How I became the Mariah Carey Christmas chord guy (and why I hate it)

this is what christmas is like for me i just know that it's the season when people show up in my mansions telling me that i'm dumb this video is sponsored by skillshare if i drop dead right now my obit will probably start thusly food youtuber adam ragusia noted for seasoning his ex instead of his why and dousing it in white wine passed away unexpectedly in his kitchen in macon georgia thursday and for this notoriety i am grateful because before lots of people started watching me play with food on the internet i was most famous for an episode that i would consider a low point of my life a moment where i had my two minutes hate when i drew the sustained ire of a ferocious beast known as music theory twitter how well with my appearance in a vox video about mariah carey's all i want for christmas is you i will now relate this tale to you from my point of view of course i think it offers a lot of good lessons about what can go wrong when you try to communicate any remotely esoteric ideas to a general audience and what can go wrong in the game of telephone from expert to journalist and then from journalist to audience and then from audience to audience of the audience's tweets or youtube videos but first you might be wondering why does adam care what music theory twitter says well it's because i used to be one of them or at least i aspired to be one of them i was a music kid i was really into theory but i was more into composition comp was my thing when i was 14 i started studying composition with a fellow named dr paul barsum who was on the music faculty at penn state i grew up in the town where penn state is and paul was just everything a young man could want in a mentor he was so helpful he was an outsider like me in the world of classical music in many ways we both sort of got into classical music by way of heavy progressive rock paul loved yes i loved the first four metallica albums particularly justice i wasn't one of the band kids i was kind of a misfit punk rock kid in fact i went to a alternative high school that was basically punk rock misfit high plus dnd kids it was absolutely wonderful but we didn't have band we didn't have orchestra and i wasn't particularly into mozart or anything like that my interest in classical music was in contemporary stuff at one of our lessons paul played me a piece by one of his teachers a wonderful composer named christopher rouse the piece was called gorgon [Music] and i thought that was the coolest damn thing i had ever heard in my life to put it in today's terminology roush gents i wanted to go to school wherever that rouse guy was teaching at the time it was the eastman school of music in rochester new york that's not a place that looms very large in the popular imagination about conservatories and such but music people watching know that's a pretty exclusive and elite music program i worked really really hard i wrote some good pieces and amazingly i got in i was really surprised and when i got there i epically collapsed i swear this is all relevant to the mariah carey christmas thing just bear with me i collapsed at eastman for a few reasons i was in a relatively unhealthy relationship with a young woman back in pennsylvania at the time and i was driving back to see her every weekend and that stopped me from developing a social support system at college which is a really really important thing for incoming students i learned later as a university faculty member let's see what else i was abusing substances quite heavily this is hardly uncommon for conservatory kids but mostly i think i just felt as though i didn't belong i was just not an orchestra kid i felt like an imposter toward the end of my second semester i got really messed up i was spending days days at a time locked in my dorm room peeing in bottles so that i would not risk seeing anyone or being seen by anyone on my trips to the bathroom that's a pretty messed up thing i just told you about pretty personal i tell it to you in hopes that if you're having a really rough year at school and you're doing some messed up stuff just be aware that you're not the only one and it does get better eventually i packed up and i left eastman before the school year was even over i ended up finishing my bachelor's degree back at penn state with paul and i had a really good time things went really really well i wrote some good stuff a piece that i wrote called jiahu won a prestigious student composition award from columbia university called the burns prize it's on my soundcloud you should listen to it i studied theory with a brilliant guy named julian hook and then it came time for grad school i was lucky enough to get into another really good program indiana university's jacobs school of music where dr hook had coincidentally landed as well and i had a good time but i fell into a pretty familiar pattern i really felt as though i did not belong i felt like an imposter and i was just kind of getting bored with it i was spending lots of time in my room writing these artie pop songs instead of doing the real music the music that counted in the eyes of my program and i finished all my coursework for my master's but i never graduated and it didn't matter to me because by then i had found where i did belong i had stumbled into the university's public radio station and applied for a job and i found my place within like a year i was in charge of the news at wfiu and my training in audio was kind of my secret weapon it really really helped me excel in that world i started doing lots of national stories for npr that's the nominally public public radio network that we have here in the united states a couple years later my wife and i moved to boston i got a job at wbur which is a really great npr station in boston had a great time kind