What angular sounds like

Up front, I want to say this to all the music critics out there: Respect. I can’t do what you do. Sure, I dabble in music writing. But routinely describing and evaluating performances and recordings? I’d feel more confident doggypaddling across the ocean.

That said — and I know I’m not alone in this — I have noticed and been irked by the tendency of music critics to recycle certain adjectives. Chief among them: angular. It’s a byword that critics use offhandedly as if I’m supposed to know what it means. Like it’s obvious what angular sounds like.

Casual reading of reviews wasn’t giving me a satisfactory definition, and so I embarked on a systematic interrogation of the literature. Plumbing the depths of library databases and web archives, slowly I pieced together a spreadsheet containing nearly 4,000 citations across 16 publications. Unavoidably incomplete, this corpus nonetheless provides a representative sample of the angular zeitgeist.¹

Much of the evidence I’ve gathered is diffuse and contradictory. For example, angular has been used to describe rock songs as different-sounding as “Lithium” by Nirvana² and “20th Century Schizoid Man” by King Crimson.³ Albums garnering the description include Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman,”⁴ Lindsey Buckingham’s “Go Insane,”⁵ and Kenny Loggins’s “Leap of Faith.”⁶ Far from indicating a narrow definition, my research suggests there is a broad spectrum of angularity in music.

But if you’re only here for a quick answer, try this: The meaning of angular often depends on the genre. In writing about classical and jazz music, it often applies to large melodic jumps — in a word, atonality. On the other hand, in writing about rock and pop, it often applies to choppy rhythms — in a word, staccato.

Puzzling over the meaning of angular rock is what got me started on this foolish quest, so let’s begin our discussion with that genre.

Rock and pop

Archives I consulted for this project are essentially limited to articles published in the 21st century. Judging from these sources, the most angular years in rock and pop were 2005 and 2007, where the term was applied to dozens of different bands from the Afghan Whigs to Youth Group. The following line chart — itself very angular — plots instances of the term as used across 11 publications from 2000 to 2025.

Album and concert reviews are almost always published in the same year as their subject. But profiles, obituaries, and other articles often refer to past works. In this way, a band or a piece of music may earn the angular label retroactively. For example, a writer in 2001 called attention to the “first angular chords” of Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” which was recorded almost three decades earlier.

Occasionally writers will note a modern band reaching all the way back to the 1960s to invoke “surf rock’s angular riffs.” But what makes a riff angular? Does it leap all around the fretboard like Dick Dale on “Miserlou”? Or does it have a staccato feel like his backing band, the Del-Tones?

It would seem to be the latter, judging by the band most frequently associated with angular. The Scottish group Franz Ferdinand helped launch an early 2000s wave of “indie” rock sometimes labeled “dance punk.” As NME’s Emily Barker wrote of the band in a 2014 retrospective: “Their self-titled debut can be held solely responsible for the popularisation of the term ‘angular’ to describe guitar riffs.” That’s exaggerated, but not by much.

Franz Ferdinand’s breakthrough hit, “Take Me Out” (2004) is certainly staccato. At times, the guitars, bass, and drums are all in unison, playing “four on the floor” — that is, on downbeats only, without any sustain or interstitial ornamentation. Another band frequently described as angular is Bloc Party, whose song “Banquet” (2004) is propelled by a frenetic start-stop chord progression. We may deduce that this quick-jab style of playing is what makes these songs, and these bands, angular.

Throughout rock criticism, angular doesn’t often stand alone. Usually there are other adjectives nearby to give it context: jagged, stabbing, hard-edged, abrasive, and dissonant are the most common — the last suggesting a harmonic dimension in addition to the rhythmic. Angular is also most often used alongside the genre labels post-punk and new wave, with ad hoc descriptors like art-rock, indie-pop, and avant-funk sometimes present.

Guitar is by far the word most commonly associated with angular, and riff is the second most common. The following word cloud provides a sense of which words most frequently accompany angular. Simplified noun, verb, and adjective forms are used. Band names and obvious terms like song and music have been suppressed.

Franz Ferdinand and similar acts are often said to emulate two post-punk bands of the late 1970s, Wire and Gang of Four. The angularity of these bands is typified by the repetitive, syncopated, and staccato opening chords of Wire’s “Three Girl Rhumba” (1977) and Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” (1979).⁷

There’s at least one direct line from angular seventies rock to angular aughts rock. Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill⁸ went on in the 2000s to produce albums by the Futureheads and other groups that critics described as angular. One Pitchfork review delineates “the Gang of Four gang of four (Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Futureheads, Maximo Park).”

In the 2000s, not only did bands make angular sounds, they had angular looks. Skinny jeans accentuated the young musicians’ gaunt frames, and even their haircuts had geometric flair. NME defined “Blochead” as a “fringe that covers half your face and was made popular by Bloc Party guitarist Russell Lissack.”

There was even the London label Angular Recording Corporation, which launched in 2003 and released CDs by the Long Blondes, Klaxons, and Wetdog, among others.

Angular rock stuck around despite quickly wearing out its welcome. As early as 2006, Pitchfork writers in particular had had enough — though at times it was unclear whether they objected to the sound or to the word. Cory B. Bryom wrote that the year so far had been “stuffed with bands exemplifying the sort of adjectives that give critics a bad name: angular, sharp, spastic — basically, shorthand phrases that don’t actually do much to convey the sound of a record to the reader.”

Disdain for angular music wasn’t limited to writers. Artists also got into the act.

“People need to stop listening to Gang Of fucking Four,” Flats frontman Dan Devine opined in a 2010 interview with NME. “Half a decade of raping the same record? Bloc Party and Franz was five years ago and people still think it’s acceptable to trot out an angular guitar riff and a disco beat. It makes me fucking sick.”

Gang of Four’s debut album “Entertainment!” (1979) was certainly a major influence on the angular rock that followed a quarter-century later. And most bands fitting the description were British. But there were other start and end points. One concert review aptly draws the line from Tom Petty’s “American Girl” (1976) to the sound of the Strokes (see their 2001 hit “Last Night”). New York Times critic Kelefa Sanneh finds the angular sound’s origins in funk, specifically the playing of Jimmy Nolen, guitarist in James Brown’s band for nearly two decades. Nolen “helped inspire two generations of post-punk bands,” Sanneh wrote in 2006, adding parenthetically, “When people talk about ‘angular’ guitars, they often mean ‘Jimmy-Nolen-ish.’”⁹

Writing in the Times in 2001, Ann Powers set out to “unravel what the word might mean” via a skeptical review of a Shellac concert. In the band’s music, Powers found a sort of toxic masculinity — although she didn’t use that particular term, which was not yet widespread. She then generalized that toxic masculinity to other music described as angular. Suggesting the absence or exclusion of women from the scene, she pointed out that angular is the “antithesis of curvilinear.”¹⁰

Women are indeed scarce in the music writing I surveyed for this project. But the Breeders and Sleater-Kinney do show up in a handful of entries. And there is one female artist whose association with angular rivals that of Bloc Party and the Futureheads: Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent. But there’s a difference. In multiple interviews, Clark describes taking her angular sound as far as it would go on 2017’s “Masseduction,” prompting her to shift to an early 1970s style for her follow-up album.¹¹ This is emblematic of how, after the heyday of the 2000s, critics and artists themselves began framing angularity as something to be grown out of.

By the end of the decade, even members of Franz Ferdinand were talking about angular in the past tense.

