![]() ![]() Mirroring the trend in rock music writ large, the Beatles’ abandonment of AABA led to an uptick in their use of verse–chorus forms. Avoiding AABA across an entire album was new for the Beatles even the previous year’s Revolver, quite progressive in its own right, contained nearly half AABA songs. Among the many revolutionary aspects of this album, it is easy to overlook its near complete avoidance of AABA form. The Beatles’ shift to an artist approach came to an explosive climax in May of 1967 with the release of Sgt. Around 1965, the band began to depart from the craftsman approach, exemplified by their decreasing use of AABA form. The former dominated their releases through 1965, exemplified through a reliance on traditional song forms, especially the Tin Pan Alley-derived AABA form. In John Covach’s terms, they moved from an approach to songwriting as craft to songwriting as art (Covach 2006). Between the 1960s and 1970s, rock shifted its preference from songs without chorus (AABA and strophic forms) to songs with chorus (verse–chorus forms).ī) Incidence of verse–chorus forms in Billboard Year-End Top-20 songs 1955–89.Īmid this transitional period in rock’s stylistic history, the Beatles were going through a stylistic transition of their own. After 1974, these trend lines leveled off a bit, showing that the late 1960s were a significant transitional period that solidified rock’s preference for choruses.Įxample 1. A decade later, these proportions had essentially reversed, with 29% AABA and strophic forms and 69% verse–chorus forms in 1970–74. Between 19, strophic and AABA songs made up 61% of the year-end top 20, with verse–chorus songs making up only 29%. These graphs visually demonstrate a trend that many writers have observed: between 19, rock shifted its preference from songs without a chorus to songs with a chorus (see Covach 2005, de Clercq 2012, von Appen and Frei-Hauenschild 2015, and Temperley 2018, among others). The top graph shows the combined incidence of AABA and strophic forms-the primary form types that do not contain a chorus-and the bottom graph shows the incidence of verse–chorus forms. These graphs use data from Jay Summach’s study of the top 20 songs on Billboard’s year-end charts from 1955 to 1989 (Summach 2011, 2012). ![]() Keywords and phrases: the Beatles, form, lyrics, narrative analysis, popular music IntroductionĮxample 1 gives two graphs showing the incidence of particular form types in the rock and pop repertoire. Through these analyses, I show how the Beatles used verse–chorus form as a specific expressive device rather than a neutral template as did later artists. Pepper sessions-the peak of what John Covach calls their “artist” period (Covach 2006). To demonstrate, I analyze four songs from the Beatles’ Sgt. This approach differs from the mainstream standard that emerged in the late 1960s, wherein the chorus is the song’s primary narrative focus, with verses playing a supporting role. The song’s meaning thus arises through synthesizing the two ideas. ![]() That approach is narrative opposition, where the two sections present contrasting ideas or settings. This article argues that the Beatles took a particular approach to narrative structure in their verse–chorus songs. ![]()
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