Objective Speed Review
August 29, 2005
Artist: John Denver
CD: Best of John Denver
“Like vinegar on a wound is one who sings songs to a heavy heart.” -Proverbs 25:20
“I hate happy songs. Happy songs make me miserable.” Sting, c. 20th century
In order to see the patterns that I now call “mean speed music theory” or “Meanspeed theory,” I saw about 200 songs grouped together by speed. Some songs I were more familiar with than other songs.
That initial discovery took pl ace in July 1988, and after calibrating 5,000 songs of all popular types (yes, I can certainly be criticized for staying with what is ‘popular)-a cursory lists of my beats per minutes so shows. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of songs are released on CD and online per minute. So my current list of about 11,000 is all about *narrowing down* the popular-but-meaningful from, well, everything else. To the extent that some of the material on this site was copyrighted in 1992 was because of the *discretion* and the *lack* of some monster amount of songs from which to make wild inductions.
Ok. So now the list is, as above, 11,000. Of all of them, three above all bothered me-they didn’t fit Ian Schneider’s little theory, and they couldn’t seem to be explained away as “joke” songs or “songs by someone else that the singer was just toying with” (like Clapton did to himself in his ‘shuffle’ version of Layla-more on that in another space). So what a great relief this week when I reviewed John Denver’s Greatest Hits! And what songs do I mean? Well, of course “Take Me Home Country Roads” (the most Western popular song in the history of China, and according to a man in my building named Pat, “really huge in Ireland.” And Pat knows his Irish music. And “Rocky Mountain High,” a song who’s rights were apparently bought out Peter Coors-so Mr. Coors.
Anyway, when I grew up, I knew these songs, well, very well. Everyone did-mid-late 70s, golden boy John Denver, who was considered such an angel that he plays a grocery store , manager who sees god in “Oh God!”-of course God (played by George “George” Burns) has to choose a man of the fine spirit and utter wholesome-itude. Who better than the never-acted-before Denver?
And growing up, beating away are these two songs that I think are supposed to reflect happiness, make me feel as high as Colorado, as close to Virginia. Then, I don’t know, one day, I just had to admit to myself that both these songs were just truly miserable. And look at the speeds-Denver released 21 versions of each song (approximately), but let us say it is quite safe to know that the speeds for *both* songs are approximately 82 beats per minute, *smack in the middle* in a group of songs that simply reek of loneliness. And I said-true-”now he walks in quiet solitude…” “he was born in the summer of his 27th year..”—man, talk about lonely. And in Take me home, Country Roads, a double abstraction-a mind-bender that Denver sneaks in: “I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday….” He drives it home….”…yesterday!” There it is. Abstraction #1: driving down the road and getting a feeling of something that you can never feel again, rather, something that you “should” have felt, and then removed again: Abstraction #2–…”yesterday!” Whoa. Talk about the danger of cell phones and driving. I hope Mr. Denver was driving safely when he wrote this. I mean, even Einstein had to *sit* in his train to invent his ideas.
So my point, kind readers, is that as searches of meanspeed where just calibrating the songs on your own will show, the songs below are deep deep in lonely-land, speed-wise. Know what though? Neil Young does this quite a bit, so do a few others: take the lonely speed (often make it a cut 2/4 country stomp like Take Me Home Country Road, Come A Time by Neil Young, I Am A Child by Young), and make the best of the happiness. Foreigner tried it with “I wanna know What Love Is.” Huge comeback hit for them-everyone can relate to expressing loneliness in the form a desire to rejoin the community.
The MeanFrequencies of “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are:
meanspeed=82.1 beats per minute.
meanemotion=Loneliness.
meanphase=1.368 cycles per second.
meanspace=731 milliseconds between beats.
meanpitch=350.300 Hertz, 1/2 cent above F4=349.228 Hertz, 99 1/2 cents below Gb4/F#4=369.994 Hertz.
Ian Schneider
12 October 2006
NYC,
review republished from www.meanspeed.com