“Well, the British scene is full of all these guitar bands now,” guitarist Nick McCarthy told Keyboard magazine in 2009. “It’s getting really boring, and it’s kind of peaked. And we didn’t want to repeat ourselves and be in that scene — we were fed up with angular guitar music. We just didn’t want to do that anymore.”¹²

But bands, as well as critics, have short memories. On 2013 releases, Franz’s guitars were “as angular as ever”¹³ while Block Party had a “return to form” that was “angular, exciting, and relevant as ever.”¹⁴

Angular was in, then it was out, and finally it was just there.

Classical and opera

Angular has its longest legacy in classical music criticism — which should not be surprising given that classical has been around a lot longer than jazz or rock. While my survey cannot claim to be exhaustive, the earliest example I found is from an 1893 New York Times review of a Madison Square Garden piano recital by Arthur Friedheim. Here the unnamed critic gives a very detailed explanation of what they mean by angular.

It must be admitted, however, that [Friedhem’s] style has peculiarities which prevent his work from reaching real greatness. Some of his rapid passages are indistinct, a fault which arises from injudicious use of the pedals and a constant want of balance between the dynamics of the two hands. The left hand, wich has the advantage of dealing with the more sonorous part of the instrument, is allowed altogether too much freedom in respect of power. Added to these defects are a ceaseless indulgence in contrasts of force so sharp as to have the nature of shocks and an overfondness for the staccato touch. These things produce a hardness, a rigidity and angularity of style which preclude any possibility of grace.¹⁵

Here, and in other examples continuing to the present day, angularity is associated with too much precision and not enough flexibility. But sometimes critics use angular to mean too much flexibility and not enough precision. A 1947 Times review of a Randolph Hokanson recital found that “rhythmic steadiness was abandoned for a jerky, spasmodic kind of playing, angular in effect.”¹⁶

Angularity is not always presented as a negative characteristic for a performer to have. Dissatisfied with one recording of the scherzo from Franz Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, Gramophone’s Jed Distler recalled Alfred Brendel’s “valedictory” 1987 rendition, which Distler called “pointedly angular.”¹⁷ Brendel is among the performers most often described as angular, alongside pianist Maurizio Polloni and conductors Georg Solti and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Conductors may move their batons, arms, or whole bodies jerkily — movements that critics often describe as angular. But only sometimes does this physical description also extend to the sound of the orchestra. Take for example this description of Klaus Tennstedt leading the New York Philharmonic in a 1981 performance of Gustav Mahler’s marathon Ninth Symphony:

But what seemed most interesting yesterday afternoon was the way that Mr. Tennstedt achieved a balance of discipline and spontaneity. The Philharmonic musicians played at their very best for him, yet the effect was never one of earnest ensemble unanimity. Indeed, there was a looseness about the playing that reflected Mr. Tennstedt’s own angular gyrations.¹⁸

A performance also may be said to smooth out the angularity of a composition. According to one review, in a 1996 recording of the Finnish composer’s major works, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra’s “rich tones infuse [Jean] Sibelius’s cold, icy, angular contours with a current of warmth and humanity that seems not at all out of place.”¹⁹

But performance is only a small part of the angular picture. Usually it is the piece being performed, rather than the performance, that is called angular. (I reserve comment about whether it is really possible to separate the two.) In my spreadsheet, references to composers and compositions outnumber references to performers and performances more than five to one.

If there were a competition for most angular composer, there would be a clear winner. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) turns up in more than a hundred citations, or nearly 4% of the articles I surveyed. Stravinsky compositions most often described as angular include the operas “The Rake’s Progress” (1951) and “Histoire du Soldat” (The Soldier’s Tale, 1918). Most frequently mentioned is the famously riot-provoking ballet “The Rite of Spring” (1913).

But what, exactly, makes Stravinsky’s music angular? The Rite is characterized by “fleeting, fragmented, angular motifs,” according to one critic,²⁰ while another critic points to its “angular and propulsive rhythms.”²¹ Still another critic is less specific, referring to the Rite’s “angular, noisy, primitive score.”²² For Stravinsky as for other composers, critics often do not provide much context when they dub a piece angular. Where they bother to be specific, critics identify Stravinsky’s melodic material as angular twice as often as they do his rhythms.

In the survey more broadly, the monophonic aspects of classical music (melodies, lines, themes, motifs, etc.) were called angular in a quarter of all citations. Angular rhythms were discussed in about 4% of articles, and angular harmonies were discussed in only about 1% of articles.

Runner-up in the angular composer contest is Béla Bartók (1881-1945), who is mentioned in about 2% of citations. Critics surveyed describe 21 of his compositions as angular, with three critics applying the label to the “Concerto for Orchestra,” written two years before Bartók’s death. One writer identifies the piece’s “folklike, angular melodies.”²³

Critics often contrast angular melodies with “lyrical” ones. Lyrical melodies tend to please the ear, while angular melodies are challenging or even unpleasant. Generally, a lyrical melody is diatonic (meaning it is made up of pitches that conform to a scale) and moves stepwise (meaning the interval between any two pitches is relatively small). Angular melodies, in contrast, use larger intervals (“leap” is a word that sometimes appears nearby angular) and may venture outside the scale into atonality.

Evidently, the boundary between angularity and lyricism is porous. I found multiple examples where virtuosic performers were said to make difficult melodic material more palatable. In one instance, the soprano Claire Booth, performing Oliver Knussen’s “Requiem: Song for Sue” in 2006, “made a piece that could come across as angular and disjointed into something tender and lyrical.”²⁴

The survey results are replete with descriptions of compositions that are “lyrical and angular by turns”²⁵ or that move “freely between angularity and lyricism.”²⁶ These formulations suggest the segregation of melody types within a single piece. But elsewhere the types intermingle, with variations on the phrase “angular lyricism” appearing in many reviews by many authors. “Tonality” and “atonality” appear in equal measure.

Significant overlap exists between “angular” and “modern.” Indeed, most pieces described as angular were composed between 1915 and 2015. The beginning of this period roughly coincides with the advent of serial or 12-tone composition techniques. The figurehead of this movement, Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), ranks third in the angular composers contest. Other prominent practitioners who appear frequently in the spreadsheet include Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Charles Wuorinen. References to serialism, tone rows, and related terms appear in about 3% of citations.

While not a serialist himself, Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) experimented with a similarly procedural approach to writing his Sixth Symphony. As Carl Bauman explains in American Record Guide:

When he composed it in 1944 he began by graphing the silhouettes of the major Brazilian mountains and transforming these based on 85 chromatic notes into a musical score. The higher the mountain on the graph, the higher the musical pitch, and so forth. While it may seem to some an interesting form of creativity, it can lead to some strange progressions and an angular outline.²⁷

As is true across genres, angular is only rarely applied to female composers. One of them is Melinda Wagner (born 1957), who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her “Concerto for Flute, Strings, and Percussion.” One critic noted the piece’s “robust angularity.”²⁸ Wagner herself uses the term when describing her compositional process: “I start with a germ of an idea, usually a melody or a mood. It could be small, a sweeping scale of notes or something angular and percussive. Then I see where it goes. My music is melodic and note specific as opposed to big washes of sound.”²⁹ Ellen Taafe Zwilich (b. 1939) and Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964) are the female composers most often described as angular.

While angular is most often applied to modern compositions, critics do use it occasionally to describe earlier works. Two concert reviews, published in the New York Times less than a month apart in 1995, single out the angularity of the fugue section of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier,” a keyboard sonata written in 1817. One critic, Edward Rothstein, heard “angular thrusts” in this section during a performance by pianist Andras Schiff.³⁰ The other critic, Bernard Holland, writing about an Alfred Brendel performance, opined that the fugue is “obsessed with a trilling, angular subject.”³¹ Other early classical titans like Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Antonio Vivaldi appear more than once in the spreadsheet.

