Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.
—James Broughton
Emotion is obvious. If we feel emotion, we pay attention. This could be prompted by the melody of a song, a single word, a concept or an idea, an image, or anything else that triggers feelings, be they faint or extreme.
Ludwig van Beethoven was the reigning musical Iconist of his time, so much so that he was mocked by critics and contemporaries during and even after his life for the childlike quality of some of his melodies. In 1899, over one hundred years after “Ode to Joy” was written, the American music critic Philip Hale described what is now Beethoven’s most revered composition thus: “But oh, the pages of stupid and hopelessly vulgar music! The unspeakable cheapness of the chief tune, ‘Freude, Freude!’” The very simplicity that Hale hated is the repetitive Block melody that causes the composition to not only stick but endure.
A few years earlier, on November 6, 1882, composer and music teacher Ferdinand Praeger published his case against repetition, “On the Fallacy of the Repetition of Parts in the Classical Form,” in which he stated,
All will readily admit that a first impression, however striking, is weakened when followed by an immediate repetition. Would ever a poet think of repeating half of his poem; a dramatist a whole act; a novelist a whole chapter? Such a proposition would be at once rejected as childish. Why should it be otherwise with music? . . . Since any whole part-repetition in poetry would be rejected as childish, or as the emanation of a disordered brain, why should it be otherwise with music?
Despite the criticism, Beethoven’s instinctual use of Blocks is what brought listeners into the vast complexity of his compositions, and still does over two hundred years later. The four-note opening of his Fifth Symphony (that instantly recognizable dun–dun–da–dun!) also works as a melodic Block. The symphonies are intricate, but the Block melodies are the nursery rhyme–like access points that allow us to embrace them. It is precisely what Hale reviles as hopelessly vulgar that is hailed as one of the most beautiful compositions ever written. Beethoven was one of the most accomplished musicians of his time. With Blocks, we can understand and focus on the relationship between complexity and simplicity as the simple mechanism that it is.
In music, the Block is a leading DOMINANT REPETITIVE melody, lyric, or rhythm that will immediately and irrepressibly force itself into the mind of a listener. It’s what grabs our attention and pulls us into a song. It is the Block that immediately gets us to stop and listen. Blocks are the reason we can’t get a song out of our heads. They create the “hook”—that is what makes a song “catchy.” Blocks capture our attention and do not let go.
Elizabeth Margulis, music perception and cognition expert and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, conducted a clever experiment through her research at the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas where she found conclusive evidence for the power of repetition in music, which she presents in a study titled “Aesthetic Responses to Repetition in Unfamiliar Music.” Using the characteristically dissonant and overtly nonrepetitive compositions of twentieth-century composer Elliott Carter, Margulis found that when they were digitally altered and rearranged to be repetitive, listeners considered the music “not only as more enjoyable and more interesting [than Carter’s original nonrepetitive composition], but also more likely to have been composed by a human artist rather than randomly generated by a computer.” Margulis concludes, “When we know what’s coming next in a tune, we lean forward when listening, imagining the next bit before it actually comes. This kind of listening ahead builds a sense of participation with the music.” According to Margulis’s research, when there’s repetition in music, we simply enjoy it more!
This is true for everything humans perceive; it is the reason we still listen to these iconic compositions hundreds of years later. Repetition is what makes music stand out and endure.
Looking for examples in more recent music history, we can also turn to nearly every song Michael Jackson ever wrote. Beethoven’s and Jackson’s most memorable compositions can be defined by two very profound and distinct characteristics: bold, repetitive, and stunningly beautiful, emotional melodies and/or rhythms soaring over more complicated, intricate, and sophisticated arrangements.
Jackson’s masterful use of Blocks is why Thriller is the bestselling album of all time. Billy Joel’s greatest hits album is the fourth-best-selling record.
Michael Jackson used nursery rhyme–type rhythms and melodies in all his songs, from “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” to “Will You Be There.” Again, it is the reason his music got attention. Despite his complexity as a writer and performer, it’s his melodies (his Blocks) that we remember. No matter what you think of Jackson’s character or personal life, there is no denying the global magnetism of his melodies. Well-crafted Blocks grab us by the collar and hook in to us. Blocks don’t care whether we want to pay attention. They make us pay attention.
Successful songs (think hits by Elvis, the Beatles, Madonna) use multiple Blocks with repetitive riffs, multiple melodies, and countermelodies to help make the music worm inside our ears. These songs stand the test of time. There are scores of genius artists in the world who do not get the attention they deserve because they do not understand the importance of overrepetitive, overdominant melodies.
It is nearly impossible to succeed without giving your audience a Block—the elementary access point that they are all starving for. In music a simple nursery rhyme–type melody, rhythm, or lyric (the sonic equivalent of a central visual image) is dominant and instantly comprehensible to our minds.
