Making time for hemiola on the radio

Over the past few years I’ve eliminated a lot of common inputs of new information from my day-to-day life. Even after cutting out basically all social media, daily news, and tv I still struggle with taking in more information than I can actually pay attention to and think about in a conscious way. However, I love the surprise of a good (music) radio station and regularly trickle some of that medium into my information filter. When I was a youth I regularly tuned into the jazz radio station from Eastern Washington University (89.5FM in Spokane, baby!) and I fondly recall listening one afternoon in particular. I must have been 12 years old and I had been tasked to clean the family bathroom in our house (which seemed like a world-moving chore at the time). I had to pick up bits of paper products from the floor, scrub the toilet, sink, AND bathtub, and wash the mirror with a different implement than I used to clean the toilet, sink, and bathtub. Now that I’m an adult who has had to assign my own children household chores, I am amazed at how long it can take for a child (or two!) to clean a 10 square foot room. On that day when I was 12 however, it was a great opportunity to tune into KEWU and listen to the live local DJ gyrate my mind by playing all of Frank Zappa’s “Hot Rats” album. I was in the habit of tape recording songs and shows from live broadcasts and I captured not only the album broadcast but the DJ talking joyfully about Frank, his band, and the magical oeuvre of the Zappa universe. Listening through live broadcast of the album probably only got me through the process of picking scraps of dried TP and bits of hair off the floor, but I was able to listen to the album recording a couple more times as I trudged through the process of moving dirt and grime around the various porcelain surfaces before calling it quits. I continued to spend a lot of time listening to that album recording on repeat and could eventually hum and sing most of the instrumental parts and DEFINITELY belched out a few glorious renditions of Don Van Vliet’s “Willie the Pimp” vocal. I look back fondly on these character-building moments with great music.

Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers from the band Wet Leg

The way I was drawn into new music when I was an adolescent finds its way through my tight filter for new information now that I’m an adult in the regular car trips to take my two oldest daughters to-and-from gymnastics practice. The great local station (KXT 91.7 out of Dallas) plays an eclectic mix and I’m constantly surprised by good new pop and alternative tracks as well as specialty shows where the DJs have a lot of leeway to play weird stuff. IfCM newsletter readers, I’m here to tell you about a band that I heard on the radio that caused so much joy and surprise that I brought them into my information bubble by looking them up and listening to ALL of their songs so much that I now can’t forget them. You don’t need any reason to like something beyond its own value to you and I get a lot of that from this band, but I also have been floored by their use of a hip, jazzy, right-on, musical device and I had to talk about it to some folks. I messaged a friend:

- Dude. Have you heard Wet Leg?

And then we conversed about the great band Wet Leg and their songs “Chaise Longue” (the song I originally heard on the radio) and “Wet Dream”, their badassness in general, and their use of a specific musical device called hemiola. Since we at the IfCM like to use the whole-part-whole approach with learning new music (read more about this in the IfCM FAQ), you should listen to these tunes 1-100 times before reading the following breakdown. You can also watch this real-time creation listen-along where I also write out a chart of the song form:

You don’t have to know any music theory to get “why Chris thinks this thing is cool,” but I’ll start by defining a couple of useful terms.

Term #1: Beat. When you listen to “Wet Dream,” nod your head, pat your leg, or tap your foot along with the low, punchy kick of the bass drum. This is the even, steady beat of the song. The bass drum plays a bunch of even, steady kicks at the beginning of the song which helps to establish the beat’s regular pulse, but even when the drums start playing a different beat you can keep tapping this pulse throughout the whole song. BEAT! BEAT! BEAT! BEAT! In case there’s any confusion in identifying the BEAT! Of the bass drum, these are the other sounds happening at the beginning of “Wet Dream”

• Low woofy sound that’s kind of like the bass drum but with less punchy attack = bass guitar. If you’re using headphones you might hear this balanced in the middle of your stereo field.

• Strum, strum, strum, strum, strum, strum, strum in the left side of your headphones = rhythm guitar.

• …..doon doon-da doon doon doon.... … doon doon-da doon doon doon.... … doon doon-da doon doon doon.... … doon, doon, doon, doon. = lead guitar in the right side of your headphones.

Also, the bass drum is the LOUDEST sound. BEAT! BEAT! BEAT! BEAT!

Ok—listen through the chorus (“Beam me up!”) and the first half of the verse. You’ve been experiencing our friend the beat grouped in repeated 2 or 4 beat chunks. Let’s count to 4 with the first set of lyrics:

That’s what we’ll refer to as the regular “meter” of the tune. 4 beats = the meter of “Wet Dream," aka quadruple meter for folks with fancy pants. I have fancy pants (they have one of those loops you can hang a framing hammer from), so I’ll continue calling it quadruple meter

Term #2: Meter. 4 regularly grouped beats is quadruple meter.

This song seems like it might remain in quadruple meter, because most pop music does. But we are not talking about a predictable pop tune! My tiny mind is splintered with glee when we get to the second half of the verse:

Check out the way the lyrical flow changes!!!!! Instead of being in groups of 4 like the beats, it’s in a group of 3, a group of 3, and then a group of 2!

FUN WITH BEATS! The lyric establishes a new meter on top of the continuing quadruple of the rest of the band—3 on top of 4 (with a 2-beat tag to even things out). COOL. This rhythmic/metric tension and release is often called “hemiola." 3+3+2 over a quadruple meter = hemiola. Wet Leg doesn’t just feature hemiola in one song, they go even further with the chorus of “Chaise Longue.” Listen to it first and try to notice some cross-metric niftiness (feel free to use this form chart video I made):

“Chaise Longue” starts off with a less on-the-beat grooviness (the drums and bass are a bit more syncopated), but nod your head/pat your leg and you should be keeping steady quadruple meter by the time the vocals come in:

The lyrics are mostly right on the beats and follow a 4-beat quadruple meter. HOWEVER, the chorus:

The quadruple beat carries on in the guitars/bass/drums but the lyrics follow a 3+3+3+3+4 pattern:

If zookeeper, conservationist, and crocodile hunter Steve Irwin were listening to this song he might remark, “Crikey! The elusive double hemiola!” Instead of evening out the meter to start over every two bars like in a regular hemiola (3+3+2 beats) “Chaise Longue” builds the rhythmic tension even more (some would say, twice as more…) before resolving it after the 4-beat closing bar of the phrase. Tension and release is exciting because it plays with our exceptions of what we think we know. It’s great to hear new music with lyrics that play with rhythmic tension and release like “Wet Dream” and “Chaise Longue”. The rhythmic intrigue contrasts with the mostly spoken, monotone vocal on “Chaise Longue” which is also neat. Take another listen to those tunes now that we broke them down, and I hope you enjoy the repeated listens as much as I do! I’m very pleased to find new music and think about it with this kind of detail. Thanks for rocking with hemiola, Wet Leg! If you know of other songs that use this cool device let me know (and don’t forget to subscribe to the email newsletter below to get these tidbits delivered directly to you!)

- Chris Teal, IfCM Co-Director