For at least a few critics, music from the Renaissance era can be angular as well. I found 40 instances of the term applied to compositions before 1700, including the “angular inflections and spicy textures” in “Lamentations” by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585)³² and four motets by John Taverner (1490-1545) that “belong to a more angular and florid phase of Tudor style.”³³

Jazz and blues

Jazz and blues criticism makes up the smallest group of citations in my survey, with the least diversity in artists described as angular.

Fully 10% of citations mention Thelonious Monk, one of the most revered and mythologized figures in jazz. He is trailed at a considerable distance by Greg Osby, Ornette Coleman, Bill Frisell, and Steve Coleman.

Monk’s piano playing and compositions were unconventional. As New York Times critic John S. Wilson wrote in a 1958 concert review, Monk “couches his melodies in angularities and dissonances that give them a rough and unfamiliar surface on first meeting.”³⁴ Clive Davis of the Sunday Times of London wrote that Monk’s “eccentric, angular attack was built around unexpected silences and mischievous dissonances and ‘wrong’ notes.”³⁵ It’s not just the notes that are off-kilter. The Globe & Mail’s Mark Miller goes further to identify Monk’s phrasing — the peculiar way he performed melodies — as angular. Monk’s phrasing, Miller wrote, was “qualified by an elliptical sort of punctuation.”³⁶

Even after Monk’s death in 1982, jazz musicians continue to write and perform in ways that recall his quirky, herky-jerky style. In one example, pianist Matthew Shipp performed an original piece “full of playful, Monklike angularity and marked by dissonant, pugilistic stabs.”³⁷

Monk’s compositions also live on. The ballad “Pannonica” appears most often in my survey, always in cover form. In one case, the pianist Tommy Flanagan performed the piece at the Village Vanguard in 1986 with its namesake, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, in the audience. Wilson, still writing for the New York Times, observed that Flanagan “played the tune in a way that softened the angularity that Mr. Monk gave it, making it more mellow and flowing without draining it of its character.”³⁸ Other Monk tunes that come up more than once include “Brilliant Corners” and “Round Midnight.”

Monk’s departures from convention informed bebop, a subgenre of jazz that emerged in the late 1940s and was characterized by complex melody and harmony. (“Bebop” and “modern” are words that appear frequently alongside angular.) As New York Times critic Robert Palmer wrote in 1987:

In the beginning, modern jazz was a cult of true believers. Modernists spoke be-bop, a language unto itself: “Oop-bop-sh’bam-a-klook-a’mop!” They wore berets, and sunglasses after dark. They devised fiendishly difficult chord sequences, to be executed at impossible tempos, with the express purpose of mystifying the squares and keeping them off the bandstand. The broad outlines of the modern jazz vocabulary were watered down soon enough, often as background sounds for television cop shows and film-noir crime capers. But hard core be-bop was still angular, abrasive, unpredictable, decidedly not sing-along fare.³⁹

In published interviews, musicians in other genres sometimes describe their sound as angular. But 21st-century jazz musicians are the only ones to do so in song titles. There’s “Angular” by Jeremy Pelt (2005), E.J. Strickland’s “Angular Realms” (2009), and “Angular Momentum” by Cloudmakers Trio (2014). Wolfgang Muthspiel released an album in 2020 called “Angular Blues.”

Across one publication

For this project I made extensive use of periodical databases freely accessible via Massachusetts public libraries. In most cases, search results went back only as far as the mid-1990s, with some sources cutting off even more recently. But ProQuest’s historical newspapers archive gives access to the New York Times all the way back to 1851. (I did not find any entries relevant to this project before 1893.) Searching this resource opened a valuable window, albeit a small one, onto the evolution of angular as a term in music criticism over more than a century.

New York Times music critics’ use of angular was modest at first. The term would appear once or twice in one year and then not again for several years. It was not until about 1950 that it began to show up at least once a year. Needless to say, it was all classical music criticism until this point.

Angular first appeared in relation to jazz music in 1958 (Allyn Ferguson “makes a good case for the use of a jagged, angular type of jazz”)⁴⁰ and rock in 1971 (Janis Joplin “beat out an angular rhythm with one foot”).⁴¹ Here again, it was only used in dribs and drabs.

Things began to change in the 1980s. Angular was being used more frequently in jazz reviews, and to a lesser extent in rock reviews. But its use really exploded with the arrival of classical music critic Allan Kozinn, who by a considerable margin is the most prolific of all angular writers in this survey. The adjective appears in 379 of his New York Times articles from 1979 to 2025 — around 6% of his total output for the newspaper. (His closest competitors, American Record Guide’s Allen Gimbel and Roger Hecht and the Financial Times’s Mike Hobart, used angular fewer than half as many times. Kozinn’s New York Times colleague John Pareles, reviewing both rock and jazz, used it 99 times.)

In only three reviews did Kozinn use angular to describe a performance. He most often used the term to describe compositions by Elliott Carter, John Adams, and Aaron Copland. Kozinn applied it to Russian composer Alfred Schnittke’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (1963) in separate concert reviews from 1995, 1998, and 2006. In the first, he described the piece this way: “Acidic passages that betray [Dmitri] Shostakovich’s influence nestle alongside angular 12-tone figures and moments of neo-Romantic introspection.”⁴²

Kozinn’s angular output plummeted after 2012. That year he was reassigned to general cultural reporting, and he later took a buyout. But Kozinn continues to write for the Times occasionally on a freelance basis. In recent years he has penned obituaries for angular composers David Del Tredici and Harold Meltzer.

Across all the sources I surveyed, angular has been in decline over the last 10 years or so. Is this a natural evolution in music critics’ word choices? Or could it be a function of less music criticism appearing in newspapers, magazines, and websites overall? I expect it’s a bit of both.

As we’ve seen, the word “angular” is a blunt instrument. But it’s better than nothing.

