How You Get the World: Reflections on Taylor Swift, Pt. 5

Part 5: Taylor Swift, modal rap, and the end of "range"

Bass beat rattling the chandelier

You own it, you better never let it go.

All installments: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4 // Part 5 // Part 6 // Postscript 1

Taylor Swift’s flirtation with hip-hop during her rocket to fame was the subject of lots of eye-rolling, especially in 2009 when she collaborated with T-Pain as “T-Swizzle” on “Thug Story” at the CMT Awards.

But there was nothing new about this. Taylor Swift was covering “Lose Yourself” by Eminem in concert as early as 2007. She has a longstanding affinity and counter-intuitive skill for the rhythms of hip-hop and for its unironic triumphalism. She told Alex Macpherson in the Guardian in 2012: “One of the things people don't really recognise about the similarities between country and hip-hop is that they're celebrations of pride in a lifestyle.” By Reputation, she courted hip-hop more obviously with pop structures and featured rappers, leading to an NPR piece by Leah Donnella that tidily summed up what she borrowed from hip-hop:

[I]t's impossible to imagine that Swift didn't learn how to be a pop star by watching and listening to rappers. The lyrical storytelling; the meticulous attention to detail; the centering of her own perspective; the posturing; the commitment to a persona; the fixation on rivals, haters, and detractors; the positioning herself as marginalized and mistreated; the support of a crew: All of these are features of good rap.We know that Swift consumes rap. In 2011, she rapped a few lines of Nicki Minaj's "Super Bass" on the radio. She's been caught singing "Dilemma" at karaoke with Nelly and has filmed herself rapping along to Kendrick Lamar's "Backseat Freestyle." Later, Lamar was featured on her 2015 single, "Bad Blood." When she presented the 2015 Video Vanguard Award to Kanye West, she mentioned that one of the first albums she ever bought was West's The College Dropout. And she came of age in an era when every pop song that mattered featured a rapper.

I want to highlight components of Taylor Swift’s approach to songwriting that are more formally, not just spiritually or attitudinally, attuned to rap, and have led Taylor Swift down some of the same alleyways that rap went down through the 10s, into the world of amorphous modal songwriting. Like all Taylor Swift phenomena, the seeds are there from the beginning, usually long before they crop up in popular accounts. That is to say, there is more than one reason why “Lose Yourself” was a good fit for Taylor Swift in 2007.

Before getting to Taylor Swift’s songwriting approach, I need to lay out modal rap, the sing-rap style that proliferated from about 2014 to 2019 and for a few years was so dominant that there was almost no rap on the radio that didn’t sound like that style, or at least feature someone using it.

This is my bullet point summary of the phenomenon:

What is “modal rap”?

• Modal rap is a style that developed in the second half of the 10s: a melodic rapping style based on a limited set of notes. I’m using “modal” and “mode” to refer to a predictable, unchanging set of notes that can be played in any order—think ragas, or certain sung prayers.¹ This is in contrast to tonal music, where the “right” notes depend on which chord you’re playing. In tonal music, a note you just played in one chord might sound terrible against the next chord. In modal music, every note in the mode is always fair game.

• Simple modal music of the kind I’m describing emphasizes words and rhythmic patterns over melodies and harmonies. The benefit of limiting yourself to a handful of notes that can be sung in any order is that you can focus on words, rhythms, and, for lack of a better word, vibes, without thinking about the careful construction of melody against chord changes, which is a perennial problem in writing a strong pop hook. All the notes you’re singing “work,” so you don’t need to think so hard about what the next one’s going to be.

• The specific mode rappers landed on is pentatonic minor. Pentatonic minor is the foundation of the most common rock guitar solos.² It comprises five notes: the root, the minor third, the fourth, the fifth, and the minor (or “flat”) seventh in whatever key you’re in. If you play an A minor scale on a piano — start on “A” and play only the white notes — the notes in pentatonic minor are A-C-D-E-G.

• Rappers then sing these notes over and over again, in any order they choose. The benefit of modal singing is that you can sing any note in the mode at any time and it will scan as an acceptable melody, if not always a strong melody. Most rappers focus only on the latter four notes (again, in A, that would be focusing on C, D, E, and G). Their “home base” is the fifth (E), with lots of singing up and down between the next two notes (C and D), and occasional hops up to the minor seventh (G). The root (A) is rarely sung. You can try this yourself: play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in C on a piano or keyboard, but play an “A” in the bass instead. That’s modal rap.