It is not a coincidence that three of the most commonly known nursery rhymes, “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Baa, Baa Black Sheep” and the “ABC’s” song, all share the exact same melody. This is the perfect example of how a Block can help us to retain information; it is the sonic equivalent of John Locke’s observation of the toy ABC block. Mozart himself is credited with helping to bring this timeless folk melody to a larger audience, using the melody in his Twelve Variations on “Ah! Vous dirai-je, Maman” K.265/300e. It is not surprising that Mozart took an interest in the simple French folk song, as he wrote “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” (“A Little Night Music”), which is also dominated by a repetitive Block melody and is strikingly similar in its unforgettable simplicity.
Sometimes, repetition in music is a deliberate cinematic technique—not just to help us remember or hook us, but also to tell a story. A leitmotif—a recurring musical phrase associated with a person, place, or idea—is a musical technique that was often used by opera composers. Today, it’s often used in music for films. The original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve, Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark have the most memorable movie scores of all time. It is not a coincidence they were all written by the same Iconist.
The core repetitive nursery rhyme–type melodies are so intrinsically tied to these films that the second we hear them they give us a feeling and take us right back to the emotion and power of watching the film. John Williams did this so consistently it is likely he is a self-aware Iconist, using Blocks with great deliberation and precision. As with Mozart and Beethoven, John Williams’s film scores will surely stand the test of time, and people will likely be listening to them in a hundred years as they continue to stir powerful emotion.
Any song may contain up to three dominant repetitive Blocks—whether a melody, countermelody, or rhythm—for it to cut into our senses. Any musician can employ Blocks using this pattern. However, like so many painters, designers, and other artists, few of them do . . . and many sit and wonder why they are not successful or attracting an audience.
Having a unique sound can also be a potent weapon. Take it from Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the lead singer of perennial alt-rock band the Dandy Warhols, who have been together for over twenty-five years and were a favorite band of the late David Bowie. Taylor-Taylor, who writes emotional repetitive melodies, put this bluntly in terms of how he approached his latest album, Why You So Crazy:
For me, emotional singularity or emotional power is more important than all of the other things. Anything that really sounds like another band or record, unless you’re doing it well, I find it detracts from your emotional power. You have to be pretty fucking amazing to use pastiche to strengthen your hand, otherwise it dulls your sword. You might like it but it blunts your emotional power of being transportive and emotionally transcending (to) someone who hears it at that moment.
Take, for another example, my close friend Hector Delgado, who is a staggeringly talented hip-hop producer. Hector is a genius, and when he is on two turntables, his hands are so fast you can’t see them move. It is like watching the speed and dexterity of a classically trained pianist. Over his long career, Hector has produced tracks for Jay Z, 50 Cent and G-Unit, Eminem, D12, Kendrick Lamar, TDE, and what seemed like an endless array of hip-hop and pop superstars and labels—yet no one knew his name. Not unlike the fighter Chael Sonnen’s early struggles in the world of MMA, Hector lingered as maybe the most successful yet (proportionally to his prolific work) unknown hip-hop producer in the world for nearly two decades.
I have always looked up to Hector and have often gone to him over the years to get advice and help on not only my art projects but on life. One day he came to me frustrated and expressed that he wasn’t getting the up-front money and recognition of some of his contemporaries and asked me why I thought that was. Quite honestly, I was uncomfortable giving my opinion considering how much I admired him, and I told him I would rather not. He insisted. I reluctantly explained to him that he was acting as a kind of cowboy for hire and that he didn’t have his own unique sound—his signature Block’d style. I explained to him that guys like Timbaland and Pharrell Williams were hired and paid for their sound and that he, Hector, was being hired to give the artist what they wanted. I told Hector that if he settled on a signature repetitive sound, his Block, people would find him. He told me he already had stuff like that.
Hector started focusing on more ethereal, cinematic, emotive soundscapes with beats laid out over heartbreaking ’80s pop hits with his postmodern sensibility. His sound crystalized, and today Hector is one of the world’s most famous producers. Working alongside superproducer Danger Mouse, he coproduced one of the most successful albums of 2015, A$AP Rocky’s AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Hector’s beat-driven, smoky balladic rhythms worked seamlessly with megastar A$AP Rocky’s ethereal sound of cloud rap. When I asked Hector how he eventually found his style, he simply said, “I think we all gravitate toward the things we are exposed to. I am a child of the eighties.” Hector has received, and continues to receive, an avalanche of press and acclaim and is now a superproducer in his own right.
The artists that do succeed on a popular or mass-demand level always use Blocks—highly repetitive dominant melodies.
Let’s use another example from popular music. The multiplatinum rock band Rage Against the Machine is widely known for one signature song, the first single on its 1992 self-titled debut album. Despite three more records over a decade that saw the band flourish creatively and raise its profile with fans, the song “Killing in the Name” remains Rage Against the Machine’s standard and is considered one of the most influential contemporary youth anthems against racism and police brutality.
