Los Doggies

Let’s take a look at Willow Smith’s “Whip My Hair”. This song features a highly-sexualized celebrity daughter whipping shots of paint into the faces of her classmates. In other words: it’s a little too racy to feature on this blog, which is far more concerned with eroticizing language.

“Whip My Hair” is a kind of playground song with a chromatic hook in the key of A minor. Chromatics closely mimic the tonality of human speech which jumps up and down in small intervals. Even without the lyrics, the melody has a mocking quality with the repetitive echo and the chromatic descent.

This next example from the RPG classic Final Fantasy VI is more like it. This melody descends chromatically in triplets.

The 7/8 theme “Another World of Beasts” was composed by game master of melodies Nobuo Uematsu—the Beethoven to Koji Kondo’s Mozart. The chromatic triplets resolve on certain “sweet notes” of an Eb Harmonic Minor scale, from the fifth to the third to the seventh back to the fifth.

Koji Kondo uses the downward chromatic tuplet in Super Mario Bros. 3 for the Warp Whistle melody. This short solo flute figure has a mystical flavor, similar to the Final Fantasy example, like a warping wind that sweeps your sprite into the clouds (which look suspiciously like white bushes).