Month: September 2016

Every individual is different when it comes to writing. A frequent problem for me is that the words and ideas race around in circles in my head and I can't seem to round them up so that they come out of me and get onto the page. I don't care how sloppily the words come out — that's what editing and revisions are for — if they would only come out.

In those situations it sometimes helps when a friend asks one specific question via email or Facebook or chat, and when I go to answer that one person about that one little thing, I find the floodgates open and I end up blathering their virtual ear off. And then I realize all that blathering should go on my blog, if only on Scott Hanselman's "finite keystrokes" principle, so I go ahead and repurpose the stuff I wrote into a blog post. (What you're reading now is in fact an example of me doing this.)

It isn't always a question that sets me off. The person might make an assertion that isn't quite correct, and my "well, actually" reflex kicks in, and there you go, I'm blathering again.

Daniel Steinberg shared some wonderful advice about writing in 30 blog posts last September. Every one of those posts is a gem, and it doesn't hurt that Daniel is one of my favorite people.

Fair warning: I don't have any real point here, except that this is the kind of thing I fixate on at 5:00 in the morning when I'm not sleepy.

On Facebook I came across an article by Patrick Metzger titled "The Millennial Whoop: A glorious obsession with the melodic alternation between the fifth and the third". When I saw that title I tried to think of melodies that use fifth-third repetition. The examples I came up with were older than today's pop music:

• "JOEY, joey, JOEY, …" ("Joey, Joey, Joey", 1956)
• "TALL AND TAN and YOUNG AND LOVELY, the GIRL FROM IpaNEMA GOES WALKING and…" ("The Girl From Ipanema", 1962)
• "on a CLEAR DAY, rise and look aROUND YOU, and you'll SEE WHO YOU are…" ("On a Clear Day You Can See Forever", 1965)

Once I played the first example in the article I knew what Metzger meant, and recognized it from Katy Perry.

Besides coming from earlier eras, I can think of two ways my examples differ from the "Millennial Whoop":

• My examples use fifth-third repetition, not quite alternation.
• Harmonically, the Millennial Whoop is sung over a dominant (near as my ear can tell). In my examples, the chords may change underneath the fifth-to-thirds in the melody, but I don't think any of those chords are dominant (could be wrong, too lazy to check).

Side note: it's always amused me that the theme from "Return of the Dragon" (the movie in which Bruce Lee fights Chuck Norris) has the same first four notes as "On a Clear Day". It even continues the similarity by repeating the pattern up a step.