Notes

To avoid any potential copyright infringement, the spreadsheet confines each quotation to only the words directly related to angular. (This essay includes more substantial versions of selected quotations.) Users may sort or search the spreadsheet to find their favorite composers, compositions, performers, publications, or critics. ↩︎
“Consider the addictively angular verse of Lithium: a part that anyone could play, but nobody else had the vision to write.” DeMain, Bill, et al. “100 Most Influential Guitar Heroes.” Classic Rock, no. 287, May 2021, pp. 25+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A657722922/ITOF?u=mlin_w_lilly&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d9b9bd6d. Accessed 18 June 2024. ↩︎
Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett said of the song in an interview: “You had that sort of free-jazz sensibility, but it was done with rock sensibility. And you had the guitar being twinned with the sax the whole time, so it was a very angular approach.” Shteamer, Hank. “King Crimson’s ’21st Century Schizoid Man’: Inside Prog’s Big Bang.” Rolling Stone, 1 Oct. 2019. Online, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/king-crimson-interview-writing-21st-century-schizoid-man-891600/. Accessed 18 March 2021. ↩︎
“Key Releases: 28.05.11: Catalogue reviews.” Music Week, 28 May 2011, p. 46. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A257334246/ITOF?u=mlin_w_lilly&sid=ITOF&xid=cbfaba7c. Accessed 27 Aug. 2020. ↩︎
Zoladz, Lindsay. “Going Solo, but He’s Not Alone.” New York Times, 12 Sept. 2021, p. 14(L). Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A675025723/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=a321958f. Accessed 25 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Holden, Stephen. “Familiar Faces in Pop-Country Trio’s New York Debut.” New York Times, 28 Sept. 2012, p. C4(L). Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A303579712/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=0f88da12. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Gang of Four reunited in 2005 amid a resurgence of interest in their music. ↩︎
Not to be confused with the music critic of the same name, who wrote for NME and the Independent. Andy Gill the author did in fact use the word angular in a handful of his reviews, but apparently never wrote about Gang of Four. ↩︎
Sanneh, Kelefa. “Godfather Of Soul, And C.E.O. Of His Band.” New York Times, 27 Dec. 2006, p. E1(L). Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A156396043/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=b4aa67c7. Accessed 12 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Powers, Ann. “Playing All the Angles of a Male Band.” New York Times, 23 Jan. 2001, p. E8. ProQuest. Web. 6 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
See especially Segal, Victoria, “‘I Could Be Anybody Today…’ St Vincent Interviewed,” Mojo, 21 June 2022, https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/i-could-be-anybody-today-st-vincent-interviewed/. ↩︎
Regen, Jon. “Synchronized strut: Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy on the making of Tonight.” Keyboard, Feb. 2009, p. 26+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A202436307/GPS?u=massw&sid=GPS&xid=9c39ca8c. Accessed 12 Feb. 2020. ↩︎
Kennedy, Jake. “Franz Ferdinand: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action.” Record Collector, no. 418, Sept. 2013, p. 92. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A346530856/ITOF?u=mlin_w_lilly&sid=ITOF&xid=bde417d7. Accessed 28 Aug. 2020. ↩︎
“Bloc Party: Octopus.” Music Week, 20 July 2012, p. 8. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A391459263/ITOF?u=mlin_w_lilly&sid=ITOF&xid=6fc26763. Accessed 27 Aug. 2020. ↩︎
“Amusements.: Mr. Friedheim’s Recitals.” New York Times, 22 Mar. 1893, p. 4. ProQuest. Web. 7 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Straus, Noel. “Randolph Hokanson in Recital Bow Here.” New York Times, 18 Dec. 1947, p. 38. ProQuest. Web. 17 Aug. 2025. ↩︎
Distler, Jed. “Schubert: ‘Late Piano Works, Vol 1.’” Gramophone, vol. 97, no. 1177, Aug. 2019, p. 68. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599300333/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=49956b59. Accessed 21 Dec. 2025. ↩︎
Rockwell, John. “Music: Tennstedt Conducts Mahler’s Ninth.” New York Times, 20 Feb. 1982, p. 12. ProQuest. Web. 31 Aug. 2025. ↩︎
McKelvey, John P. “Sibelius: Symphony 2, Finlandia, Karelia Suite, Swan of Tuonela.” American Record Guide, vol. 59, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 1996, pp. 184+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A18344080/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=877062fe. Accessed 29 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Haldeman, Philip. “Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring with Scriabin: Poem of Ecstasy & with Debussy: La Mer Boulez: Notations VII. (Guide to Records).” American Record Guide, vol. 65, no. 2, Mar. 2002, pp. 166+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A84053873/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=f8a5efa7. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Enright, Robert. “Dance review: The rite of spring: Rite of spring modern, urban, up to date: choreographer Mark Godden has made a perfectly contemporary sketch, – part cartoon, – part psychic portrait of himself and his age.” Globe & Mail, 9 May 1997, p. D2. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A30548000/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=55c84519. Accessed 29 Dec. 2025. ↩︎
Harris, Robert. “Big Names, Fresh Faces, New Twists.” Globe & Mail, 9 Oct. 2012, p. E2. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A304767603/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=7a2c7496. Accessed 3 Jan. 2026. ↩︎
Hecht, Roger. “Bartok: Concerto for Orchestra; 4 Orchestral Pieces; Hungarian Peasant Songs London Philharmonic/Leon Botstein Telarc 80564-76 minutes.” American Record Guide, vol. 64, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2001, pp. 75+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A80371368/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=35b24446. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Smith, Rowena. “Reviews: Classical: SCO/Knussen City Halls, Glasgow 4/5.” Guardian [London, England], 18 Dec. 2007, p. 36. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A172552338/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=80953cc8. Accessed 11 Jan. 2026. ↩︎
Kozinn, Allan. “Review/Music; Conductor on a Marathon 2-Concert Day.” New York Times, 13 Apr. 1989. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A175669119/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=615e2223. Accessed 21 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Kozinn, Allan. “Classical Music in Review.” New York Times, 14 Nov. 1992. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A174994878/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=7f06053f. Accessed 3 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Bauman, Carl. “Villa-Lobos: Symphony No.6, Ruda, God of Love.” American Record Guide, vol. 60, no. 3, May-June 1997, p. 228. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19926351/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=2980cf0a. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Gimbel, Allen. “Wagner, M.: Flute Concerto.” American Record Guide, vol. 63, no. 5, Sept. 2000, p. 226. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A65463749/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=95c64452. Accessed 30 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Wetzler, Cynthia Magriel. “Composer Writes Piece For Philharmonic’s 15th.” New York Times, 17 May 1998. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A150197193/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=497efc05. Accessed 29 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Rothstein, Edward. “Bach, Beethoven and Bartok In the Hands of Andras Schiff.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 1995. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A155491439/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=d0a07d5a. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Holland, Bernard. “Moments Of Inspired Insanity.” New York Times, 19 Apr. 1995. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A155451983/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=72ab68ee. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Barker, John W. “Lamentations.” American Record Guide, vol. 57, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1994, pp. 244+. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16457792/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=34a43004. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Barker, John W. “Byrd: Mass for Four Voices, Motets; Taverner: Motets.” American Record Guide, vol. 58, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 1995, p. 94. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A16346719/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=50eac2e0. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025. ↩︎
Wilson, John S. “Thelonious Monk Plays Own Works: Leads Quartet in Concert at Town Hall Devoted to His Jazz Compositions.” New York Times (1923-), 02 Mar. 1959, p. 30. ProQuest. Web. 5 Nov. 2025. ↩︎
Davis, Clive. “Doing their own thing; CD Offer.” Sunday Times, 13 Nov. 1994, p. 32. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A116954994/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=dac7aed6. Accessed 1 Mar. 2026. ↩︎
Miller, Mark. “Signs indicating a revival of his music are appearing.” Globe & Mail, 12 Oct. 1985, p. D5. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A165557788/GPS?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=ec6edcac. Accessed 3 Jan. 2026. ↩︎
Milkowski, Bill. “Shipp in Disparate Settings.” DownBeat, March 2019, p. 58. Online: https://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2019/DB1903/_art/DB1903.pdf. Accessed Aug. 31, 2026. ↩︎
Wilson, John S. “Jazz: Tommy Flanagan at Village Vanguard.” New York Times, 8 Feb. 1986. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176434124/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=8c2c6e1d. Accessed 14 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Palmer, Robert. “Be-Bop Redux: Old Is New.” New York Times, 24 July 1987. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A176102233/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=d4bbc609. Accessed 14 Sept. 2025. ↩︎
Wilson, John S. “New Broadway Show is Pure Entertainment.” New York Times, 23 Feb. 1958, p. 1. ProQuest. Web. 18 Aug. 2025. ↩︎
Marks, J. “Janis Keeps Her Promise in ‘Pearl.’” New York Times, 31 Jan. 1971, p. 2. ProQuest. Web. 22 Aug. 2025. ↩︎
Kozinn, Allan. “A Romantic Sings Out In Mozart.” New York Times, 7 Mar. 1995. Online: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A155497426/SPN.SP24?u=mlin_w_forbes&sid=bookmark-SPN.SP24&xid=5146a3ac. Accessed 27 Sept. 2025. ↩︎

Love’s Old Sweet Song

Every year on June 16, fans of the Irish novelist James Joyce celebrate Bloomsday. His most famous novel, “Ulysses,” is set on that date in 1904 and centers on the character Leopold Bloom. Joyce was a music lover, and “Ulysses” is full of music references. The sentimental tune “Love’s Old Sweet Song” comes up repeatedly as Bloom’s wife, Molly, is preparing to perform it.

