The Architecture of Force-Prologue

So if you go back to the very first post on “Styrofoam Boots”, you’d see where Stuart introduced this site as being about posting “good reviews and essays”. Most of these reviews have been quite good, but, looking around, I’m not seeing any real essays except for that one where Stuart was all like “I like music a lot” and that was more of an essay/review hybrid, so I’m going to bring it upon myself to write the first essays that’ll be featured on this site. I’m going to call it the “Architecture of Force” series.

Now given my track record, you’ll probably assume that this is all going to be about prog and metal, and while those both play a part in it, no, that’s not really what this is about at all. It’s more of a meditation on what makes a moving, powerful piece of music moving and powerful-be it metal, punk, folk, jazz or whatever I feel like shining a light on.

There are a shit-ton of definitions for the word “force”. The one I’m going to be concentrating on is this one: “intensity or strength of effect”. This means that I’m going to be looking at what the song is trying to achieve, and how it achieves this(I’m only going to be looking at ones I deem successful-no losers in my sounds club).

One of the points of this exercise is to see if there’s a kind of universal appeal in a powerful piece of music. One would think that somebody who listens to mostly jazz is going to be looking for a different effect or feeling then somebody who listens to largely punk or somebody who listens to largely rap-but as stated above, this is just an assumption. Most people take it for granted that this is the case, so, as somebody who has a rather expansive taste in music, I’m going to try to see if this is the case once and for all. It’s more of a side-goal, but I think it’s interesting enough to mention.

So, to recap: What makes a song powerful, and how does it achieve said power, and how can I claim something like that accurately without knowing a bunch of music school garbage? I can’t. But it’s science fact that I’m writing for a music blog because I know more about music than you do, so shut your pie hole.

Part 1 starts sometime this week.

-CJ