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i think some of you are probably
wondering why i'm analyzing this song
and there's one reason and the reason is
it's on the downward spiral this is not
one of my favorite songs and
i skipped it pretty much every time when
i was growing up because i just didn't
get it
as soon as he said i have a big gun i
was like
next it just sounded like he was mocking
himself
or somebody was mocking him or he was
mocking somebody
somebody was being mocked it's pretty
dark subject matter and some people
think that this is sort of like
the lowest point of the protagonist or
like a turning point for him
if this does fit into the narrative it
seems like he's hit rock bottom in terms
of
ethics so this song has a very like
immature
satirical sound to me the drums kind of
sound like gunshots
you know everything's very distorted the
guitar is extremely distorted lots of
noise and it just gets increasingly
noisier until it basically
is like a car crash you know it just
burns out really quick
and it's messy and things just become
so out of control some folks feel that
it's really important for the narrative
and some folks feel that it's
superfluous
other people think that it should have
just been removed from the album
completely
we're gonna talk about if there is any
sort of musical merit
here and i think that there's a couple
things that are sort of interesting the
baseline reminds me of another song on
the downward spiral so it could be a
thematic
callback there's a very clear callback
to another song on the album by way of
the lyrics
there's a guitar riff that reminds me of
a classic rock song
and then there is the timing this song
gives me the
worst case of rhythmic displacement on
i think the entire nine of chanel's
discography have you ever struggled to
feel the downbeat of this song because i
still do
he had to know that this was going to
cause confusion for people
do you hear this song with the downbeats
starting on the snare like this
it's very challenging for me to hear it
with the snare on the downbeat but i do
think that that is
the true downbeat
and there are some reasons why just
pulling apart the multi-tracks being
able to hear where
the arrangement changes happen where
things enter
like the hi-hats and just how much
syncopation would have to exist to make
this work
is really a big giveaway but also
i do not want this is you know that
fooled me for years and it was
it seemed like everything was on an
offbeat and that should have clued me in
but instead i was like well it's jazzy
i had to create a little drum pattern
to re-anchor me with the correct
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downbeat
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i just think there's a lot of weird
syncopation in this song that throws us
off like
the 16th note offbeats being emphasized
by the kick
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and even in his vocal melody i think
that a lot of the time when we have the
downbeat with the snares
his vocal rhythm makes a lot more sense
but there are still spots where it just
sounds
so strange and so offbeat
but you know what does make sense is
nothing can stop me now
when we align the beat with the snares
then we get that
actual rhythm nothing can stop me now
which is just like nothing can stop me
now in piggy
so that's another indicator to me that
that is the true downbeat of the song
we heard it in piggy it's kind of this
careless vibe and ruiner kind of sounded
like denial to me
and now it's full-blown delusion i think
in this song so what makes this song
kind of
more simple and straightforward than the
others i think it has a lot to do with
the fact that it's a one chord song
all the way through it's almost like the
character is not evolving at all
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and what scale uh blues maybe
this reminds me of something very famous
in his vocal he's mostly uh singing like
the fourth to the
major third which we've been talking a
lot about that resolution
i am a big man so that's really
prevalent but then he's like
and then that's like the minor third
with the edge so you notice i
said blues and there are a couple
reasons for that and one is that the
bass line
actually has a flat five in it or
the tritone of the scale which we've
talked about in other videos
but check this out
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it's rhythmically the same i believe
we're
extremely similar
but there are just some differences in
the notes but
i mean it's hard for me to not imagine
that that wasn't an intentional
thematic connection
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you
approximately i think it's doing a
little bit of noodling
also the harmony on shoot is slightly
interesting because it reminds me of
help me from closer as far as i can tell
the harmonies that he's singing here
on shoot is the flat 3 of the scale up
here in his falsetto
and then the flat 7 which is the d one
of his favorite
scale degrees this is our tonic
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it's giving me the flavor of an e minor
seventh chord like inverted and with
missing notes
sounds pretty bluesy to me
maybe not bluesy maybe jazzy or just
something basically i think i would like
this song a lot more if i just
thought of it as a blues rock song and
like could feel it in that slower
halftime groove
and also just completely ignore the
lyrics and this sort of like outro
i do kind of like it because it gets
like really really noisy it feels like a
total loss of control
and there's this sort of like i don't
know march of the pigs and
piggy solo kind of uh drum track that
comes in
uh it's very muted and it's kind of
buried in the mix
but it was pretty cool to hear that
pulled out and it's got symbol crashes
which are
telling us where one is usually the
symbol crashes are on one
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usually
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and just as quickly as this song starts
it ends
and glitches and brings us to a very
very
different place do you think it fits in
the narrative
doesn't fit should have been yanked out
seems to be very polarizing i would say
so i'm curious to hear your thoughts but
be respectful
because we are not big men with guns
here
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right
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you