We made a video for The Oldest Song—a music video, as it were. The Oldest Song (Hurrian Hymn no.6.) was discovered on clay tablets in the Ancient Syrian city of Ugartit and is estimated to be about 3,400 years old. This version is performed half on toy classroom instruments, and half on traditional rock ‘n’ roll instruments. With its incessant crazy changes, odd rhythms, and silly happy schoolhouse sound, the Oldest Song makes for the perfect Los Doggies cover song. It’s almost bad, but it isn’t; it is good.
The Oldest Song is so old yet sounds much like the music of today; it’s in the key of C Major (C D E F G A B), and follows a simple I IV V chord progression. The first measure even sounds like “Ode to Joy”.
Music has stayed so similar over the millennia because of the natural basis of the major/minor scale. Every tone that you hear is actually a tiny chord of barely audible harmonics. They form the harmonic series, a scale that resembles the key of Lydian Dominant, and dictates what we hear as consonant and what is dissonant. The Harmonic Series appears at the end of the above video, as a half-time rock outro.
So when you strike a low C on a piano, these others harmonics will also sound.
Tones at the front of the series will sound consonant, while the tones at the end of the series are the most dissonant. So every tone we hear has harmonics that make it sound subtlety like a major chord (the first 8 harmonics actually make a dominant 7th chord). That’s why simple major music like the Hurrian hymns were just as popular in the ancient world as it is in today’s derivatives.
The Oldest Song is so old that nobody knows it anymore. It should be taught in every music classroom in America. It should be the School Song of Berkeley. It should be performed as a ballet at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. There should be dub and dance versions all over the Net, a sludgey stoner metal version, and the prodigy Asian version that puts them all to shame. The Oldest Song went viral thousands of years ago, and no one has bothered reposting it since. All that remains is an out-of-print record, an ad-addled youtube video, with synthesized MIDI versions of the song— a Muzak mockery of the god-fearing ancients. It’s as if a millenia from now, all that will remain of our once glorious music culture are the bloopy Casio covers of pop songs no one remembers the lyrics to.
um, I love you guys. We all need the Oldest Song! If there’s anyone who can bring it back into the rotation, it’s definitely Los. More videos!