of climbing the ladder there and learning a whole lot but eventually i came to the conclusion that i needed to kind of look for a different career path npr did not need any more guys of my general demographic description on their air and i was good at teaching so eventually i landed at this wonderful teaching job here in macon georgia at mercer university where i taught very happily for several years until this whole youtube thing dropped in my lap i'd always hope to find more ways to marry my disparate skill sets into the same professional activity many of the best things in the world i think are made by people who are able to bridge worlds and so when i got to georgia i started making an effort to do music or make music as part of my media projects i started writing themes for people's radio shows and podcasts for example i also started writing about music reporting on music and writing essays opinion pieces about music for general interest publications in journalism i had learned how to write things that large numbers of people would want to click on and i thought that i could combine that skill set with my musical experience to good effect or so i figured in 2014 mariah carey gave a live performance of her hit all i want for christmas is you and she infamously bombed us people were eating her alive on twitter and i wanted to come to her defense it is not realistic to expect that a woman in her mid-40s is going to sing as acrobatically as she did in her mid-20s and besides she co-wrote that song let's give her some credit that is one of the very few post-war songs that have really penetrated the christmas canon it's right in there with all of the other immortal classics and will be for a very long time and i just wanted to dig into why that is the case thus my 2014 article for slate.com all i want for christmas is diminished cords why mariah carey's immortal holiday classic sounds so darn christmassy my argument here was pretty modest i simply observed that relative to other modern christmas songs carrie's song has a harmonic palette that is more similar to something that irving berlin would have written something like white christmas it's got some spicy jazzy chords in there it's got some nice chromaticism in the melody all of which gives it a classic sound more so than other modern christmas hits and if you have no idea what any of that means what you'd like to learn consider patronizing the sponsor of this video skillshare which proves every day that the academy is hardly the only place where one can learn sophisticated stuff if you like music but know nothing about theory consider this excellent class by fernando arruda he teaches all the basic theory stuff not on a piano or staff paper but via the simple midi grid that most contemporary electronic musicians use to program their tracks if you don't judge yourself to be a musician at this point don't worry you'll be soon and you'll be making great songs in no time skillshare is a place where you can watch thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people these are not haphazard youtube tutorials these are classes with a logical flow and homework assignments skillshare is curated for learning meaning there are no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you can follow your creativity and curiosity wherever best part it's less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription hit my link in the description and the first thousand of you will get a free trial of skillshare premium use my link in the description get that free trial thank you skillshare so anyway in this slate article i was simply arguing that the chords in all i want for christmas is you are kind of reminiscent of the great american songbook era of american popular music sort of pre-rock pop music at the same time the arrangement of the mariah song is straight out of phil spector's famous 1963 christmas album also reminds me a lot of the classic motown christmas records it's just touching or resonating with a lot of our musical christmas reference points all at the same time and yeah duh it also has sleigh bells this article really blew up for slate it was their number one most shared article for quite some time and it was again when they republished it the following year people like to read about how a song that they maybe regard as a guilty pleasure is also considered artistically meritorious by someone they find it validating and of course people with little or no musical background like it when something can help them understand why a song makes them feel the way they do so the article blew up really big and i did not get much of any blowback at the time except for this one little kind of nitpick i got in the comments where people said that what i analyzed as a minor four plus six chord in the irving berlin song the plus six wasn't really a chord tone they said it's more of a passing tone in the melody and maybe they're right although i'm pretty sure i hear it sustained in the orchestration as well although i suppose it depends on the orchestration a national radio show out of new york called the takeaway had me on to interview me about it again didn't get any blow back there to this day every christmas i get invites from chat show producers all over the world asking me to come on their show and talk about mariah carey in fact here are invites that i've gotten in the last few days one from bbc4 one from sky news to come on and do this sorry brits i'm out of the game i'm out of the carry game permanently because in the fall of 2016 i got an email from folks at vox media who wanted to do a video based on my slate piece and they wanted to interview me for it at first i was hesitant i respect vox a lot but i don't especially like it for reasons that we will get to still most people who do some version of what i do for a