Episode 202
Fight Songs
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An aptly named number from a bombastic legend of the upright bass… A rage filled rallying cry echoing the emotions of the masses… And an orchestral tapestry filled with elaborate symbolism, in spite of being loathed by its creator…
In the latest episode of Themes and Variation, our podcast panelists unpack their interpretations of the term "fight songs."
This time around, I (your humble host, Mahea Lee) am joined by co-host Martin Fowler and special guest and Soundfly Founder and CEO, Ian Temple to discuss musical selections full of unrelenting angst, righteous indignation, and fiery determination.
This time around, we've highlighted songs by Charles Mingus, Rage Against the Machine, and Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky. The conversation touches on topics like mob mentality, the jazz world's rumor mill, and orchestrated gunfire.
Could Mingus swing? Is there a reason for the seemingly unfinished name of a particular '90s hit? And why does the "1812 Overture" sound so familiar? Check out the latest episode of Themes and Variation for answers to these questions and more.
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Find Themes and Variation's "Fight Songs" playlist here.
Transcript
[00:00:24] Themes and Variation is Soundfly's podcast about music and perspectives. I'm your host, Mahea Lee.
[:[00:00:34] Mahea: Hey there, we are back again with Themes and Variation. This week, Martin and I will be talking about fight songs with Ian Temple, Soundfly's founder and CEO and an amazing musician as well.
[:[00:00:57] We'll get into that in just a moment, but before we do, I have a quick favor to ask: If you like what you hear and want to let me and the rest of the team know it, please subscribe to the show and consider leaving a positive review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you go for podcasts.
[:[00:01:16] Welcome back to Themes and Variation. I am your (still pretty new) host, Mahea Lee, and today I am here with Martin Fowler. How are you, Marty?
[:[00:01:28] Mahea: That's good. And we're joined today by our very special guest. Well, I guess just kind of a, it's a little bit of a strange word because you're kind of like... if it's Marty as second chair, then Jeremy, then I kind of feel like you're sitting next to Jeremy in the orchestral section.
[:[00:01:46] Mahea: I can't handle the pressure. But yeah, so Ian Temple, anyway, I should say your name. So Ian, how are you doing today?
[:[00:01:54] Mahea: It's nice to have you here on this, the second episode back.
[:[00:02:07] Mahea: Well, we're happy to have you. And today we'll be talking about "Fight Songs," which is sort of a bastardization of a different theme that you were proposing, Ian, that we just couldn't quite get the right wording on. Do you feel like it does that justice or do you feel like this was a totally different direction?
[:[00:02:41] Mahea: It was very self helpy.
[:[00:03:08] Mahea: Well, I think one of the reasons we had trouble with it too is 'cause we sort of accidentally did a theme along the lines of what you're describing last season, which is like the whole entire past of the podcast... with Seth Haley, Com Truise. We did "Songs to Escape Into" and I think two of the three songs were chosen... like I chose Clair de Lune because it's what I listen to in headphones when I have to get a vaccination or a blood test, you know? So yeah, it was tricky to find wording, but I'm excited about "Fight Songs." I do want to point out you both picked songs in which the bass is very heavily featured, which puts further pressure on me to try to fill Carter's shoes in a way I wasn't fully prepared for this early, but that's fine. It's fine.
[:[00:03:51] Mahea: Yeah. So spiteful.
[:[00:04:05] Mahea: Yeah. Marty was my saving grace on that too. And I was like, okay, well Carter's not here, but Marty is also an excellent bass player. So pressure's on Marty.
[:[00:04:16] [track]: [music]
[:[00:04:46] Martin: This is "Haitian Fight Song" by Charles Mingus.
[:[00:04:57] Martin: Mahea? How dare you. How dare you!
[:[00:05:03] Martin: It did not. This is actually one of my favorite Mingus tunes of all time. It's a very well known Mingus tune, and being a bassist and having some experience and in the world of jazz, I am aware of Charles Mingus and might qualify him as maybe my favorite, certainly top five all-time upright bass players.
[:[00:05:23] Martin: So "Haitian Fight Song," it's just... you know, I've spent some time with it. And so when the words "fight song" entered my brain, my internal computer returned "Haitian Fight Song."
[:[00:05:36] Martin: Always.
[:[00:05:51] Martin: I vaguely recall this.
[:[00:06:05] Martin: That's hilarious.
[:[00:06:10] Martin: "Haitian Fight Song," off of the 1957 album The Clown, is a very specific point in not only jazz history, but also American history. The word "Haitian" in this case, refers to the Haitian Revolution, which obviously was not in America, but was basically the only successful case of enslaved people rising up and overthrowing a government... although feel free to fact check my history, Ian. I know that's your realm.
