Content Theory

A cou­ple of friends on Face­book just posted a per­for­mance by Car­rie Manolakos of Radiohead’s “Creep” (see below) that may be even more emo­tion­ally manip­u­la­tive than Thom Yorke’s orig­i­nal recording.

The chills I got at the crescendo reminded me of an arti­cle I read in the WSJ about a musi­cal term called appog­giatura, and how it sup­pos­edly makes you cry. But then NPR–who also cov­ered this story–ended up doing a fol­low up based on a listener’s com­ments, which leaves the sure-footed sci­ence behind this in ques­tion. (link to NPR segment)

Tech­ni­cally, Appog­giatura is “a grace note per­formed before a note of the melody and falling on the beat” (source), and whether or not it is sci­en­tif­i­cally proven to make you cry (or whether or not there are appog­giat­uras in Radiohead’s “Creep”), I was defense­less against Ms. Manolakos’ wail­ing, even after sev­eral listens.

This would lead me to believe that the sci­ence is sound, but I’m not even com­pe­tent enough in musi­cal the­ory to iden­tify an appoggiatura.

In any event, after some furi­ous googling for “Radio­head” “Creep” and “Appog­giatura,” I did find a rather amus­ing arrange­ment of the song by Frank Ben­nett, which made me more likely to want to gam­ble, drink and cruise for skirts. (see below)

Does that then prove the sci­ence behind Swing?

Either way, it’s okay you wake up with yourself.

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