Ethan Hein on "Iron Man" and "Wish You Were Here"--formal complexity in a riff-basher and hypermetrical ambiguity in a ballad--and I half-jokingly suggest that "Iron Man" is a masterpiece of thematic (riff) differentiation within a nine-part rondo pattern

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/i-dont-hear-the-song-as-being-about-syd-barrett-i-hear-it-as-describing-the-failed-bromance-between-david-gilmour-and-roger-waters-a-music-professor-breaks-down-pink-floyds-wish-you-were-here

 

If these lyrics were presented to you as a poem in a book, you probably wouldn’t be impressed, but the music elevates them. This is true of a lot of Pink Floyd songs, and songs generally. If your melodies, harmonies, arrangement and production are this excellent, it can make whatever words you’re singing seem vastly more profound.

 

That was kind of a thing in 1970s rock and pop, though, wasn’t it?  If I took lyrics from songs by Stevie Wonder, Pinkfloyd and David Bowie and tried to analyze them the way I would with songs by Bob Dylan or poems by Donne or Eliot or Wallace Stevens then Wonder, Waters, and Bowie would come off far the worse for wear.  But … the musical settings of pedestrian texts elevates them whether we’re talking about a Stevie Wonder song or, ahem, a John Dowland song (some of those texts he set to music were just not that inspiring).

Ethan Hein's discussion of hypermetrical ambiguity and phrase elision is fun and does a lot to explain how the Waters/Gilmour song is not nearly as simple as it sounds if you start breaking it down by phrase-lengths and harmonic rhythm. Pinkfloyd may have had to leave Syd behind but they got more ambitious with their musical forms and interest in long-form songwriting.  They peaked (and overdid it) with Animals.  I think "Dogs" holds up because the band didn't do what Yes so often did, which is bludgeon you with riff after riff without giving you a cognitive through-line; instead Pinkfloyd's "Dogs" can be heard as a massive double binary form like "Great Gig in the Sky" (ABAB).  

If you have a parade of mercurial riff-switches in six minutes this isn't an obstacle to the song being indelibly seared into the memory.  This gives me my transition into Ethan Hein's other classic rock song analysis, Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".  Earlier this year I blogged about how I thought Ethan Iverson's reservation about the piano sonatas of Nikolai Kapustin was based on a sound intuition and proposed that the concepts he may have been looking for are thematic presentation and thematic differentiation. Kapustin's piano sonatas have thematic presentation to spare but he wasn't so good at differentiating them.  Conversely, you can cram in riff after riff in a harmonically static soundscape but if every riff is unmistakable ... you get "Iron Man".

 

https://www.musicradar.com/artists/they-were-unfairly-dismissed-by-critics-and-listeners-with-good-taste-as-mindlessly-primitive-a-music-professor-breaks-down-the-theory-behind-black-sabbaths-iron-man

Ethan Hein breaks down “Iron Man” riff by riff and I can’t but make a half-joking and half-serious reply.  If we substitute the riff names with letters then we get a structure that looks something like this.

      iAB AC AC AD—DC AB Ai--E

In classical music there’s an axiom that repetitions can be collapsed to simply the analysis of a form.  If the main riff functions as a “chorus” then let it be the “refrain” in a rondo form.  For a rock song we can dispense with the idea of tonal discursiveness and key regions as superfluous to form; what we don’t get rid of is the idea that melodic and rhythmic profiles and tempo changes count for variables in thematic presentation and differentiation. 

 

      AB AC A  D    AB A (Coda)

 

If you squint your ears, so to speak, you can hear “Iron Man” as an elaborate nine-part rondo. It’s at the outer limits of formal complexity but it still works.  Most theory courses don't even mention that rondos can have up to nine parts but nine-part rondos do exist (I read a case that one of the giant movements of a Sor guitar sonata should be interpreted as a nine-part rondo so making giant riff-bashing musical forms at the outer limits of what non-guitarists want to listen to happens in classical music at least as often as it has in metal a century afterward. ;) 

One of the canards in art song vs pop song is pretending that the materials are somehow foundationally different in terms of music and in terms of text.