The song itself dates to 1884, with words by C. Clifton Bingham and music by James Lyman Molloy. Artists have recorded it well into the modern age, and Joyceans sing it whenever they get together for conferences. Here’s a rendition I put together a few years ago.

Not even remotely about that bass

Pointless List No. 4

Undermining my own humble efforts around standalone bass guitar music are rock bands that eschew the instrument entirely.

Utter depravity, I say. A band without a bassist is like a body without a brain.

First let’s take bands that, while they may not have a literal bass, use other instruments to fill the role of a bass. Prime example: Keyboardist Ray Manzarek of the Doors played high sounds with his right hand and low sounds with his left. On studio recordings, the Doors sometimes enlisted a proper bass player. Clearly they recognized what was missing.

Other bands are not so apologetic. Petulantly, they don’t even try to fill the void left by the bass’s absence.

A devil’s advocate might assert that there’s something special in the intimacy, the immediacy of the bassless rock duo. These skeptics might point to the White Stripes and say that to add a bassist would be to subtract from the magic. Such sonic sophistry is easily dismissed.

There are of course larger bands without bass — ones that have even less of an excuse for their exclusivity. Could anyone argue that the treble-only music of Sleater-Kinney or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs has any heft whatever? Not with a straight face.

True extremists attempt to call the bass obsolete. So much music listening today, they observe, is done on cellphones and tiny earbuds — devices too small to convincingly render the deepest aural frequencies. Why, this argument goes, should anyone bother recording sounds that will never be heard?

All nonsense, certainly. Bass isn’t just something you hear with your ears, it’s something you feel with your whole body. It’s fundamental. Isn’t it?

What follows is a partial list of bands with bass. Send additions to zogernd [at] gmail [dot] com.

Animals As Leaders
Ativin
Black Keys, The
Black Pistol Fire
Blood Red Shoes
Caddywhompus
Cleopatrick
Cramps, The
Doe
Doors, The
Dresden Dolls, The
Gossip, The
Hot as Shits, The
Japandroids
Kills, The
Left Lane Cruiser
Local H
London Souls, The
Mates of State
Middle Class Rut
Nurajet
Pack A.D., The
Perennial
PS I Love You
Radical Dads
Richman, Jonathan
Shaggs, The
Sleater-Kinney
Spinanes, The
John Spencer Blues Explosion
We Are the City
White Stripes, The
Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Take a bad song and make it badder

Artists endeavor to refine their craft, striving to make their creations better and better over time. They may or may not succeed, but improvement is always the goal.

There is one artist, however, working deliberately in the opposite direction. For a decade, Tim Heidecker has been making one horrible song worse and worse. Because it’s funny.

The song is “Empty Bottle.” It’s a recurring gag in the long-running web series “On Cinema at the Cinema.” It perfectly encapsulates what Film Cred reviewer Jessica Scott identifies as the “howling void” in the soul of Heidecker’s eponymous character. A wannabe multihyphenate, Heidecker begins each season of “On Cinema” with a new self-aggrandizing persona — having ended each previous season in abject humiliation. This vicious cycle of reinvention extends to “Empty Bottle,” whose chorus is an anthemic cry for help: “Fiiiiill me uuuuup again.”

What makes it so bad? First, it’s barely a song. Two halfhearted quatrains and the one-line refrain are its only lyrics. Sonically, “Empty Bottle” is a disposable container into which any musical fad may be poured and then dumped out again just as easily. Since its debut in 2015, the song has (d)evolved from leather-clad butt rock to abrasive EDM to QAnon-inspired rap metal to cookiecutter teen electropop to midlife crisis blues. In the most recent season, Heidecker performs an acoustic version for the residents of an assisted living facility.

Somehow Heidecker’s masterpiece hasn’t brought him the recognition he expects.

Yet.

While Heidecker the character continually demonstrates a total lack of self-awareness, Heidecker the comedian knows exactly what he’s doing. His creative brilliance is in taking an already uncreative song and recreating it ad infinitum.

Happy birthday, Franz!

Before launching this blog (seven years ago now!), I spent some time casting about for a title. I wanted to write about music, but not in the way it’s presented most places — i.e., the hottest takes on the latest tunes. I would offer my takes hesitantly at best. How to capture that?

Wikipedia’s glossary of music terminology has an entry for hesitant playing: zögernd. A better title I could not hope to find. The letter z and an umlaut? Sold.

I searched for an example of the direction used in an actual music score, but never found one. What Google did show me, however, was a few recordings of a song whose first line is “Zögernd, leise,” German for hesitantly, softly.

The piece, “Ständchen,” or serenade, was written nearly 200 years ago by Austrian composer Franz Schubert (born on this day in 1797). It uses an alto soloist, four-voice choir, and piano. It’s built around a poem by Franz Grillparzer. As I interpret the text (helpfully translated by Oxford Lieder), the narrator spends the song getting psyched up to serenade a sleeping love interest (“Do not sleep when the voice of affection speaks”) only to chicken out in the end (“But what in all the world’s realms can be compared to sleep?”).

The words are amusing, but it was the sounds that I fell in love with.

Here are some of the most joy-inducing melodies I’ve ever heard. Each time the soloist presents a phrase, the choir yes-ands it, and round and round they go. Somehow what they do is predictable and surprising at the same time. If Schubert were alive today, there’s no doubt he would be producing the most captivating hooks in pop music.

I’ve tried to spread the love for Ständchen in a couple ways. First as the theme song for the short-lived Zögernd postcast, where I had a computer perform all the vocal and instrumental parts using modern-day synthesizer patches.

After that, it was inevitable that Ständchen would become my next bass solo. But I hesitated. It took a few years to figure out how to pay the composition due reverence in my own irreverent musical style.

To put Ständchen within reach of the bass guitar, I transposed it down a perfect fifth, give or take an octave or two, from the key of F to the key of B flat. I also took a few small liberties in condensing material for five voices down to one — allowing the bass (which never needs to pause for breath) to sing both lead and backup. And I enlisted my trusty ICBM fuzz pedal to provide more sustain and a broader color palette than the bass alone.

So far I’ve failed to mentioned Schubert’s dazzling, frenetic-yet-placid piano writing. Surely I couldn’t pull off Ständchen without it, and so the transcription I prepared for the podcast theme became a backing track. But that wasn’t all. Biographers record that Schubert wanted his vocal works performed to a strict beat, so I bet he’d appreciate my modern drum machine treatment.

I hope you’ll agree this is a beautiful, thrilling, distinctive piece of music. There’s a good chance my rendition will not be to your taste, but I defy you to find fault with this one:

The greatest albums of 10 years ago … and all time

Comedian James Acaster was having a rotten year, but he got through it by assiduously seeking out albums released in 2016. The effort led him to conclude that 2016 was the “greatest year for music of all time.”

Although I read his book “Perfect Sound Whatever” quite a while back, I figured I would save this blog post for the decade anniversary of that fateful year.