living believe in interview karma even now doing food journalism on youtube i live and die by people consenting to be interviewed by me so when people want to flip the table and interview me for their thing i tried to do it the vox interview was very quick they were not going to fly a crew down to macon georgia to talk to me so he did what's called a tape sink or a double ender basically that means i set up my own camera in my office at mercer and i recorded myself talking to my camera while the vox folks asked me questions over a speakerphone remember i'm a radio guy i was just starting to figure out cameras at that time and i was very distracted worrying about whether or not my dslr was running properly as they were asking me these questions and at one point in the interview i felt that i should offer or play an example of why that mariah carey song reminds me of something irving berlin would write i did not have an instrument with me in my office when i was on the takeaway i had a guitar with me but i had nothing with me in my office so i picked up my iphone and i opened up garageband that has a little keyboard in it so i picked up my phone and i started to play a particular little chord progression that is common to both all i want for christmas is u and white christmas just a tasty little bit of mode mixture goes one four minor four plus six back to one again that minor iv chord always sounded particularly christmassy to me it's that sort of melting effect going from the major four to the minor four just felt like a warm fireside especially with that spicy added six in it and as i started to play and sing this i remember making a snap decision to play and identify that minor four plus six chord not as i had done in my slate article which was as a minor four but rather as a two half diminished chord why well is because i was playing a teeny little iphone keyboard and i didn't think i would be able to finger a second without mashing the keys with my fat little fingers the notes are just too close together so i revoiced the chord i threw that added six down in the bass which then made it look like a two-half diminished chord and i called it that even though i don't think it really functions that way whatever i figured people watching a vox video are not going to stay up at night worrying about matters of enharmonic equivalence and probably neither are you if you don't know what that means basically in any system of musical analysis there's kind of multiple different names that you can give to the same collection of notes and you might give it a different name depending on kind of how it's behaving in the composition even though it's the same set of notes regardless that's what that is i want to see something crazy literally as i was recording this just now i got another twitter mention from somebody saying hey it doesn't really function as a two chord it's more of a minor iv chord this is what christmas is like for me i just know that it's the season when people show up in my mansions telling me that i'm dumb anyways also when i was playing for vox i misspoke once i said dominant when i meant subdominant and if you don't know what that means just know that that's a really elementary mistake it's pretty embarrassing on the other hand that's the kind of thing that happens i know the difference that just the wrong word came out i know the names of my own children and yet i very often refer to the big one by the little one's name and vice versa it's just that kind of mis-speaking is a thing that people do in fact i remember having the feeling that i had messed something up when i recorded that little talk through sing-through for a vox and i said i wanted to go back and do it again and i did do it again i'm pretty sure i got it right but i did not communicate effectively to the vox folks that they should probably use the second take of that anyway i had to hurry off the call with vox because i needed to go teach journalism class i sent them the files that i had recorded on my camera and then i did not hear from them again i figured that they had probably scrapped the project hardly uncommon in the business then during finals week december 2016 this happened one of my kids suffered a very terrible injury having a very young child in what is called a spika cast is an absolute nightmare it requires 24-hour care luckily christmas break had just started for me at the university so i was able to spend all of my time being a 24-hour caregiver for a very very injured little boy and it was extremely sad i was worried all the time and after a while frankly i got really really bored being hodor for a kid oh no then one day in the midst of all of that i got an email from vox saying hey we finished that video that you're in it's up why don't you go check it out and i thought oh cool i could use a pick me up i started watching this thing and my first thought wasn't oh we really botched that really it was wow that is some pretty impressive adobe after effects work i was trying to learn after effects myself at the time in general i thought it was really well done and i sent an email back saying hey great thanks for including me but then as i sat with it for a little bit longer i started to think uh people are gonna ding us for that headline the secret chord that makes christmas music so christmassy ain't nothing secret about the chord in question going to the parallel minor on the four is one of the oldest tricks in the book it in fact is a cliche and indeed i wasn't even saying that that one chord makes the song or makes the genre of christmas music i was just offering it as one example among many i think whomever wrote that headline was trying to make a cheeky leonard cohen reference if you recall leonard cohen had just died when this all happened and his immortal lyric was everywhere i