at all and maintaining the thickened texture and heightened dynamic level of the chorus. Note that diatonic harmony is pivotal in delineating the form here, as it often is in recordings that articulate traditional rock music structures.
The experience of the sound-mass of this piece is of an ordered and hierarchical structure that supports the voice and lyric, which is itself very much front and centre. The creamy backing vocals and chiming electric guitars present a non-threatening sixties-oriented backdrop against which Costello's snarling vocal throws easy rhymes and non-specific images coated with the envy and spite that helped to define his early image. Driving it all is the quest narrative form, which ensures that the recording peaks at a 'golden-mean' three-quarters of the way through in the bridge section, the point harmonically and dynamically furthest away (though not far at all) from 'home.'
The Kinks-'Everybody's Gonna Be Happy' (1965): strophic form as quest narrative
A strophic form in pop rock is one comprised of a lımited number of sections—often two or three-that are repeated in the same sequence throughout the recording. We can call a single instance of this sequence of sections a strophe, and each instance of the strophe may outline a quest narrative.[1] In this example, the strophe consists of verse-chorus, each section identifiable through its chord progression:
Verse: C7/G7 (repeat)
Chorus: Bb/Bb/F/A/D/D/C/G
(all chords are major triads unless indicated otherwise)
The verse, though based on only two chords, sustains interest through a three part internal form, the first of which is the verse proper (with different lyrics each time), and the second ('I know') and third ('Come on baby…') of which are refrains. There is ambiguity over which of the two chords-both sevenths-is the tonic, or home, until the final three chords of the chorus point towards G. Regardless, the repetition of these two chords constitutes a home territory from which the Bb that starts the chorus ventures sharply away. Although relatively concise, the harmonic disruption of the chord progression of the chorus in the context of the repetition of the verse is dramatic, and there is a sense of order being restored upon the resumption of the verse
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- ↑ In the case of twelve-bar blues form, the words strophe, stanza and verse are often interchangeable due to the lack of a contrasting section.
PORTAL, vol. 8, no. 1, January