Throughout the book, Acaster takes anecdotes about his own heartbreak and humiliation and weaves them together with stories of the music that brought him solace. When he interviewed the artists, many of them described creating their music under precarious mental health conditions similar to Acaster’s. It’s interesting to reflect on how personal turmoil can inspire art with broad appeal, which can in turn inspire more art from artists experiencing their own turmoil. Both the creation and the consumption can be therapeutic.

The book recommends 366 albums, and online Acaster has continued to add to his list of 2016 favorites. I certainly haven’t listened to every one, but Acaster’s descriptions did pique my interest in several. This was how I discovered Danny Brown’s “Atrocity Exhibition,” one of my top albums of 2023. And it turned me onto “Kiid” by an artist right here in Western Massachusetts, Mal Devisa. Other Acaster picks that get my endorsement include the experimental R&B of Jon Bap’s “What Now?” and the math rap of Sooper Swag Project’s “Badd Timing.”

Even before sampling these unfamiliar records, I could tell Acaster had good taste when I saw his picks included two of my top albums of previous years, Clipping’s Splendor & Misery and Esperanza Spalding’s Emily’s D+Evolution. I don’t know if 2016 really is the greatest year for music of all time. Truth be told, some of Acaster’s picks just didn’t resonate with me. But based on that year’s recurrence in my own list of favorites, I think he may be onto something.

A particularly trenchant passage from the book: “And if you don’t love an album that everybody else hates, then I don’t believe you truly love music. We can intellectualise all day long but, really, true fandom is about you having a personal connection to an album and it’s impossible to only enjoy critically acclaimed cult classics that everyone approves of. Albums like this are how you know you’re not just liking stuff because you’re told you have to like it” (pages 194-195).

LCD extras

Fourth in a series of three

Curating my “Lowest Common Denominator” anthology, I found plenty of music related (directly or tenuously) to my surname, Lowe. Enough to fill more than the three CDs I ended up producing.

I wanted the collection to reflect the diversity — stylistic, geographic, temporal, and otherwise — of my musical family. But I had to draw the line somewhere. With due respect to those cousins I excluded, I wanted the songs to be good ones. Or at least for their creators to have interesting stories.

But there is also material I excluded either because I overlooked it in my own collection or because I hadn’t discovered it yet. My research wasn’t quite obsessive enough, evidently, to turn up some true gems. In the time since I finalized the physical collection, a few of them have found me.

Below, I give some of these rejects and latecomers a new, digital-only opportunity to join the family.

Lowdown | Boz Scaggs

William Royce “Boz” Scaggs played with Steve Miller in the 1960s and had a lackluster solo career until a rogue DJ turned this album cut into a hit in 1976. With lyrics describing the archetypal foolish lover and performances from future members of Toto, “Lowdown” registers a whopping 94.5 on the Yachtski Scale. So smooth!

I Wish | Skee-Lo

Rappers tend not to be whimsical and self-deprecating. In 1995, when gangstas ruled the charts, this minor hit from Skee-Lo (real name Antoine Roundtree) was a breath of fresh air.

Seeds of the Desolate | Solitude Aeturnus

This doom metal epic comes from a 1992 release by the band from Arlington, Texas. Their singer is Robert Lowe, who has performed with a number of heavy music groups.

Sweet and Low | Fugazi

How could I have forgotten that one of my all-time favorite bands recorded an instrumental named after the artificial sweetener? Not their best work, but worthy of inclusion.

Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac | Dizzy Gillespie

I tip my hat to a listener for hipping me to this 1967 jazz take on the 19th-century spiritual that closed out Disc One.

Cage the Songbird | The Low Anthem

Not to be confused with the Elton John song about Edith Piaf. The Low Anthem is a folk/Americana outfit founded in 2006 by a couple of Brown University students. This track is from their second album.

Monsters | All Time Low

This track by the Maryland power pop group, featuring the rapper Blackbear, was No. 1 for 18 weeks in 2020 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart. A remix featuring Demi Lovato was released at the end of the year. The band claims to have taken its name from the lyrics of a song by pop-punk band New Found Glory — but we know better.

BBC World TV Mix | David Lowe

English composer and producer David Lowe (b. 1959) is best known for creating theme music for BBC News. The instrumentals were so popular the Beeb released some of them on CD in 2001.

Only the Strongest Will Survive | Hurricane #1

Formed in Oxford, this group fronted by guitarist and singer Alex Lowe was another part of the Britpop craze of the mid-1990s. This song, the title track from the band’s second album, reached No. 19 on the U.K. Singles Chart in 1998.

The Widor Toccata | Roger Lowe

I’m a sucker for modern reinterpretations of classical music. This prog rock version of the final movement of Charles-Marie Widor’s Symphony for Organ No. 5 (1879) was created in 2003 by Roger Lowe, a composer and church organist from North Carolina. “I grew up wishing ELP or some similar band would cover this,” Roger writes on his YouTube channel.

Speak Low | Kurt Weill

It was inevitable: Just days after I finished burning CDs, I heard this perfect example at an open mic in Brattleboro. Performed by the composer in 1943, this song has lyrics by the poet Ogden Nash.

Toxic | Michael Lowenstern

You may not have realized before now that you needed a “clarinet choir” rendition of Britney Spears’s greatest song. Michael Lowenstern makes goofs like this, as well as serious instructional videos, on YouTube. Primarily a bass clarinetist, his background is in performing with various New York avant-garde ensembles, including with luminaries Steve Reich and John Zorn.

I’d rather live in his world

The mirror image of stalk rock is found in songs where the narrators profess undying love despite being ignored or mistreated or even abused. Let’s call this subgenre “Stockholm syndrome rock.”

Whereas many stalk rock narrators falsely believe they’ve been wronged, Stockholm syndrome rock narrators actually have been wronged but fail to see it. What both have in common is delusion.

Take for example Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)” (1968), a terrific piece of music with a terrible message.

You can blame me, try to shame me, and still I’ll care for you
You can run around, even put me down, still I’ll be there for you
The world may think I’m foolish, but they can’t see you like I can
Oh, but anyone who knows what love is will understand

The female version of Stockholm syndrome rock is about men — men whose wants and needs come before those of the women narrators. These narrators abdicate any form of personal agency, and they never complain about any discomfort they might experience.

In another example, the narrator of “Midnight Train to Georgia” by Gladys Knight and the Pips (1973) accompanies her lover’s retreat from a failed attempt at Hollywood stardom because “I’d rather live in his world than live without him in mine.” Tammy Wynette’s signature tune, “Stand By Your Man” (1968), carries this subservience to the extreme, recommending that wives honor and obey regardless of their husband’s behavior.

You’ll have bad times, and he’ll have good times
Doin’ things that you don’t understand
But if you love him, you’ll forgive him
Even though he’s hard to understand

The male version of Stockholm syndrome rock is also about men — men who want to stay with the object of their affection even if it means being tortured or killed. Its narrators are focused primarily on their own misfortune. Their paramour-antagonists are shadowy figures, scarcely mentioned.

Green Day’s “Pulling Teeth” (1994) describes physical abuse, captivity, and coercion at the hands of a lover.

Looking out my window for someone that’s passing by
No one knows I’m locked in here, all I do is cry
For now I’ll lie around, that’s all I can really do
She takes good care of me, just keep saying my love is true

Nickelback’s “Follow You Home” (2005) uses the same template, but sounds more like plain old stalk rock:

Well you can tamper with the brakes, call it a mistake
And pray I’m never coming back
And I’ll stay alive just to follow you home

How to pronounce ‘boogie’

At one time or another, you’ve probably embarrassed yourself by mispronouncing something. Maybe it was a word you read on a page but never heard spoken aloud, and your first attempt at verbalizing it made you a laughingstock.