heard that there was a secret chord that david played and it pleased the lord headline writers everywhere love timely illusions and i think that's what this was an attempt at though indeed the video itself did also talk about this one chord as though it is some talismanic gestalt deep within the dna of all christmas music everywhere and that did not surprise me this is vox we're talking about and that's what vox does that is their whole thing this is the one chart that explains the global economy or this is the one map that shows what's wrong with health care in the united states or whatever what's the one thing that explains all the things that's what vox does journalism i would argue is inherently reductive but vox makes an art of reducing things awesec to borrow a culinary term it means almost dry this has always been a brilliant content strategy on vox's part the one simple thing that explains all the things schtick is perfectly optimized for the platform-based content marketplace that we're in it makes things work in the context of a single tweet or other social media post so whatever i thought vox gonna vox and it's not like i'm the one calling it the secret chord that explains all of christmas music they're the ones calling it that they're not gonna blame me for this and then i looked at my twitter mentions hashtag cordgate someone had dubbed it music theory twitter was a buzz and not like a happy honeybee colony but an angry ass yellowjacket nest and their outrage was to a great extent justified i think that video was click baity and it was outright wrong in spots music theory twitter was also mad that vox hadn't called them instead no vox had called a comp major with an iphone as someone had put it you know i thought i was being rather resourceful by reaching for my phone there but anyways i've always kind of felt that music academia is a lot like high school in some ways it's got jocks it's got nerds it's got cool kids it's got losers and i kind of felt right back in there remember what i said before about how i never really felt like i fit in that world well having music theorists some of whom i knew and whose work i respected tweet at me and say literally stay in your lane that kind of touched something within me a sore spot worn raw by years and years of imposter syndrome it touched on my earlier feelings of rejection from that world and my regret about having abandoned that career path combine all that emotional baggage with the fact that i was sitting at home caring for a poor injured child and i was already emotionally really raw i had nothing to do but sit and stew about this i lost my everlove in mind i lashed out at the critics on twitter i've had trouble going back and finding a lot of these exchanges but one i remember pretty vividly was a faculty member at a very well-known music school tweeted at me and accused me of pandering to the lowest common denominator and i responded with something to the effect of okay if you think that's the lowest common denominator you have absolutely no idea how low denominators go but nothing caused me more grief than one particularly inadvisable tweet of mine somebody had tweeted hey vox you know there are actual music theory experts out there you should call us to that i replied i am an actual expert please friends allow me to revise and extend those remarks by saying i am an actual expert i absolutely was not trying to put myself on the same level as people with terminal degrees in music theory and musicology eminent music scholars who were engaged in this discussion online i was merely saying that i do have expertise too i was not just anybody and the fact is vox could have interviewed you they could have interviewed a credentialed terminal degree holding music theorist and vox still would have come away with a piece that says this is the one thing that explains all of christmas music because that's what vox does vox gonna vox regardless of who they talk to and you know what i'm still not convinced that's entirely bad i think there's value in getting a general audience to think about esoteric aesthetic stuff even if making it digestible for them requires reducing it down almost beyond the point of recognition i do think there's value there i believe in the power of expertise i believe in the academy i absolutely abhor the anti-intellectual moment that we're in here in the united states on the other hand i do think that there are lots of ways to acquire expertise beyond the normal channels and i did see some haughty elitism in the response to that video a kind of priestly attitude only we the guys in the funny hats are endowed with the divine authority to read the word of god who is this layman this lullard who would presume to interpret the mysteries of the faith and in a lot of these tweets mocking either me or the video i see a lot of very smart people doing that thing where people kind of become deliberately obtuse in their desire to be righteously indignant about something this right here is a particular version of a common argument i got people saying come on adam there's nothing inherently christmassy about these chords they're in like a billion things well duh no musical object has any intrinsic meaning in isolation context matters it always matters and you damn well know that there's nothing inherently christmassy about cinnamon and cloves either but put them on a goose the size of tiny tim and it's christmassy af likewise i do think there is a historical cultural association between the kind of harmonic palette that we see and all i want for christmas is you and the broader canon of christmas music for a lot of people vast numbers of people that time of year when their go-to country or pop station switches over to 24-hour christmas music that's really the only time in their year when they are exposed to a lot