[:[00:07:13] So he channeled this energy into this sort of bombastic, unapologetic wall of sound from his band with just a whirlwind of tempo changes or feel changes and just a huge, huge, powerful, aggressive sound that channeled the energy of the fight.
[:[00:07:41] Martin: My understanding is around this time Mingus was getting questioned for whether or not he could swing and this album essentially was him being like "I can swing."
[:[00:07:54] Martin: I guess he wrote an open letter to Miles Davis. And this is all stuff I learned just like through the Googling process for a little more context. This is... I'm not super deep in this lore, but in an open letter to Miles Davis in Downbeat in 1954, he wrote his iconic quote that you'll find online, which is, "I write or play ME, the way I feel through jazz or whatever. Music is or was a language of the emotions. If someone has been escaping reality, I don't expect him to dig my music. My music is alive and it's about the living and the dead, about good and evil. It's angry, yet it's real because it knows it's angry."
[:[00:08:37] Martin: Yeah.
[:[00:08:41] Martin: Yeah, he also said in the liner notes about the song, tying it back to the civil unrest and sort of social justice aspect... he said, "I can't play it right unless I'm thinking about prejudice and hate and persecution and how unfair it is. There's sadness and cries in it, but also determination. And it usually ends with my feeling, 'I told them, I hope somebody heard me.'"
[:[00:09:04] Martin: So that's "Haitian Fight Song." I guess I'll also just say it's G minor blues, pretty strong throughout, except for the sort of more free sections where he's doing his front man, free soloing.
[:[00:09:28] Martin: Always a journey, always beautiful. And always makes you tilt your head a little to the side.
[:[00:09:58] [track]: [music]
[:[00:10:19] Martin: Those are really good characterizations. I feel like he had no choice but to be fully outwardly himself, and I think the word "bombastic" is how he lived his whole life.
[:[00:10:56] But then yeah, he's got sort of an angular quality to some of his writing and arranging that feels related to the way Monk approaches the piano in a lot of ways. That's how I think of him.
[:[00:11:23] Mahea: I also think there's something to... like his contemporaries that we really think of as being like the forefathers of a certain era of jazz. A lot of them played with each other over and over and over again. I was gonna actually ask, who else is on this album?
[:[00:11:42] Mahea: And that's kind of what I'm getting at here, is I do feel like I'm not always as familiar with the people that he puts on his music. Like Miles Davis, at a certain point, it's a familiar cast of characters, even though he changed players regularly, you know? They all went on to become people we knew.
[:[00:12:11] Martin: You might be right. You might be absolutely right. He certainly liked to do things his way. So I would say that makes sense.
[:[00:12:34] People who know Charles Mingus better can please, absolutely come at me and I will be happy to be overruled. But these are just some things that I think I've heard over the years.
[:[00:12:47] Ian: Yeah.
[:[00:13:12] Martin: All right, I'll do my best.
[:[00:13:13] Martin: So we got Shafi Hadi on alto and tenor saxophone, Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Wade Legge on piano, and Dannie Richmond on drums. None of whom I'm super familiar with, not that I'm like the biggest jazz head. I don't really know these players beyond their work on this record.
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[:[00:15:56] Martin: Yeah!
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[:[00:16:28] Ian: We are listening to Rage Against The Machine, their song called "Killing In The Name." This song has some terrible language in it, so if you're offended by expletives... we probably need to add that caveat here. But it is truly one of the great fight songs of all time, and one of the great amp you up songs of all time.
[:[00:17:03] [track]: [music]
[:[00:17:14] And I thought about Michael Jackson's "Bad," you know? Like the video where they're actually like doing the knife fight in the alley.
[:[00:17:27] Ian: Public Enemy, "Fight the Power."
[:[00:17:36] Ian: ...obviously a great example. Smashing Pumpkins, "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" is a good fight song.
[:[00:17:50] Ian: But I think at the end of the day, there's one song that I can put on and no matter where I am, like what's going on in my life, I will jump up...
[:[00:18:02] Ian: And start like beating something. I don't know. I mean, you know...
[:[00:18:07] Ian: I will rage. I will just absolutely rage — usually, hopefully in a loving way, but you know, sometimes also in a defiant way in a kind of angry way.
[:[00:18:21] Ian: Yeah, if you ever need to like turn me into the Hulk, just put on this song.
[:[00:18:30] Ian: I mean, okay. So it was released in 1992 on Rage Against the Machine's self-titled album. It was written in the wake of the Rodney King beating and the subsequent LA riots in response to the police officers being acquitted for that. I mean the photo on the album cover is actually a Vietnamese monk, I believe, self emulating in protest of the killing of other Buddhists by the US-backed South Vietnamese regime in like the '60s.
