I’m guessing that some of you are not familiar with the band Imperial Teen. I wasn’t either, but I’ve lately been listening to some of my girlfriend’s old CDs on my iPod, and one of their songs stood out while my iPod was set to shuffle.

The song is called “You’re One” and it’s from their debut album, Seasick. It turns out that this album was rated Spin magazine’s 4th best album of 1996 and on Spin’s list of top 50 albums of all time. I’m not exactly sure how I overlooked this band, but this song (”You’re One”) was apparently the album’s breakout single. It’s certainly a catchy song, which is partially why it attracted my attention in the first place.

There is something kind of fascinating about the song, however, other than just its general catchiness. Firstly, there are two main parts to the song. The first part is soft, undistorted, and upbeat while the second part is loud, distorted, and rockin’. Typically, I would expect (like in a Nirvana song, for example) we would call the first part the verse and the loud distorted part that follows the chorus.

But in this tune, the title of the song gets repeated in the first part (what musically sounds like a verse) and the lyrics stay the same every time this part reappears. In contrast, the lyrics to the second part (which sounds somewhat like a chorus) change each time this second part appears. So already, the song is not exactly what one might expect from a typical form.

More interestingly, though, I was kind of struck by how the chords in the first part of the song are simply the chords in the second part of the song rearranged in a different order. In fact, it’s like the chords in the louder part are just a rotation of the order for the chords in the softer part. Here, take a listen to both parts to hear their harmonic similarity:

		Imperial Teen: “You’re One” (first soft part)
		Imperial Teen: “You’re One” (second loud part)

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Here’s a little table of the harmonies for both sections to make this rotational pattern more clear:

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I think there are some standard harmonic relationships that verses and choruses often share, although no one has really sat down and mapped them out. One classic trick, though, is that the verse will start on tonic and go somewhere else, while the chorus will start somewhere else and lead back to tonic. In other words, verses go away from home, choruses come back; this gives the chorus a cadential quality that arguably makes it all the more satisfying. Of course, that’s just one generic paradigm, and I can’t say yet what many other typical paradigms are.

So for harmonic and textural reasons, I’m apt to call the first part a verse and the second loud part a chorus. But lyrically, it’s the opposite. The first part has the repetitive lyrics and contains the title. I know this is a stretch, but you might see the lyrics and the music to be somewhat out of phase. Or perhaps, you could say that the lyrics have been rotated out of their more expected position with respect to the music, similar to the way the music itself rotates the harmonies between the two parts? OK, maybe that’s maybe going too far….

Getting back to my main critical point for this song, though, is that I found it slightly unfortunate that the rotational nature between the two parts of the song weren’t used to their fullest potential. For example, the melodies for each section could have been superimposed together to have one culminatory blowout end section.

If the two melodies get combined, it brings up another interesting question: where do you hear the strong beat in the hypermeter? In both sections, there is a clear hypermeter of 4 bars; that’s how often the chord progression repeats itself. But of course, the beginnings of the phrases in the first part start on the E chord (tonic), while the beginnings of the phrases in the second part start on the D chord (subtonic).

When both parts are combined, does the hypermeter shift to 2 bars, or can you hear two conflicting hypermeters of 4 bars at the same time (or does one 4-bar hypermeter subsume the other)? I’ve made two mash-ups below, since I think we tend to give preference to the hypermeter that begins first; it’s hard to just jump in without preferencing one over another.

		Imperial Teen: “You’re One” (mash-up; second part leading)
		Imperial Teen: “You’re One” (mash-up; first part leading)

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I realize these mash-ups sound a little messy. But I think you get the idea of how combining these two melodies could have been cool. It seems like a missed opportunity.

The task of nailing down what makes us call one part a verse and another part a chorus, musically speaking, still remains open of course. Then again, what would we call a part that has the verse and chorus together at the same time?