The song doesn’t contain a traditional structure. Instead, it relies on a series of impassioned and repetitive melodic statements. In fact, every lyric is repeated over and over again, with the phrase “killing in the name of” aggressively proclaimed at least five times, as the hook and one of several Blocks in the song. The song initially focuses on the chant “And now you do what they told ya,” with lead singer Zack de la Rocha shouting the lyric almost twenty-five times throughout the course of the five-minute song. This deliberate repetition transforms the phrase “now you do what they told ya” into a another Block and invests it with emotion. The impassioned lyrics command attention. The song gives the listener one Block statement to connect to at a time; it doesn’t give any other choice.
Whether or not we personally feel disenfranchised, none of us want to be told that we are puppets just doing what we’re told (that is why it resonates emotionally with so many). And after building to a climax, the song culminates with a defiant twist on the iconic lyric, a Block, as de la Rocha rhythmically repeats, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”
Rage Against the Machine was one of the most influential hard rock groups of the ’90s, and its success was neither dumb luck nor coincidence. Tom Morello, the band’s lead guitarist, and cofounder alongside de la Rocha, is a Harvard graduate with a degree in social science. Despite the aggression and ardent simplicity of “Killing in the Name,” I imagine de la Rocha and Morello worked very intentionally as they crafted the single.
“I was actually shocked,” music producer Garth Richardson told Spin magazine in an article examining the song’s impact twenty years later. When the band first shared the track with him, Richardson recalled, “I thought it was an anthem. From way back then until now, every kid still feels the actual same way. Every kid hates their parents when they’re 16, 17 years old.” The lyrics connected to the universal desire of teenagers to assert their independence and avoid being controlled.
Indeed, the repetitive simplicity of “Killing in the Name” allows for instant connection, but once that connection is made, potential fans are then willing to listen for the intricacies and the message beneath the surface energy and explicit lyrics.
We’ve been able to have our cake and eat it too. Every song, every T-shirt, is absolutely a pure expression of what we want to do. And it connects.
—Tom Morello
Global phenomenon Radiohead has sold over thirty million albums around the world with little to no radio play. On nearly every song, across nine full-length albums, singer Thom Yorke commonly repeats a simple, nursery rhyme–type dominant melody—a Block—over and through the entirety of every song, from the beginning of the album to the end. It is the bold, exhaustive use of Blocks in repetition that has propelled Radiohead to be one of the most successful, immediately recognizable bands in the world, even though listeners can’t always understand some of the lyrics he sings. The aggressively repeated melody, like Rage Against the Machine’s repetitive phrases, captures the listener and doesn’t let go. Blocks give the audience no choice but to stop, take notice, and imprint. Blocks are powerful. We can often remember decades later melodies we’ve only heard a few times, and as with all other Blocks, they can bring mass information and memories along with them.
Just like Yorke, Michael Jackson used repetitive, brazen, aggressive Blocks to pull us into every one of his songs. They are why “mama-say–mama-sa–mama-coosa” sung loud over ten times is so addictive and why Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Beethoven’s dun–dun–da–dun! have stood the test of time. How many incredible breakthroughs have we missed out on, or are we missing out on, because unsung geniuses and innovators didn’t know to use Blocks?
Now, to be clear—not everything is meant to be screamingly simple. Arthur Russell and John Cage are artists I love. Many of you may have never heard of them, and they are certainly obscure compared to pop superstars like Britney Spears. Russell and Cage weren’t striving for mass appeal as their be-all, end-all; they were experimental artists. These guys knew who they were. Everyone should know what gets attention and make a choice.
If an artist doesn’t understand the power that a Block melody carries, they might be less heard and not know why. The legendary Quincy Jones has a single-minded, sacred view of the absolute authority of melody. “Melody is king, and don’t you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they’re not; they’re just an accompanying factor.”
In understanding Blocks, the choice to be heard is there for everyone, no matter what they do, rather than leaving it up to chance. Blocks are tools and should be seen as such, like a painter might choose a color or a composer might choose a chord progression.
Melody is God’s voice. It’s clothed by lyrics, but melody is God’s voice—that’s the power.
—Quincy Jones
The lesson here is that if you lead with too much complexity—whether it’s in a fruit jam or a musical jam—you’ll lose that microsecond in which someone will subconsciously decide to stay engaged with you or reject you and move on. Presenting a bold Block up front allows you to offer a wider and wider array of choices after your audience has already connected to what you are trying to say.
This is true for music, business, art, and even the relationships we will build with people throughout our lives. Uniqueness and emotion, whether visual, musical, or conceptual, serve to accelerate the attention they get and the speed at which something becomes iconic.