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Sexual Subversion and the Subdominant: the Case of Suede
Author(s) -
SMITH KENNETH M.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
music analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.25
H-Index - 18
eISSN - 1468-2249
pISSN - 0262-5245
DOI - 10.1111/musa.12087
Subject(s) - chord (peer to peer) , subversion , art , aesthetics , literature , visual arts , computer science , law , political science , distributed computing , politics
The first two studio albums from Suede (in America, ‘The London Suede’), fruits of a collaboration between Bernard Butler and Brett Anderson, served as the erotically twisted underbelly of early 1990s Britpop, adding bizarre, seductive alternatives to the relatively normalised sexual experiences described in the songs of Pulp or Blur. A vital part of the band's aesthetics, Suede's harmonic progressions prove to be extremely dexterous, with sinuous voice leading and meandering key changes, often based on common‐tone modulations and parsimony rather than any sense of dominant‐to‐tonic resolution. Using a range of songs from an extensive corpus study, I theorise the chord patterns that were to become recognisable Suede clichés (the ♭VI–V progressions and the III/♭VII/♭II dominant substitutes). In doing so I posit a sense of substituted functionality ( T , S or D ) and a sense of flow in a D ‐wards or S ‐wards direction. Uncovering a strong predilection for the latter, I return to examine their earlier work in a new light with readings of ‘Sleeping Pills’ and ‘Pantomime Horse’ from their debut album, Suede .