Lately I've been obsessed by Paul McCartney's song Jet. Pop music critics focus on lyrics because they're writers and they understand words better than music. So there's a lot of talk about what the lyrics mean in this song - though they're essentially nonsense designed to sound great - and not nearly enough about the startlingly abstract descending melodic line that's the centerpiece. You'll hear it in the first phrase:
I can almost remember their funny faces
and then, in a more elaborated form, in the second:
That time you told them you were going to be marrying soon
If you try to sing these lines getting the melody and rhythm exactly right, I think you'll find it hard! Or maybe I'm just bad at singing... but I don't think so - I think they're rather slippery. And so he put this melody in several extremely catchy frames:
Starting the song, a repeated ominous 4-note theme. This should remind you of the phrase "band on the run" from the title song of this album.
A recurring bump-and-grind thing on rhythm guitar, which anchors the whole piece. This is actually reminiscent of a reggae rhythm, since it plays the 3rd and 4th beats while leaving the 1st and 2nd silent.
Most obviously, the shouted chorus of "Jet!" The whole band sings this, and its intense while still sounding cheery. They do it 3 times before the main lyrics come in with that descending melody. From then on, the first 2 of the 3 are followed by an insanely catchy "woo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo". This instantly grabs everyone.
A chorus with a different type of melody:
Ah Mater want Jet to always love me
Ah Mater want Jet to always love me
Ah Mater, much later
@johncarlosbaez That was the first album I ever owned - I had a grade 5 teacher who spent some time one day telling us how McCartney’s bass lines were melodic, and playing some of the songs at higher speed on reel-to-reel tape machine to make it stand out. I must have come home raving about it, as my grandmother (presumably on the advice from my mother) got it for my 10th birthday.
I lived in Nigeria in 1969-1971 or so, and while shitshow is the right word, I have some empathy for the difficulty of going from colonial rule to independence without institutions struggling.
@raganwald@MichaelPorter - maybe Michael just meant the recording project was a shitshow. McCartney writes:
"... we had been in Lagos a couple of weeks, we were held up and robbed at knife point. [....] Their eyes were wild and Linda was screaming, ‘He’s a musician, don’t kill him,’ you know, all the unreasonable stuff you shout in situations like that. So I’m saying, ‘What do you want? Money?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, money,’ and I handed some over. Shaking, we walked on home and we were just sitting down having a cup of coffee to try and recover our nerves and there was a power cut. We thought they had come back and cut the power cables. We had a lot of trouble sleeping that night and got back to the studio the next day to be told, ‘You’re lucky to be alive. If you had been black, they’d have killed you. But, as you’re white, they know you won’t recognise them.’ I wanted to call the police, but everyone said it would do no good there at all. With that we had to carry on and make the record, adding to the pressure, which we had already got. It seemed stuffy in the studio, so I went outside for a breath of fresh air. If anything, the air was more foul outside than in. It was then that I began to feel really terrible and had a pain across the right side of my chest and I collapsed. I could not breathe and so I collapsed and fainted. Linda thought I had died."
@hugoestr - if you like Ram (1971) and Band on the Run (1973), you're almost certain to like Venus and Mars (1975). The first few songs on this are like an extended suite, with transitions up to the standards of Uncle Albert:
I want to think more about the music. For example: why does that 4-note theme sound so foreboding? I think it's just II, II, III, IV - triads on the second, second, third and fourth of a major scale. But the triad on the second is minor (as usual) and the fourth is unresolved (since we don't go up to the fifth), so when it repeats we stay in suspense.
But about the lyrics. "Jet" was the name of a cute black Labrador puppy:
"She came back one day pregnant. She proceeded to walk into the garage and have this litter ... Seven little black puppies, perfect little black Labradors, and she's not black, she's tan. So we worked out it must have been a black Labrador. What we do is if either of the dogs we have has a litter, we try to keep them for the puppy stage, so we get the best bit of them, and then when they get a bit unmanageable we ask people if they want to have a puppy. So Jet was one of the puppies."
Somehow this makes the line
want Jet to always love me
far more cute.
The song was inspired by McCartney meeting Linda's dad - that's the "sergeant major". But Linda became Jet, and things get strange, like:
And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette
Huh? The word "suffragette" was introduced purely to rhyme with Jet:
"I make up so much stuff. It means something to me when I do it, and it means something to the record buyer, but if I’m asked to analyze it I can’t really explain what it is. ‘Suffragette’ was crazy enough to work. It sounded silly, so I liked it."
So I'd say he's a master of the craft of music, willing to use lyrics mostly for their sound.
@johncarlosbaez I think it possible that the music and the lyrics are informed by the Bowie song which came out the year before, Suffragette City. Say, a old-fashioned rocker comments on the glam rock scene.
@oschene - there's definitely a hint of sexual fluidity in
I thought the major was a lady suffragette
but I wouldn't want to claim the lyrics had any particular meaning. Still, Bowie's excellent song would have brought that word to mind!
For anyone who doesn't yet know it, here it is. Note the song's very last word, "suffragette", is sung in a sharp, spiky way - a bit like it is in "Jet".
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