{"id":6911,"date":"2011-04-26T08:51:10","date_gmt":"2011-04-26T12:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=6911"},"modified":"2011-04-26T08:55:57","modified_gmt":"2011-04-26T12:55:57","slug":"last-man-standing-songs-that-are-based-around-the-chord-progression-and-rhythm-of-sweet-jane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/last-man-standing-songs-that-are-based-around-the-chord-progression-and-rhythm-of-sweet-jane\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Man Standing: Songs That Are Based Around the Chord Progression and Rhythm of “Sweet Jane”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I love “Sweet Jane.” Although its chord progression and rhythm are probably part of the extended rock ‘n roll lineage of 3-chord classics like\u00a0“Louie Louie,” “Wild Thing,” and “Gloria,” I would argue that its distinctive rhythmic hitch established the song as its own dynastic chord progression.<\/p>\n

Last night, while watching the John Hughes<\/strong> “classic” Pretty in Pink<\/em> for the first time in my life I kept waiting for the title track to play,\u00a0hoping against hope\u00a0that it would inject a little excitement into this simplistic, overly nice<\/em> film that I felt justified for having been “too cool for school” to see when it was all the rage in my college years. Maybe the song plays at the beginning of the movie, the first 15 minutes or so of which I missed, but let me tell you, I was pretty pissed when… [SPOILER ALERT!]<\/em> …nice<\/em> guy Duckie<\/strong> (looking like he walked off the\u00a0set of The Undertones’ “Love Parade” video<\/a>) set Molly Ringwald<\/strong> free to track down nice<\/em>, rich guy Andrew McCarthy<\/strong> and the movie ended without blasting The Psychedelic Furs<\/strong>‘ big hit!<\/p>\n

The one silver lining is that I spent so much of my evening watching the long, nice<\/em>, mostly pointless scenes of this movie in anticipation of a small jolt of identification with a song I was once not<\/em> too cool to fully dig (ie, when it was just the title track to the Furs’ second album, prior to its remake for the wildly popular movie I had no interest in ever seeing) that I had time to realize that “Pretty in Pink” is an example of a song that is a direct descendant of “Sweet Jane.”<\/em> And that, Townspeople, is my long-winded way of introducing today’s Last Man Standing: Songs That Are Based Around the Chord Progression and Rhythm of “Sweet Jane.”<\/em><\/p>\n

So any songs in this LMS must have been written\/recorded after<\/em> “Sweet Jane” and must tap into that song’s distinctive hitch around a I-IV-V chord progression (with or without the “secret sauce” of Lou’s minor chord tucked in there). The hitch, I believe,\u00a0is the telltale trait in this rock song dynasty.<\/p>\n

As I was composing this post I spotted a note on another Townsperson’s Facebook page reminding me of a second entrant in this competition. I’ll let him\u2014or you\u2014provide that answer and whatever other answers might arise in this thread.<\/p>