(Try singing the melody while playing the bottom line – it should feel strange.) One analysis of “Single Ladies” describes this as an example of “polymodality” – we are in two E modes (major and minor) at the same time. But this song doesn’t do that, since the E major melody seems oblivious to the strange thing that’s happening underneath it. It’s not uncommon for songs to toggle back and forth between a major key and its parallel minor (as we discussed in the chapter on borrowed chords). But what is the C natural in the accompaniment? It appears rather suddenly and seems to point to the key of E minor, rather than E major. The melody makes perfect sense given what we’ve already seen – it bounces along in the key of E major. The chorus repeats beginning at about 0:50, which is when the really strange things start happening. “Single Ladies” simply isn’t constructed around chords. It wouldn’t even be very helpful to understanding what’s going on in “Single Ladies.” But it does suggest a way of thinking about music that’s quite different from the approach I’ve taken here at Popgrammar, which essentially has been to think about chords as the foundations upon which songs are built. I haven’t addressed counterpoint on this site, either, because it’s arguably of limited use in pop music. That music can be made this way is probably fairly obvious to many people who create music electronically, but I haven’t discussed that way of thinking about music very much elsewhere on this site.Ī conventional music theory education would include plenty of discussion of counterpoint, which deals with interaction patterns between multiple semi-independent musical lines.
The squelching sound also reveals an important principle about the song’s construction - “Single Ladies” will feature multiple musical layers that interact unpredictably. The sound serves as a warning shot – it’s telling us that although the melody may be straightforward, the accompaniment will not play nice. When the first chorus enters, a squelching electronic sound fades into the foreground, seemingly independent of the vocal that guides the song. Beyonce does perhaps imply the presence of the I and V chords in E with her harmonization of the word “attention,” as the melody descends from G# (a note from the I chord) to F# (a note from the V chord), but even those harmonizations are not literally I and V chords. If we had to label these 35 seconds, we would probably just put an E chord over the entire passage, but even that is merely implied (by a repeating E subtly beeping in the background) and not stated. The first 35 seconds or so of the song don’t have chord changes in the usual sense. The song’s somewhat taunting chorus (“If you liked it, then you should’ve put a ring on it”) also contributes to that impression, even though the lyrics deal with adult subject matter.
The trajectories of these melodies, coupled with the syncopated handclap percussion, indeed evoke a playground chant. Notice the paths of these melodies – the way the first begins on the fifth degree of E major and descends straightforwardly to the root of the scale, and the way the second dances around only the first three degrees of the scale. Still, there’s something to be said for the straightforward, sing-song quality of these melodies - there’s a reason some commentators noted their similarity to “schoolyard double-dutch chants,” and there’s a reason this exists. The swung rhythms throughout the song, such as the bouncing long-short motives in the first example, create a layer of complexity that isn’t obvious at first listen.
I say “seemingly” above because these melodies sound a lot simpler than they actually are, as we can see when we notate their rhythms. Like many great pop songs, “Single Ladies” is based upon seemingly simple, sing-songy melodies.
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