So the vocals are cool, the progression is great, the instrumentals simple and good – is there anything bad about this song? Don’t worry, there always is when it comes to the pop charts.
Most pop songs seem to be full of major chords, I assume because minor chords sound sadder and sad songs don’t sell to happy summery youngins, but Stolen Dance obviously isn’t full of major chords, nor is it happy. There’s an interesting chord on the verse, it sounds like a 7th of some kind, that really makes the progression pop – and same on the chorus. You’ll hear a shit ton of “G, Em, C, D” in pop songs, or variations of those four, but this progression – whatever it is – really pleases me because I’m just not familiar with it. Then we slide back into the verse, with those great drums and the interesting, very atypical chord progression giving it quite a bit of life. There’s a satisfying, simple beat, with Great Hair’s voice smoothly wavering on top, slightly off-key (although this may be a bit of an illusion, because it isn’t unpleasant) and then, during the chorus, he gets louder and the grit in his voice appears, which is quite neat. What’s going on in Stolen Dance? Not a whole lot. When a song comes out like Stolen Dance, which is not clean or boring (albeit fairly simple), and then actually becomes popular, it surprises me, and I would even say definitely pleases me.
The epitome of simple and boring.) Anyway, I’m veering off track here what I mean to say is that a good, simple, clean voice with a good, simple, clean sound is popular and has been popular since maybe just about forever. EDM is pretty simple and boring, after all (just look at Turn Down For What. I find the EDM craze to be kind of interesting because it seems to be the exact opposite – well, at least the opposite of clean, maybe not of simple and boring. There have always been exceptions – David Bowie is a good one – but in this decade, at least, Clean, Simple, and Boring seems to be what the public really embraces.
In fact it’s rather cool, and extremely welcome in a world that’s drowned in auto-tune, whose popular vocalists generally piss me off because they seem to have been stripped of all originality by the big companies or maybe just by society, who seem to really like a certain kind of sound – which is, it appears, a rather clean, uninteresting sound, like for instance the notes that spring from Mariah Carey or the newest popular teen idol. And as I continue to listen to it, I still think it is, but it becomes less and less of a problem each time I hear it. When I heard Stolen Dance for the first time, it was on Much – the Canadian equivalent of MTV – and I didn’t like it because the verse seemed vaguely off-key. As stated above, he usually has his head in the sandbox behind his house entitled ‘Obscure Music of the 2000s.’ But I couldn’t resist climbing out of my comforting world of Aesop Rock and Neutral Milk Hotel to take a look at this song – so enough exposition, Jesus Christ! Let’s get to the thing. So, does the loner behind this blog that nobody reads usually listen to popular music? No. Doesn’t he only look at indie stuff?Ībandoning all pretense that I’m a stuck-up hipster who only listens to super-obscure Aesop Rock songs from the early 2000s, let’s dive in and take a look at a very curious little quirk-of-a-hit, Stolen Dance by the Man With Great Hair, apparently known officially as “Milky Chance.” I will never refer to him as such, however, because since seeing the video all I can think is Great Hair.