Heroin by The Velvet Underground
Finding courage to endure chemo with one song each day
If you have read my ‘About’ page, you will know that the inspiration for this blog came from a promise I made to a friend, who was about to embark on chemotherapy cancer treatment. I said that I would send them a song everyday, so they would know I was thinking of them and wishing them better.
Now this first choice may have been in poor taste as they were about to inject themselves with the first dose of poison like a badass junkie, but this was it! Not the easiest of pieces to listen to, but you can really hear the blood and drug-induced madness pumping through your brain as it builds to its climax.
How do they do that?
There are many musical devices in this piece (changes in tempo, volume, rhythm and more), but the one I’ll focus on, because it’s really quite unusual in popular music, is its dissonance. Our ears find it pleasing to hear chords made up of a particular group of notes - most simply, the first, third and fifth notes of a scale. For example C-E-G gives a bright and pleasant sound (known as a “major” chord). Flatten the 3rd note to Eb and the sound darkens and becomes more melancholy (turning it into a “minor” chord). Adding other notes from the scale changes the mood further, with those that “don’t belong” in our basic, yet pleasant major or minor chord giving colour, tension, drama and all manner of other effects. In this piece, the additional notes in the chords deliberately jar and clash, with the drone (the long note that is played throughout the whole piece, adding to its hypnotic effect, yet also holding it all together) sometimes being sonorously “within” the chord and sometimes dissonantly against it. And later in the piece, more scraping and screeching outlander notes join the fray to do your head in!
Hope you enjoy it or feel inspired to listen to something new today.
