Duran Duran - Thank You

African American musical genres, the different varieties of blues as well as soul and funk since the 1960s and rap music since the 1970s, also offer novel modes of design with regard to harmony and melody that were adopted by and, in some cases, developed further in other popular music styles. This was already evident in 1950s rock 'n' roll, which was founded on rhythm & blues, and has also been apparent in rock music, which was heavily influenced by rhythm & blues and older varieties of blues since the 1960s. Drawing on this observation, the British musicologist Allan F. Moore derives far reaching conclusions for the harmonic analysis of rock music.

In general... popular songs as hybrid forms of music as their mode of design derives from two traditions: African American musical traditions and the traditions of American Popular Song... While harmony in popular song tradition can be described in terms of functional major minor tonality, with cadences involving the dominant or at least descending fifths, harmony in African American music... opposes such an interpretation. In order to be able to compare songs from the two different traditions in terms of harmony, Moore advocates the use of an overarching modal interpretation framework. In it, the major scale becomes the Ionian mode, the natural minor scale becomes the Aeolian mode. The Mixolydian and Dorian modes are also widespread, while Lydian, Phrygian and Locrian are less common. This understanding of modality is based on a concept of diatonic modes, so called church modes, which is also common in jazz theory, but rather problematic. Moore emphasizes that the assignment of a chord pattern to a mode does not apply to the entire song, but often only works for the duration of the respective chord pattern. This is due to the songs' regular changes of modes, especially with contrasting parts.

Since the chord patterns often include both major third and minor third chords, the semantics of major and minor are barely significant in the analyses presented by Moore. Still, if they are brought into play, the attribution of meaning follows the conventional semantics of bright dark or positive negative. Moore draws on these semantics when it comes to determining the tonal center of a chord pattern... identification of the song's tonality is supported in a rather roundabout way by the semantics of the song's statement, which are probably derived primarily from the lyrics.

Source: Beyond Major and Minor? The Tonality of Popular Music after 1960 by Martin Pfleiderer

Duran Duran - Thank You

• First release by: Led Zeppelin
• Written by: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant
• Release Date: April 4, 1995

"Duran Duran's career has seen more than 100 million record sales worldwide, six Platinum selling records, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And, in 2022, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame."

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