[:[00:19:18] So the lyrics... well, you can see it as religious or maybe even cultish, right? He's repeating the same lines a lot. You know, "now you do what they told you" is repeated like 16 times or something. And then at the end it changes to the, you know, "F*** you, I won't do what you told me" 16 times.
[:[00:19:50] Ian: But like every lyric in this song is repeated many, many, many times. And that repetition is kind of, working oneself up into an almost like, frenzy.
[:[00:20:12] Ian: Absolutely. A hundred percent. The lyrics themselves are a critique of the police force and pretty direct to the point. I mean, "some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses," basically accusing certain police officers of being KKK members. And obviously there's a deep history in the US of that being the case, both after the Civil War when the KKK came into existence, there were active links with law enforcement for the next 100 years, but then even more recently, actually, there was a report by the Brennan Center for Justice that cited an FBI internal report warning its agents that it's not uncommon to encounter white supremacy groups and far right groups that have active links to police officers.
[:[00:21:06] [track]: [music]
[:[00:21:21] The central message of the song in some ways is this idea of "killing in the name of." And it's really interesting that the lyrics are killing in the name of blank. I think what Zack is saying with that lyric is like killing in the name of anything, right? Like people have... all throughout history, people are killing in the name of something — of ideology, of religion, in the name of order. In this case, in the name of white supremacy, maybe. And, you know, you cannot justify your killing of people. There's no justification. Killing in the name of blank. And that's super powerful.
[:[00:22:04] Ian: Musically, super interesting. It's a song that's kind of in D major, but also in D minor at the same time. The song is just a progression of different bass and guitar riffs, really. Some of them have the major third and some of them have the minor third. Some of them have more chromatic stuff. One of the opening bass riffs is this...
[:[00:22:30] Ian: So what is that, a flat ninth?
[:[00:22:33] Ian: But that's a pretty awesome interval and it's not in D minor or D major.
[:[00:22:39] Ian: There's a lot of chromaticism in here. And then like the guitar comes in over the top of that.
[:[00:22:52] Ian: So it's like C sharp to D, F sharp to G, but over the top of D and E flat. So really kind of weird. There's almost like a teasing of harmonic minor.
[:[00:23:10] Ian: What it is, is it's kind of the color brown, right? It's like super chromatic. At the end of that little guitar riff, he goes like F sharp, G, and then G sharp, and then back to G.
[:[00:23:23] Ian: Basically, the music is all over the map. It's got these chromatic ideas, it's got these funky bluesy notes, it's got stuff that's more kind of classically blues minor.
[:[00:23:48] The first time through, at some point, the guitar starts doing kind of double time, like a quicker rhythmic riff over the top of it.
[:[00:24:02] Ian: Once again, repetition is key to this. The bass note's not moving, there's no harmonic movement.
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[:[00:24:59] But then the third time is when the whole song breaks. The song just stops basically and it's arhythmic. The groove is totally lost and then the bass and the guitar start climbing up a D natural minor scale.
[:[00:25:29] Ian: I just cannot listen to that without moving at the end. I mean it's that tension from that build, right? It's just like everyone's just going crazy. It's not a rhythmic, I guess, but it's certainly outside the groove of the song. It's just brrrrrr.
[:[00:25:41] Ian: And the guitar is just kind of sliding around on the strings and then it's got that tense scale walk up where every note is just like, uh, it's getting a little higher.
[:[00:26:07] Ian: Totally.
[:[00:26:09] Martin: It's a little hard to hear, but my understanding is that bassist Tim Comerford is playing basically triplets on that middle D while all the chaos is ensuing around. Which I always thought was really interesting. It's sort of like, functionally, the role of the bass player to hold everything together anyway. And then amidst this chaos, it kind of has this quality of being the sort of core central identity of the listener, holding on amidst the chaos.
[:[00:26:38] Martin: That's true. That's true.
[:[00:26:40] Mahea: So it's resisting in its own way. Because there's different forms of protest.
[:[00:26:46] Mahea: It's triplet based protest.
[:[00:26:52] Ian: Yeah, yeah totally.
[:[00:26:59] Mahea: It feels like there's a lot of musical symbolism in this throughout. Like with the repetition stuff, you even have the experience as a listener, a little bit of like... like you get comfortable in the repetition, you get kind of irritated at it just a little bit for a second, you know? Like it feels very similar to the experience of being part of an organization that you start to lose faith in at a certain point. And then it's such a big relief when you break away from it.
