Drive Carefully, Pop-Pickers…

You must have noticed a particularly irritating rock’n’pop tactic to which certain songwriters resort when forced into a desperate compositional corner: having flogged every last bit of life from their tune but being unable think of any natural way of killing the damn thing off, a last-ditch decision is made to shift everything up a semi-tone and just keep going, in the hope (i) that this will provide the dirge with an extra dose of energy, and (ii) that the listener won’t notice the awful jarring effect as the musical gears screech protestingly.

It usually sounds absolutely horrible, but that hasn’t stopped Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and many others from indulging in this reckless musical practice as repeat offenders.

It just won’t do, and now there’s a website, the Truck Driver’s Gear Change Hall of Fame, dedicated to keeping track of the list of musicians who have been tempted by the dark side in this way. When the revolution comes, this kind of behaviour should be punishable with at least a stern ticking-off by the musicological authorities, so it’s important to maintain a list of the principal perpetrators to date.

The FAQ gives this high-minded description of the site’s purpose:

This site functions as an educational resource with the aim of ensuring that in a better future world, our children, our children’s children, and ideally also our children’s children’s children, avoid this musical crime. Equally, there is an element of name-and-shame involved, to help prevent those who may already have offended from doing so again in their career. Although frankly I think it’s too late for Westlife.

I especially enjoyed Dominic Pedler’s essay on the musical theory of the Truck Driver’s Gear Change, which includes a discussion of some cases in which it appears at first sight that even the Beatles couldn’t resist. Quite rightly, Paul McCartney is released without a stain on his character for the modulations in ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and ‘Penny Lane’, but Pedler is a bit less sure about ‘Octopus’s Garden’ and a few others, deciding to nominate the moptops for an honorable Yorkie in recognition of these lapses in ingenuity.

Update: Non-British readers will most likely have no idea what a Yorkie is and what its relevance might be. Fair enough: the Yorkie is a perfectly ordinary chocolate bar which was advertised in the late ‘seventies and early ‘eighties as being so extraordinarily chunky (I believe that was the adjective chosen) that the biggest baddest trucker could subsist on nothing but as he drove up and down the nation’s motorways during the night. Personally, I’ve always preferred a bag of wine gums.