However, the researchers found that the Bolivians tended to prefer different ratios than Westerners, and that these ratios corresponded to simple integer ratios found in their music but not in Western music.

“Both of these cultures seem to prioritize rhythms that are formed by simple integer ratios. It’s just that they don’t prioritize all of them,” says Josh McDermott, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Assistant Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study, which appears in the Jan. 5 issue of Current Biology.

For this study, the MIT team devised a new way to reveal biases in the brain’s interpretation of sensory input. These biases, called “priors,” are thought to be based on our past experience of the world and to help resolve sensory stimuli that could be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, in a noisy room, priors on speech help you to extract a conversation of interest by biasing perception toward familiar speech sounds, words, and linguistic forms.

(Anne Trafton. “How the brain perceives rhythm.” MIT News Office. January 5, 2017.) 

 

“In a little honky-tonky village in Texas

There's a guy who plays the best piano by far

He can play piano any way that you like it

But the way he likes to play is eight to the bar

When he plays, it's a ball

He's the daddy of them all

“The people gather around when he gets on the stand

Then when he plays, he gets a hand

The rhythm he beats puts the cats in a trance

Nobody there bothers to dance

But when he plays with the bass and guitar

They holler out, "Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar"

“A-plink, a-plank, a-plink plank, plink plank

A-plunkin' on the keys

A-riff, a-raff, a-riff raff, riff raff

A-riffin' out with ease

And when he plays with the bass and guitar

They holler out, 'Beat me Daddy, eight to the bar'"

– “Beat Me Daddy (Eight To the Bar)” by Will Bradley and His Orchestra featuring Ray McKinley (1940)

The Beat Is In Us

“There is music wherever there is rhythm, as there is life wherever there beats a pulse.”

– Igor Stravinsky, one of the most important composers of the 20^th century

Beat induction, the detection of a regular pulse in an auditory signal, is considered a fundamental human trait that, arguably, played a decisive role in the origin of music. Research shows that newborn infants develop expectation for the onset of rhythmic cycles (the downbeat), even when it is not marked by stress or other distinguishing spectral features. Omitting the downbeat elicits brain activity associated with violating sensory expectations. Thus, results strongly support the view that beat perception is innate.

(István Winkler, Gábor P. Háden, Olivia Ladinig, István Sziller, and Henkjan Honing. “Newborn infants detect the beat in music.” Proceedings of National Academy of Scientists. 106 (7) 2468-2471. February 17, 2009.)

Girls are dancing all around them just for me
And the party wouldn't swing if not for me
I've made you hearts jump, I've caused a heat
I'm in demand I am the beat

When the martian came to earth I made him dance
And who made the zombies all tap their feet
I'm in demand I am the beat

Beat

Beat

Beat

– “I Am the Beat” by The Look

Dance Is In Us, Too

“To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?”

– Michael Jackson

We humans are movement. We are the movement that is making us able to think and feel and act at all. Think of simple movement such as walking down the street. Try to do so without rhythm. It just isn't the same. In such moments, dance emerges – patterns of sensory awareness that changes us. When such an impulse courses through us, it relates us to ourselves and our worlds in a new way. It aligns and it frees. The movement of our bodily selves is actually “dance.”

“Jumping from boulder to boulder and never falling, with a heavy pack, is easier than it sounds; you just can't fall when you get into the rhythm of the dance.”

– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

Kimerer LaMothe – award-winning author, philosopher, dancer, and playwright – explains …

“Humans dance because dance is human. Dance is not an accidental or supplemental activity in which humans choose to engage or not. Dance is essential to our survival as human beings.

“Without the barest ability to notice, recreate, and become patterns of movement, without the ability to invite impulses to move, humans would not be able to learn how to sense and respond to the sources of their wellbeing – to people, to nourishment, to ideas, to environments.

(Kimerer LaMothe. “Why Do Humans Dance?” Psychology Today. March 31, 2015.)

 

Sad Sack was a sittin' on a block of stone
Way over in the corner weepin' all alone.
The warden said, "Hey, buddy, don't you be no square.
If you can't find a partner use a wooden chair."

 

Origins Of the Backbeat

The backbeat is a significant component of the Africanization of American music. Music critic Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) makes the bold claim that “the only so-called popular music in this country of any real value is of African derivation.” He traces the spread of African musical values into America via the slave trade.

The percussion-heavy, improvisationally oriented and shouted/chanted music we hear on every pop radio station is informed powerfully by those vestiges of West African music that survived slavery. Generally speaking, African music is rhythmically complex and harmonically static, an inverse of Europe’s harmonically rich but rhythmically unsophisticated art music tradition. American musical history is largely informed by the collision between these two musical cultures.

(Amiri Baraka. Blues people: Negro music in white America. New York: Quill.1963.)

The backbeat also traces its popularity through early jazz banjo and piano accompaniment patterns, “Chicago-style drumming (on snare and hi-hat or choked cymbal), New Orleans processional drumming (with roots in Africa and the Caribbean), hand claps and tambourine hits (in sanctified gospel music), slap bass (in country and jazz), and staccato guitar and mandolin accompaniment (in country music).

So the big question is “Why don't we get bored with the classic groove, the backbeat? After all, we hear it over and over.

Some theorize that the possibility of continued repetition or a break in the pattern keeps our mind in the happy groove – you could define it as “a present that is continually being created anew.” We give particularity to each repetition based on our memory of the immediate past and our expectations for the future.

It is believed “participatory discrepancies” add power and interest to the groove. Music timbre, tone qualities, creative tensions, dynamics – that tricky but interesting stuff – all adds texture to the beat or the groove.

(Charles Keil. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” Cultural Anthropology. Vol. 2, No. 3. August, 1987.)

These researchers readily admit music is about motion, dance, and global and contradictory feelings. It's simply about allowing ourselves to get down in the groove. So much magic is there, but we just listen and enjoy even if we are oblivious to the complex structures we hear. Just ask those Dick Clark Rate-a-Record teens, and they simple say “It's got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

(Charles Keil. “The Theory of Participatory Discrepancies: A Progress Report.” Ethnomusicology 39, no. 1. 1995.)

“There's something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it. We exist on a rhythm of seventy-two beats a minute. The train, apart from getting them from the Delta to Detroit, became very important to blues players because of the rhythm of the machine, the rhythm of the tracks, and then when you cross onto another track, the beat moves. It echoes something in the human body.

“So then when you have machinery involved, like trains, and drones, all of that is still built in as music inside us. The human body will feel rhythms even when there's not one. Listen to "Mystery Train" by Elvis Presley. One of the great rock-and-roll tracks of all time, not a drum on it. It's just a suggestion, because the body will provide the rhythm. Rhythm really only has to be suggested. Doesn't have to be pronounced. This is where they got it wrong with 'this rock' and 'that rock.' It's got nothing to do with rock. It's to do with roll.”

– Keith Richards (of the Rolling Stones). From Life, his autobiography (2011)