• Rappers are improvising their melodies, but may use common rhythmic patterns or repeated melodic phrases for hooks. They are not singing “hook melodies,” per se—in fact, when modal rappers do sing a specific hook melody, it often sounds different, and often goes out of the strict mode.³

• The vocal range required to sing in this style is extremely limited. This improvisation is not improvisation like you'd hear in modal jazz music, or in a complex guitar solo—it’s improvisation like you might improvise lightly in certain sung prayers, rushing through the wine blessing to get to the meal faster on Shabbat, say. Literally anyone can do it.

I don’t have a strong opinion about whether modal rap was on net any good for music, but I think it’s been poorly theorized. The most common accounts I’ve seen frame it as a simplification of pop melody, and attribute the shift to artists like The Weeknd circa 2013. Instead, I think we need to see the shift to modal rap as an opening up of hip-hop to melody and, maybe more to the point, a decoupling of rhythmic and melodic considerations in the songwriting process. I think this basic idea—that you can sing common melodic phrases, or improvise on a simple pattern, and get lots of new rhythms and many more words into your pop song— is something that has a very long tail outside of modal rap proper. I hear what I’d call “melodic meandering” in lots of new pop music, some of which is exciting and some of which is deadly dull.

And I hear it a lot in Taylor Swift.

This makes some sense when you realize that Taylor Swift has never been a particularly gifted melody writer, and that, like in hip-hop, it’s often her rhythm and personality and phrasing that sell her songs more than the sort of melody that knocks your socks off. I think this may be by design: for Taylor Swift to become the biggest pop star in the world starting in the mid-aughts, she would need to compete against a juggernaut melody machine.

As she began her pop career, Taylor Swift was witnessing the apex of a previous and now bygone era of melody writing: the clockwork-like weaponization of the soaring chorus in teen confessional rock music, a sort of arms race to see who could blow the lid off their chorus the hardest, though usually it was just Max Martin and Dr. Luke competing against themselves. Max/Luke got the formula from indie rock: purportedly they wanted to rewrite Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Maps” with a real chorus and came up with “Since U Been Gone.”⁴

There’s a very specific move they made melodically that created what Mike Barthel once memorably called the “wind at the back” feeling of teen confessional rock music of that time. Here’s how the “wind at the back” confessional rock change works: You set your verses in a minor key—let’s say A minor— and sing the fifth (in A minor, that would be an E). Then you shift, either immediately or through a quick series of chord changes,⁵ to the major key, so that what was the fifth in the minor key becomes the major third in the relative major. You hold the note on “goooooone” in “Since U Been Gone,” and by the time you’ve moved from your minor verse to your major chorus (Leonard Cohen’s “minor fall, major lift,” perhaps), the whole sky has opened up and you’re ready to heal or fight or ascend or drive your car off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. It is ruthlessly sublime.

Taylor Swift tried this confessional teen pop move once on her first album, in the song “A Place in This World.” The song is wonderful, and she claims to have written it when she was 13, which would mean she wrote it before Kelly Clarkson broke through with the Max/Luke template. (Color me skeptical; maybe she wrote the verses when she was thirteen and workshopped the chorus in 2005?)

You can immediately hear why this style isn’t going to work dependably for her: the most important note in the song (an A, on “I’m a-LONE, on my OWN”) is right at the top of her comfortable vocal range. When she goes any higher (once, to a C#, on “all I know”) , her voice falters. I like that aspect of the song: it makes the wind at the back tentative. You’re sort of rooting for her to get to where she’s going because you don’t fully trust she’ll necessarily make it. Kelly Clarkson, by contrast, is always already there.

One limiting factor in Taylor Swift’s melody writing is that she is reluctant to write very far outside of her vocal range. Circa 2007, Taylor Swift could comfortably sing about one octave and a couple notes beyond—specifically the G below middle C to the B above middle C—and with much more comfort in her lower register. In “A Place in This World,” she can’t land on that highest note, a C#, comfortably, because it’s a whole step out of her comfort zone.⁶

Taylor Swift’s melody writing takes her range into account, in a way that other songwriters who also sing their own material don’t seem to sweat as much. One of the joys of listening to Carole King sing “Natural Woman” is how emotionally different her performance is than Aretha Franklin’s — you can hear her really working in the chorus, and the effect is raw and vulnerable, completely different from Franklin’s regal declaration of her own strength.