Luckily there’s one word for which any and all pronunciations are acceptable. It’s a word that describes carefree, self-assured bodily movement, so it’s fitting that the normal strictures of elocution don’t apply.

That word is boogie.

Etymologically, boogie is likely descended from African words for dancing and drumming. Its absorption into English began somewhere in the second half of the 19th century as African-American pianists started playing the blues fast and with a seesawing motion in the left hand, enlivening the musical form for dance parties and saloons. Dancing is better with a partner, and so boogie was often doubled up as boogie-woogie.

From there the boogie phenomenon translated to other instruments and social strata, carving out a corner of country music and giving rockabilly a starting point. And even though boogie’s influence on the disco genre is difficult to discern, there is hardly a better word than boogie to describe what one does on the disco floor.

When deciding how to pronounce boogie, you have many options to choose from. Let’s explore them phoneme by phoneme.

You won’t find much disagreement on the initial plosive. The letter B sounds like the letter B anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Things get more interesting with the double vowel that follows. Just how much do you lean into those O’s?

If you’re American, you may not lean very far. In what may be the first sound recording of the word boogie, “Pine Top’s Boogie-Woogie” (1928), it sounds just like Merriam-Webster’s primary pronunciation, \ˈbu̇-gē\. That is, it has a compact central vowel sound like in “wood” and “book.” This pronunciation persists from the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” (1941) to Heatwave’s “Boogie Nights” (1976) to Childish Gambino’s “Boogieman” (2016).

If you’re British, you’ll probably want to lean further into the O’s. Webster’s secondary pronunciation, \ˈbü-gē\, extends the central vowel sound like in “rule” and “youth.” Humble Pie made light of this variant pronunciation with the title of its song “Natural Born Bugie” (1969), though the word “boogie” does not figure into the lyrics. Like many of his countrymen, Marc Bolan on T.Rex’s “I Love to Boogie” (1977) squeezes all he can out of the diaresis, to the point where the “oo” almost sounds like “ew.”

What about the G? Most people say it hard: \g\, as in “gift.” But there is at least one example of people saying it soft: \j\, as in “gem.”

In “Conditional Discharge” (1971), over piano vamping by Elton John and occasional guitar licks from Ronnie Wood, Long John Baldry gives a spoken-word account of being arrested for busking. The arresting officer testifies in court that Baldry was “contravening a breach of the peace” by playing “BOO-jie WOO-jie” music. The judge questions this unfamiliar term, and the officer explains that it’s “kind of a jazz-rhythm music peculiar to the American Negro.”

In Baldry’s telling, the mispronunciation demonstrates the squareness of the authority figures. In the song that follows his monolog (“Don’t Try to Lay No Boogie-Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll”), Baldry and his backup vocalists reassure us that they’re hep by singing both boogie and woogie with a hard \g\.

While using a soft \j\ may go against orthodoxy, you may do it anyway if you’re being ironic — or if you’re keen on upsetting orthodoxy.

The diphthong concluding “boogie” is where you have the most options. If you’re a traditionalist — which certainly is not to say uptight — you can use the long E sound, \ē\, as in “easy” and “mealy.” That’s mostly how the examples above treat it. But two well-established variations can go further to signal your attitude about boogying.

Occasionally Bolan will throw in a blithe “BOO-geh” (\ˈbü-g^ə\). That’s also how David Bowie does it on “Starman” (1972). Perhaps better than any other utterance, this pronunciation evinces each artist’s godlike cool. We know Bolan in particular loves to boogie, but it’s a supremely nonchalant boogie. He and his friends are doing their thing, and what do they care if you join in?

At the other end of the spectrum both metrically and enthusiasm-wise is “I Love the Nightlife (Disco ’Round)” (1978), where Alicia Bridges exclaims, “I love to boo-GAY” (\bu̇-ˈgā\). While both the dictionary and most singers stress the first syllable, Bridges emphasizes and extends the second. Her syncopation suggests an altogether more exuberant, extroverted kind of boogying. She is preaching the boogie gospel — she’s on a boogie crusade.

In conclusion, there are many ways to pronounce “boogie,” and none of them is right or wrong. Let those who hear you say it draw their own conclusions.

Illustrations adapted from The Strand Magazine (1897) via the Public Domain Review.

The last name you’ll ever need

Third in a series of three

The great thing about my surname is you can spell it multiple ways. And depending on how you spell it, it can be a proper noun (Mr. Lowe), an adjective (low to the ground), or even an interjection (lo and behold). The puns are never hard to find when you’re a Lowe.

Creating my “Lowest Common Denominator” collection last year, I eventually amassed enough songs to make it a three-CD set. Naming each disc didn’t require a second thought. Obviously the first would be “Lowe,” the second would be “Lower,” and the third would be “Lowest.”

When my aunt received her copy of the anthology for Christmas, it jogged a memory about subscribing to a magazine years ago. “They sent me TWO copies every month thereafter, one addressed to Linda Lowe, and one to Linda Lower,” she wrote me. “Always wondered if I’d eventually end up with a third copy, but that never happened.”

The low/lower/lowest conceit provided a convenient way to organize the music. The songs of Disc One establish a baseline that is already low. (Some might consider this lowbrow or low-calorie music). Disc Two takes things lower, delving into more melancholic material. Disc Three hits rock bottom, with songs full of deviance and debauchery. And, most importantly, the lowest of the low frequencies. Here’s where you’ll find the soundtrack for your next party.

Friends in Low Places | The Suffers

There are many ways to work the family name into clever song titles, and this may be the best example. Credit for the title and all the music associated with it goes to Earl Bud Lee and Dewayne Blackwell, working in Nashville in 1989. This 2019 performance for Houston Public Media’s “Skyline Sessions” gives the country classic a soul makeover.

In Spite of All the Danger | The Quarrymen

You’ve heard of Pete Best, you’ve heard of Stu Sutcliffe, but have you heard of John Lowe? “Duff” (b. 1942) played piano alongside John, Paul, and George before they formed The Beatles. This track, written by Macca, was recorded in 1958. Various non-Beatle Quarrymen got back together in the 1990s, and Duff has performed with them as recently as 2017.

Bourama | Cheikh Lô

Imported Cuban 78-rpm records were all the rage in West Africa when Cheikh (b. 1955) was growing up. That’s why there’s a Latin tinge to many of the recordings from this Senegalese singer, drummer, and guitarist. A dedicated member of the Baye Fall movement of Islam, Cheikh wears dreadlocks and patchwork clothes as colorful and varied as his song catalog. A frequent collaborator is James Brown saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis, with whom Cheikh wrote this song about a “little impudent provocateur” who steals a bicycle.

In the Still of the Night | Whittemore and Lowe

For 40 years, Jack Warren Lowe (right, 1917–1996) and Arthur Whittemore carved out a niche performing classical and popular compositions on two pianos. Jack was born in Colorado and met Arthur in the Navy. This rendition of a Cole Porter tune comes from a bestselling 1946 album the duo recorded with the RCA Victor Orchestra.

Afrodesiac | Powder

This Britpop band fronted by Pearl Lowe (b. 1970) released a handful of singles in the mid-1990s. Pearl went on to record with the group Lodger alongside her now-husband, Supergrass drummer Danny Goffey, with whom she has three children. She also has a daughter with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale. Pearl’s penchant for partying landed her in the tabloids and ruined her chance at a solo career. She cleaned up in the mid-2000s and now designs textiles and supports charities fighting homelessness and addiction.

