When you combine the dark atmosphere from the bass walking down, the unexpected turn of that leap down to the last note, and those trumpets reinforcing everything you hear from the bass, you’ve got a powerful little beat. So that bass hits you, and then those trumpets hit you again, on the same note, but higher.
So you’ve got an unexpected bass line, and then you’ve got the same thing repeated, insistently, an octave higher. Look at that jump and you can almost hear DMX’s boot come crashing down on you. And that interval between the third and fourth note – it’s not a slide down anymore, is it? It’s a leap. So that immediately grabs your attention. But in this context, it’s different from what you’re expecting in a subtle way. Pop music swaps the 4 chord in for a 5 chord all the time. Now, this isn’t completely unheard of, or massively groundbreaking, or anything. They take that bass you’re expecting to hear and drop that last note down an extra step, to a 4. (This bass line is called “Lament Bass” by people who need to have a name for every single little thing.) It sounds cool, and it’s super effective, and again, it gets you to 5 in a hurry. (Both of those sneak in an extra note or two. A whole host of other people from Monteverdi to Green Day have made use of it. So does “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by the Beatles. Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” comes at you with this right away. You hear this all the time, in some form or fashion. When you’re going for “dark,” it doesn’t get better than this. Sometimes people tuck in an extra note between the notes so it’s extra slidey and sneaky and/or sad and/or sexy, but this is the basic bass line. This walking motion is perfect because it has a definite sense of motion, it immediately communicates the minor mode very effectively, and it sets you up to land on that 5 really quickly so you can jump back up to 1 and do it again. You walk down from 1, to 7, to 6, to 5.Ī 1 and a 5 are, on a basic level, all you need to make a musical “sentence.” It’s like having a noun and a verb. Normally when you walk a bass down in minor, you just keep walking til you get to the 5th note of the scale. Those first three notes, Bb down to Ab down to Gb, tell you immediately that something’s about to go down. The first, most obvious part is that insane beat, which makes use of one of the oldest ways to communicate “sinister badassery” known to Western music – it just walks down the minor scale, for the most part.
(Below is a TV spot for the film which also uses the song, though maybe not to quite such perfect effect.)īut why does it get stuck in your head so hard? Let’s try and take a look at this on sort of a “music theory-lite” level. The references to “stainless steel” as the camera lovingly lingers on Colossus (and of course the oblique “X”-references) make it a perfect fit for the film. Tim Miller has said that the song was part of the movie’s DNA since the script first came into being six years ago.
)Īs Rick and Morty‘s popularity explodes, the song’s YouTube count has soared, but it got another boost early this year when it was the backdrop for Deadpool‘s trailers and TV spots. (That scene is embedded below, censored to the degree that it was when it ran on. It was famously used at the end of the “Something Ricked This Way Comes” episode of Rick and Morty, in a scene where Rick and his granddaughter Summer go on a steroid-fueled rampage against her old boss/The Devil, and then widen the scope of their beatings to “anyone who has it coming.”
Some 12 years after recording “X Gon’ Give It To Ya” for the Cradle 2 the Grave soundtrack, the song is seeing a massive resurgence in popularity. All of a sudden, DMX is everywhere – especially for nerds.