By contrast, Taylor Swift hugs the root tone a lot in her songs. To make up for this, she writes rhythmically, in a pattering style that in late 2008 didn’t sound like anything else on the radio except maybe Jack Johnson’s acoustic schlub-core. In the chorus of “Love Story,” she’s singing the root, second, and third over and over again — it’s “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” just like in modal rap, but in a major key instead of a minor key. If you played it in C, the chorus of “Love Story” would work out to a pattern of C-D-E-D again and again and again, giving the song a kind of perpetual motion machine rush—you almost can’t believe she’s getting away with it, that she’s going to make us feel like we’re soaring hitting those notes over and over again. She makes us fly while hardly budging herself.

I really can’t overstate how different this sounded on pop radio coming out of the mid-aughts. Absolutely nothing on the radio would hover around three notes in a comfortable, lower range like that and never develop or launch into the stratosphere for the chorus. (It made a bit more sense in country music, but what she does in “Love Story” is much more melodically simple than most country melodies, too.) Melodically the closest thing to it might be “Blame It” by Jamie Foxx and T-Pain, the prehistory of modal rap.⁷

Taylor Swift almost never goes into the stratosphere. Even when producers like Max Martin eventually coax her close enough—“we-eeee!” on “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” say—these are memorable exceptions. Most of her iconic soaring high notes in her pop hits tend to be ad-libbed: the “yeah!” coming out of the bridge of “I Knew You Were Trouble”; the “yeah-ohh!” coming out of the bridge in “Shake It Off.”

Taylor Swift is obviously not a rapper. But she’s using the same technique that rappers with limited vocal ranges used in the last decade, putting the emphasis on her words and timbres and rhythms and, even as early as 2008, starting to abandon the kind of tonal complexity that hitmakers tend to use to craft their choruses, focusing instead on how her specific personality and delivery will take something that on paper is repetitive—droning, almost—and make it sparkle.

So to bring it back home: “Lose Yourself” was a natural fit for Taylor Swift in 2007 because it was exactly the sort of chorus that Taylor Swift herself might write. Right in the pocket, the couple of notes that every rapper, and Taylor Swift, can comfortably sing. Taylor Swift could turn “Lose Yourself” into a Taylor Swift song because it was a Taylor Swift song.

1. Popular jazz famously went through a modal period starting in the 1950s, usually exemplified in critical accounts by Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Though the concept of a “mode” in this music is the same, I avoid the comparison here because there is much more harmonic complexity in modal jazz than there is in modal rap. Thinking about common sung prayers I might hear at temple provides a more intuitive connection to what rappers are doing than describing a Miles Davis trumpet solo from the late 50s.

2. My six-year-old is taking guitar lessons right now and the A minor pentatonic scale is the first thing the teacher gave him to learn, with the parenthetical note “(fundamental rock scale!)”

3. My favorite example is A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s “Look Back At It,” which is built on the same chord progression as “I Will Survive,” and has a melodic hook that incorporates notes outside pentatonic minor. Several of A Boogie’s songs use modal rapping for the verses but then switch to other melodic hooks for the chorus, like in “Drowning,” where the chorus introduces the pretty minor 6th on the word “drowning.” Because these songs use chord changes that don’t allow unchanging harmonic relationships, he has to be careful on the verses. In “Look Back At It,” e.g., there are moments where his go-to pattern hits a weird note: he keeps singing the Gb (the minor third in Eb minor) on the ii chord (F minor) leading to the V (Bb major); the Gb against an F minor chord sounds a little off.

4. I think the “Stroke of Genie-us” mash-up of The Strokes and Christina Aguilera from 2001 is an important milestone—you can hear exactly what Max Martin was thinking about, as Aguilera sounds incredible on the verses but then loses some of her luster when the combination produces a few bum notes in the chorus.

5. In a song in Amin/Cmaj, it usually goes A minor—>F major—>G major —>C major.

6. For comparison, Ashlee Simpson—who also is much more comfortable in her lower register and can in fact sing lower than Taylor Swift—in “La La” regularly hits the E note above the C# that Taylor Swift can barely hit. Admittedly, this probably absolutely shredded Ashlee’s voice: you can see why someone wouldn’t want to write a song where that note was so important! People talk a lot about the SNL fiasco but there is no Ashlee Simpson public event that makes me feel more uncomfortable than her getting booed at the Orange Bowl in 2005 after a rough “La La” where her voice refuses to hit that note.

7. There’s a long diversion I could make here into post-Aaliyah R&B, especially pointing to Cassie in terms of someone on the radio whose melodies are simple in the way Taylor Swift’s are. But in that diversion I would end up at the original point, which is the way that limiting melody gets you closer to the rhythms and maybe logic of rap (i.e. to collapse distinctions between the spoken and the sung).