[:[00:27:50] You know what I mean? It's like, it builds and then the whole thing locks in. You get this release because the rhythm locks in. You get this release because the scale stops climbing and lands on that like pentatonic riff. You get this vocal release because he starts screaming it on the rhythm and he's just like letting go, and that whisper has now turned into one unified energy, right? So like it's not multiple just individuals whispering. It's now a unified group of people charging down the street, or marching down the street to achieve an objective. And everyone's pounding the same drum, the same rhythm, the same kind of surging electrical energy. And I think that probably very much is the dynamic of being in a riot. The psychology of crowds, right?
[:[00:28:38] Ian: Little whispers are happening and suddenly somehow it all comes together and it just gets directed at one thing. And it's all unified. And that's a scary, dangerous thing.
[:[00:28:52] Ian: Oh yeah, totally.
[:[00:28:56] Ian: It takes on a life of its own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This song actually hit number one in 2009 in the UK at Christmastime. It became the number one hit.
[:[00:29:08] Ian: So basically a bunch of people in the UK got sick and tired of being force fed songs from the X Factor, from like Simon Cowell and his, you know, whole manufactured thing where every year there'd be an X Factor winner and that X Factor winner would do some schmaltzy, sugary song that would go to the top of the charts. Someone got sick of it and in 2009, started a petition and an online movement and it totally caught on ,and "Killing in the Name" became the top Christmas song.
[:[00:29:44] Ian: Yeah, I should put it on all my Christmas mixes.
[:[00:29:50] Mahea: Yeah, seriously. Well, are we ready to move on to our last song of the day?
[:[00:29:55] Martin: Yeah.
[:[00:30:24] [track]: [music]
[:[00:30:42] Obviously, you guys are familiar with the piece. What do you associate it with? Where do you think you've heard it in your life? In your travels as an adult human?
[:[00:30:56] Mahea: Yeah. Ian, what do you associate the song with?
[:[00:31:01] Mahea: This one?
[:[00:31:15] Mahea: So that's one of the themes.
[:[00:31:17] Martin: Nah, but do the big, big one. You know the one I mean.
[:[00:31:29] Mahea: Is this the one you meant, Ian?
[:[00:31:34] Mahea: Yeah. You know what that theme actually is?
[:[00:31:39] Mahea: Well, let me start by just saying... okay, so "1812 Overture." What is your understanding of the word "overture?"
[:[00:31:52] Mahea: A musical or something like that.
[:[00:31:56] Ian: Usually runs through a few different themes that will appear later in the performance, I would guess.
[:[00:32:19] But so... this piece is actually a collection of themes, but we associate most of those themes with this piece rather than their source material. The one that we link most closely to the "1812 Overture" is actually the French national anthem.
[:[00:32:42] Ian: Oh totally.
[:[00:32:46] Mahea: Yeah.
[:[00:32:47] Mahea: Tchaikovsky hated this piece. It's possible that he came around eventually, but one of the things he had to say about it was, "I'm undecided as to whether my overture is good or bad, but it is probably the latter."
[:[00:33:06] So not a fan of the piece. He was basically commissioned to write something for an arts and industry exhibition that was going to be held in Moscow in 1882. One of the things that was supposed to happen at that exhibition is they were going to open the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, a giant building that was originally supposed to be created in celebration of Napoleon's retreat in 1812, but it was still unfinished at the time of writing. It was unfinished at the time of the premiere still.
[:[00:33:36] Mahea: What do you mean?
[:[00:33:39] Mahea: Oh yeah, no. A hundred percent. You and the nation of Russia.
[:[00:33:45] Mahea: But so Tchaikovsky didn't like the building itself. He was not inspired by it.
[:[00:33:52] Mahea: Yeah, he did.
[:[00:34:07] He ended up putting a lot of symbolism into the writing, but it is just a collection of different pieces of music that he has repurposed and arranged in an expert way. Some of the music is original because you need that to transition and make things work. But yeah, it's basically like a really elaborate puzzle.
[:[00:34:35] Mahea: The first thing you hear at the very beginning is the melody from an Eastern Orthodox hymn called "O Lord, Save Thy People."
[:[00:34:54] Mahea: Then we get the French national anthem, which interestingly wasn't actually the national anthem during Napoleon's time because he replaced it for a little while.
[:[00:35:04] Mahea: Yes, it is.
[:[00:35:11] Mahea: Totally.
[:[00:35:22] Mahea: For some reason it wasn't good enough for Napoleon though.
[:[00:35:34] Mahea: It's funny though, because here Tchaikovsky uses it to symbolize Napoleon.
[:[00:35:38] Mahea: So when it comes in, it's supposed to be the French entering. Then we get an overlap of the French National Anthem with some more Eastern folk music to represent the fact that there was this big clash.
