All right, let’s get massively on line, people. There’s a hot theory “debate” happening on “Instagram”, about WHERE’S THE 1 on a simple damn rap song by Ludacris, “Rollout”, which I had never heard before yesterday:
You, a person who owns a drum set, and is at least passingly familiar with its idiom, perhaps you’ve played an R&B gig, or heard a record, or been accidentally exposed to a few seconds of some form of popular music while incapacitated somehow, hears this recording beginning plainly on the 1. Not so, says theory person Robert Komaniecki, it is possible to torture another answer out of it, as many in the discussion on this video have done:
Answer 1 has it in a slow 4, with the snare drum on 2 and 4. Obviously the correct answer, if a person knows anything about the common practice of Rhythm & Blues* music:
The drums begin the track on the 1, the ROLLOUT line falls on the &1, the first rapped line after 0:45 comes in on the e&a1— “now where’d you GET” Subsequent rapped lines do something similar. The bass line is an ordinary funk rhythm:
Answer 2 has the drums in a half time feel, with the snare drum on 3, if we’re counting in 4, or on the 2 if we’re counting in 2/2.
ROLLOUT is on 4-1, first line lands on the &4&1. The riff is not felt in 2, but some people are more comfortable with the quarter note pulse here, than the slow quarter note above. So if someone wants to count it this way, fine.
That would put the bass line here:
Answer 3 is in cut time, a quarter note off, with ROLLOUT falling, inexplicably, on the 3-4, and the first rapped line, now where’d you get that platinum chain falling, as inexplicably, on &3&4&1&2.
Which would mean the recording starts like this:
And the bass line would go like this:
After the torrent of f-bombs, the plain question is, why/wtf/how would anyone choose Answer 3?
- They’re trolling/gaslighting. I would say it’s 90% that. Civilization is dying, and people will deliberately say the wrongest thing they can think of with great confidence and no justification just to get people to pay attention to them, and for whatever fractions of a penny the platform pays them for generating any “engagement” at all, no matter how senseless.
Or, civilization is dying and people are simply now wronger than they have ever been. - They are of a new breed of music theory nerd that lives in computers, has never played an instrument or performed, and this is all just numbers, and any answer can be right. ”Advanced” theory-sounding answers that no one agrees with are creativity to them.
- They were raised underneath a trailer, and upon emerging immediately became music theory majors, and were taught by the worst person on the entire planet, and then proceeded directly to commenting on Instagram videos, gaslighting.
- Spiritual whiteness, which began quaintly with simple clapping on the 1 and 3, has metastasized beyond all recognition into a sort of a funhouse, Timothy Leary perception of reality where black is white, white is plaid, up is sideways, and everyone looks like the wolfman.
Part of the problem is that, for a theory person, saying what it “definitely is”, where there is any ambiguity, is completely messed up. What you do is give an analysis and then justify it, and understand the other answer and explain why your analysis is better. You also need to understand the idiom of the music itself. You have know what a backbeat is. If your interpretation requires the drum groove to be backwards, you have to account for that. You have to know you have to account for that.
I am not a theory person, I am a player, and here the rhythm section establishes the groove framework quite plainly, and none of what happens on top of it contradicts it. Whatever is happening with the rhythm, you analyze it for how it relates to the drum groove.
Not that some music doesn’t begin deceptively, or ambiguously, like here:
If you hear the guitar riff starting on the 1, you’ll be off for a few bars when the drums come in, and it takes a second to adjust to where the 1 actually plainly is.
Here the drum groove is deliberately backwards, but everything else he plays supports the 1 where it clearly is. Nothing anyone plays supports calling the snare drum falling on the 2 and 4:
None of that happens on the Ludacris song. No shift in feel, nothing in the drum performance supports a beat 1 anywhere other than where it plainly falls in answers 1 and 2. Weird/wrong-seeming stuff happens, there’s just no justification supporting that being the case here.
If anyone is feeling gaslit by all this, and having doubts, here is Ludacris performing the song live, with a real drummer which makes it all plain, to any drummer at least:
It’s all too stupid. Let’s close with Questlove’s comment on it:
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I think that when musicians who aren’t drummers get confused about time signatures it’s generally because they start off counting twice as fast as they should. They can find the one and feel the beat but they don’t know to put the backbeat on two and four. which is something worth knowing: if the snare is on three you’re probably counting too fast (ignore half time feels) adjust accordingly. do not stubbornly keep counting at the same speed and move the downbeat to so the snare is where it should be.
I think a lot of them don’t play instruments, and do all their work on a laptop, and think that anything can be anything. Techbro syndrome where they think they’re the first person to ever think about something.
Plus a lot of civilians giving an answer by vibe, not knowing what any of it means.
I agree that most of these trends about how to count (insert popular song from a while ago) are usually pretty silly and bereft with manufactured debate.
Rollout is a song that has been on my group’s early 2000s set list for several years. We all loved the song and it was exciting because when we sat down to play it (myself a bassist for the better part of twenty years), it clicked in a rehearsal or two.
So imagine my horror when I mentioned the Rollout debate at rehearsal, only to learn that our singer counts it like method one, our drummer hears it as method two, and I realized I’ve been counting it like method three the entire time. Truly, I’m shaken to my core (but we have fun and it’s never presented an issue so it’s all good).
I completely understand why three is considered wacky, and thinking about it now, I think I line up most closely with one. But now I’m positively BAFFLED that I made it this far feeling it like three!