Did you ever notice how clock time is counted on the wrong beats? It goes “tick-tock” when it should go “tock-tick”, like drums do. In the popular drum beat, the lower tone kick drum is played on the One, while the higher tone snare drum on the Two. Boom pah, boom boom pah, not pah boom, va-va-voom.
It’s as if Father Time’s daily meter has been shifted off one beat—a truly off-beat. We seem to be missing a moment, like when the Pope casually killed 11 days off the Gregorian Calendar. We are always trying to catch up to the future and the past by clocking into the present, yet we find ourselves living in a borrowed beat from another bar—the famous quarter-beat delay of consciousness. Tock-tick? What is this folk jam with downbeats all around? You would make a hoedown of the day’s ballad?
Pcch boom, pcch boom.
Similarly, the heart beat goes “lub dub” and not “dub lub.” Where did this missing proto beat disappear to? Did somebody turn the beat around, and forget to turn it back? We begin life on an upbeat, but we’re not sure how we got up there.
And yet if down-beat feel is the most natural to us, why does Pop Music feel so good to be uppity on the up-beats? Is it a kind of music therapy that turns our downs upside-down? What is it about the stomp-clap stomp-stomp-clap pattern of “We Will Rock You” that is so primal it’s featured at every sporting event, yet seems to conflict with the inverted pattern we find in the heart beat and clock-time? Four-on-the-Floor music found in Electronic Dance and the recent explosion of retro Folk, will challenge any notion of a tick and a tock, by refusing to count to 4, and just counting 1 over and over, but as long as there is Rock and Pop and Pop-Rock, drummers will be required to reverse our common notions of time and dub-a-lub, set the tempo at 60 Bpm, for 21,600 measures a day; that’s the 4/4 life.
Popular Songs that Use the Tick-Tock Beat:
“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” by Nirvana
“Birthday” by The Beatles
“Birdhouse in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants
“Party Poison” by My Chemical Romance
“Comin’ Home” by Hum
Can you think of more songs with this beat? Please write them in the comments section below.