[:[00:36:01] Mahea: Then we get the first set of cannons. We get five of them.
[:[00:36:15] Mahea: I guess that's supposed to represent the Battle of Borodino. And then we get that very, very, very long descending passage that just goes on forever and ever. Beautiful orchestration to make that sound happen. And that's supposed to represent the French army retreating.
[:[00:36:39] Mahea: And then "O Lord, Save Thy People" comes back, but in a more glorious way. Like it's just... it sounds a little more confident, a little more bold. There's more instruments in at that point.
[:[00:36:57] Mahea: And then the piece closes with 11 more canon shots and the melody from "God Save the Tsar!"
[:[00:37:19] Mahea: So yeah, it is a collection of different pieces of music, really beautifully orchestrated essentially. I didn't know that.
[:[00:37:28] Martin: No, I definitely didn't know that.
[:[00:37:30] Ian: It's this whole story. Yeah, it's like a film score. It's got all these different kind of motifs interacting.
[:[00:37:50] The cannons are an interesting choice.
[:[00:38:01] Mahea: It's supposedly like... well, I mean, obviously really difficult to sync that up properly, so I'm not sure that Tchaikovsky ever really heard it as perfectly timed as the Boston Pops might do it today.
[:[00:38:31] Mahea: Most marching bands do the "1812 Overture" eventually, you know? Like even high school marching bands. Personally, I associate it with fireworks displays, and I think that's partly because it has that big finish.
[:[00:38:44] Mahea: A lot.
[:[00:38:45] Mahea: ...which is really weird knowing that it was a piece commissioned by the government of Russia.
[:[00:38:52] Mahea: Yeah, it just doesn't feel American at all.
[:[00:38:55] Mahea: I believe Tchaikovsky conducted it at the opening of Carnegie Hall. And I'm pretty sure he was the first Eastern European musician to conduct a major event in the US. And that would have been that concert. I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure this is one of the pieces of his that he did.
[:[00:39:26] Ian: I kind of never trust artists when they say that. I feel like a lot of these artists, a lot of these composers, are pretty ornery people anyway — never satisfied with a lot of their works, you know?
[:[00:39:57] That said, he was the most famous composer in Russia at the time. So if you're celebrating Russia, of course you get the most famous composer to do a piece of music.
[:[00:40:20] Ian: That's what I was going to say. I mean, I'm curious about that. Do you have insight into how Tchaikovsky would have written it? Is he just hearing the parts in his head and writing down the notes? Like, is it that fluid?
[:[00:40:32] Ian: Maybe tinking on a piano occasionally?
[:[00:40:58] Martin: Yeah, I mean, with that kind of time crunch, you know, that's so many notes, you got to be pretty well steeped in the traditions of orchestration and understand how to put those notes in the right voices very quickly to make this volume of music in that short amount of time.
[:[00:41:24] Ian: Yeah, you probably would have to, because you can't, on a whim, be like, "I'm going to try something crazy." 'Cause you can't hear it, right? Like until you get it in front of your performers.
[:[00:41:51] Martin: Yeah. That really speaks to the depth of immersion in the space and the sphere with the instrumentalists, hearing pieces all the time. So you, you know, you write down an A in a certain range for the violin and you're like pretty sure you know what it's going to sound like because you heard that violinist who's probably going to play the piece play that A a hundred times last month. You know what I mean? It's just the immersion in the space.
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[:[00:43:18] Martin: I'm just so pleased that neither of you picked Rachel Platten. Thank you for that.
[:[00:43:27] Mahea: And with that, the "Fight Songs" episode of Themes and Variation is just about over. But before I let you go, I have a couple quick announcements to make.
[:[00:43:35] Mahea: We'll be back here again in two weeks with a new episode and a new theme. If you'd like to join in on the conversation or keep up with podcast news, be sure to follow us on Twitter @ThemesVariation or drop us a line at podcast@soundfly.com.
[:[00:43:56] This turned out to be a really fun theme, and while we had a great time choosing the three songs featured in the episode, there were obviously lots of other possibilities. Here are some noteworthy fight songs selected by members of the Soundfly Discord community...
[:[00:44:25] Jasmine suggested the song "Kung Fu Fighting," pointing out that it offers a musical mood that's uniquely non-threatening, yet it still clearly fits the theme.
[:[00:44:41] You can find some of these suggestions and others in the Themes and Variation Spotify playlist linked to in show notes. If you'd like to learn more about the community or Soundfly in general, visit soundfly.com. And if you decide to become a Soundfly subscriber, be sure to use the code PODCAST in all caps for 20% off at checkout.
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