Further Reading: Lowe, Pearl. “All that Glitters.” London: Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2007.

Get Me to the Church on Time | Jon Hendricks

Growing up in Berlin, Frederick “Fritz” Loewe (1901–1988) was a child prodigy concert pianist. After moving to New York in 1942, he teamed up with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and went on to write some of Broadway’s biggest musicals, including “Brigadoon,” “Camelot,” and — the source of this particular tune — “My Fair Lady.” One example of a crossover success for Lerner & Loewe, “Church” has been adopted as a jazz standard. This version is performed by Jon Hendricks (1921–2017), one of the most celebrated scat singers and an originator of “vocalese,” which adds lyrics to existing instrumental songs. The backing band features Wynton Marsalis among others.

Misshapen Measures pt1 | Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe

This sound artist (b. 1975) lives in Brooklyn, doing lots of collaborations and making soundtracks. Back in the early 2000s he was the bassist in the Chicago indie band 90 Day Men, who are also well worth checking out.

https://robertaikiaubreylowe.bandcamp.com/track/misshapen-measures-pt1

Gimme Indie Rock | Sebadoh

One of the defining bands of early ’90s indie rock, Sebadoh used to practice and record in Eric Gaffney’s dad’s garage on Oak Street in Florence, Massachusetts. Gaffney (center) and Westfield’s Lou Barlow (right) formed the band in 1986, with Northamptonite Jason Loewenstein (left) completing the lineup in 1989. This 1991 track, a simultaneous salute to and send-up of their subgenre, is credited to all three multi-instrumentalist songwriters. These days you can find Barlow performing with Dinosaur Jr., Loewenstein with the Fiery Furnaces, and Gaffney with Grey Matter.

Jenny from the Block | Jennifer Lopez

If your last name is Lowe and your first initial is J, your work email address is bound to be jlowe. Your colleagues won’t be able to resist pointing out the similarity to J.Lo, aka Jenny from the Block, aka Jennifer Lynn Lopez (b. 1969). Undoubtedly the biggest star in this collection, Jennifer has sold some 80 million records worldwide and starred in numerous Hollywood films. But as she asserts in this 2002 hit, fame hasn’t caused her to forget her humble upbringing in the South Bronx.

Allegro con fuoco | Jerome Lowenthal

This is the third and final movement from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in G Major (Op. 44, 1880), whose tempo marking translates as “Cheerful with fire.” Jerome (b. 1932) is a native of Philadelphia and is recognized as a virtuoso and expert on late romantic music. He’s backed up on this 1987 recording by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sergiu Comissiona.

I Know I Know | Lifeguard

Here is a perfect example of what I call a trompe l’oreille (trick of the ear): a song where the downbeat turns out to be not where you thought it was. As the guitar begins the song, you naturally hear its first strum as the downbeat. But when the drums enter it becomes clear that the guitar part is syncopated. Those drums are played by Isaac Lowenstein, younger brother of Penelope from Horsegirl.

A Knot of Toads | A. Mifflin Lowe

This children’s author lives in Newport, Rhode Island, and Bird Key, Florida. In 2003 he recorded an album of songs and poems based on the names for various groups of animals — from the familiar (a murder of crows) to the bewildering (a smack of jellyfish). Mifflin’s song about a pride of lions would have been appropriate for this collection, given that the surname Lowe may derive from the German word for the king of beasts. But the lion song is just (k)not as amusing as this somewhat Carrollian, amphibian air.

Canzonetta | Alma Gluck (soprano), Francis J. Lapitino (harp)

In his day, Johann Carl Gottfried Loewe (1796–1869) was known as the “Schubert of North Germany,” setting hundreds of poems to music. Many of the texts came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — including this one, from “Faust,” whose first line translates as “She was prettier than the prettiest day.” You can find oodles of 21st-century recordings of Carl’s works. This one is more than a century old and very scratchy, but its charm is irrefutable.

Hello Susie | Amen Corner

Singing on this 1969 U.K. hit is Welshman Andy Fairweather Low (b. 1948). Later in his career Andy was a touring guitarist for George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Roger Waters, and Bill Wyman, and he sang backup on The Who’s “Who Are You.” (Bonus: Don’t miss The Move’s 1970 recording of “Hello Susie,” which features the song’s writer, Roy Wood of later ELO fame.)

Mischief | Bill Lowe and the Signifyin’ Natives Ensemble

In his younger days, Bill played trombone and tuba on the New York City jazz scene. From 1989 to 2005, he taught music and African-American studies at Northeastern University. In 2023, at age 77, Bill released his first album as sole leader of a band (one that includes Boston cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum among others). The album centers on Jean Toomer’s experimental novel “Cane,” a defining work of the Harlem Renaissance. Black LGBTQ writers including Samuel R. Delany figure in other of Bill’s scholarly work and musical compositions.

Turn the Lights On | Big Sugar

These guys are kind of a big deal in their native Canada. Anchoring their blues/rock/reggae sound was bassist Garry Lowe(b. 1953), a transplant from Jamaica who played in several other Toronto groups and was the go-to bassist for visiting island acts. He even does a little toasting on this track. After Garry’s death in 2018, his son Ben took over as the band’s bassist.

Low Down in the Broom | Frankie Armstrong

This traditional Scottish folk song has been recorded many times in the modern age, including by the Waterboys. “Broom” here refers not to the sweeping implement but to a bush with small yellow flowers. In the song, two lovers meet beneath this bush for what we can only assume is an innocent chat. You may think this song is included because it’s got “Low” in the title, but there’s another reason. Accompanying vocalist Frankie on the recorder is one Jeff Lowe.

Theme from “Leisure Suit Larry” | Al Lowe

Albert William Lowe (b. 1946) is a video game designer best known for creating the “Leisure Suit Larry” series. This is Larry’s theme song as it sounded in a 1989 release on the Apple IIGS. Before getting into computers, Al played saxophone at the University of Missouri and was a public school music teacher.

The Green Door | Jim Lowe

James Ellsworth Lowe (1923–2016) grew up in Missouri. Outside his work as a singer-songwriter, Jim was a disc jockey at various New York City radio stations for decades. This recording climbed to No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart 1956, displacing Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender.” Written by Bob “Hutch” Davie and Marvin J. Moore, “Green Door” probably describes a speakeasy. During Prohibition, some restaurants painted their doors green to indicate they were selling bootleg liquor.

Break Up Your Band | Chavez

Heavy-hitting drummer James Lo anchored this mid-’90s NYC math-rock/post-hardcore band. Chavez never scored a hit on the charts. But their video for this song — which prominently features male strippers — did appear on “Beavis and Butt-Head.” To quote Butt-Head: “I mean, it’s like, the music is horrible, but it rules.”

Dawn Carol | RNCM Flutes

Margaret Lowe of Birmingham, England, wrote this meditative piece in 2001. She intended for it to be performed by multiple flutists scattered among the audience in a concert hall, each one playing the same part in a loose round. This somewhat indeterminate format made “Dawn Carol” perfect for the type of collaborative split-screen videos that so many musicians created during the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. This version was posted to YouTube on June 5, 2020, by students of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester.

Get Low | Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz feat. Ying Yang Twins

Atlanta’s Jonathan H. Smith (b. 1971), aka Lil Jon, is the self-proclaimed King of Crunk. In other words, he’s a leading exponent of a subgenre of Southern hip-hop that’s all about partying. This song was a No. 2 hit in 2003 and remains a party staple to this day. Lil Jon continues to rack up hits as a producer.