Modern vs. ancient

POP EXPLORED, part seven. Time to create some perspective: hence Coldplay’s Viva la Vida (current) vs. the Bee Gees’ Night Fever (Feb 7, 1978), a gap equivalent to several pop lifetimes.

Coldplay. Slickly controlled conventional structure (Eight bars repeated, middle eight, eight bars again), conventional instrumental line: guitars produce “train” sound (probably based on no more than four chords) later augmented with strings, lyrics that scan, hummable tune, chorus of la-las for good luck, and the inevitable execrable drumming.

The song is an update of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

One minute I held the key,
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand.

Includes an excellent couplet:

Once you go, there was never,
Never an honest word.

Hilariously middle-class line-up: Christopher Anthony John Martin, William Champion, Mark Buckland, Guy Rupert Berryman. Success based on all the self-evident virtues. Plus lots of polishing.

Bee Gees. Having seen, and unexpectedly enjoyed, Saturday Night Fever (albeit thirty years on) I was familiar with Night Fever. Most pop enthusiasts have difficulty identifying the different genres but this is quite definitely “disco”. Which I take to be heavily rhythmic, melodically staccato accompaniment to predominantly single-syllable-word lyrics eventually lapsing into repetition. Typically:

Then I get night fever, night fever.
We know how to do it.

As with ballet, the primitive nature of the music is lost (ie, becomes critically invulnerable) against the dancing. Which can be surprisingly chaste in the movie – almost like square dancing.

Conclusion: It’s apples vs. purple sprouting broccoli. One’s a song the other’s a toe-tapper.