of music that isn't just for block triads christmas is the only time when they hear music from the 1930s and 40s when pop music was much more influenced by jazz and tin pan alley than by rock or folk and mariah's song evokes music of that 30s and 40s era that's all i'm trying to say all i was trying to say but in retrospect i do think i could have done a number of things differently or better in how i talked to vox and certainly in how i talked to music theory twitter if you are a kind of person who may ever be called upon to be an expert source in someone else's media project here are some hard-won lessons from me a person who is frequently on both ends of that interview dynamic both as the interviewee and the interviewer so here's what i've learned don't give any example or anecdote that you don't want to be the example or anecdote a journalist knows that they only have space to communicate one wonky idea to their audience they get one thing and everything else is going to have to be generalities so if you're an expert being interviewed you got to think really strategically about what examples or anecdotes you give them because they're probably only going to pick one to cover in any kind of detail and if there isn't one that you would want to be the one then don't give them anything don't give them any specific example or anecdote talk purely in generalities they'll hate it in journalism school we teach students that quotes should be the spice in the stew not the meat and potatoes by that we mean quotes should not be used to kind of cover basic information you can probably do that more efficiently in your own writing quotes should instead be there to provide a little bit of color a little bit of emotion a little bit of flavor for the bland bulk around it i should have known as i was singing and playing through that stupid modal interchange progression that has caused me so much grief in my life that that was gonna be the thing that they were gonna use that was the most colorful most dynamic thing that i did on camera for vox that day of course they were going to use it maybe i shouldn't have submitted to that interview at all after all remember i had already written my article i had already said my say my thing was out there in my own words why did i need to have it translated through someone else because here's another unfortunate thing about journalism it's sloppy inherently sloppy in fact i would argue that the only difference between journalism and scholarship is that scholarship is slow and methodical while journalism is quick and dirty it is the first draft of history as the expression goes i believe that both journalism and scholarship have really important roles to play in society but they are fundamentally different and they both have their pros and cons here's another unfortunate thing about journalism is that you often have a person who has no particular subject matter expertise covering a really complex topic and there are some advantages to that there's advantage to having a layperson cover something that's really really complicated they're coming at it with fresh eyes and they're coming at it asking the kinds of basic questions that the normals at home are going to be wondering that's a good thing but of course there's a downside to it too which is that the details are going to get smudged a little bit around the edges one thing you can do is ask the reporter you're talking to if you could maybe see their draft prior to publication you'll have to do this delicately because this what is known as giving a source prior review is generally regarded as an ethical no-no in the journalism world it gives a source the opportunity to exert undue influence over your finished product they're taught not to do this but here's the thing you're not some politician you're not a newsmaker with a big personal stake in influencing how this topic gets talked about you're an expert source you're just somebody who's trying to inform the public the same way that the journalist is and in my opinion granting prior review to an expert source is a very different thing and a perfectly fine thing in fact when i blew up on youtube and then started doing food journalism alongside my recipe videos i realized that i could now make my own ethical rules and i started granting prior review to every single expert source that i talked to i still do that to this day i'm not offering them veto power over my video but i am offering them every opportunity to convince me if i've gotten something wrong and in fact i get things wrong all the time and prior review has saved me from a lot of those errors i believe in it if vox had given me prior review i don't think i would have torn their thing to shreds i still think they did a pretty good job overall i just would have encouraged them to kind of walk back from certain rather kind of absolutist or sweeping language they used and i might have discouraged them from using certain quotes that they had taken from me here maybe some good ways to ask for prior review hey i'd love to have a look at your draft when you got it together just to make sure that i didn't do a bad job explaining any of the technical stuff blame it on yourself that always works don't worry i'm not trying to write your article for you and feel free to call or text me about it anytime day or night i can probably look at it real quick right before your deadline journalists are always on deadline and that's part of why they don't want to go into the prior review business it just slows things down you could try asking for prior review that might work however if you really want to try to communicate sophisticated things from your field to a general audience really the best thing may be for you to simply do it yourself to augment your skill set with the ability to take esoterica and translate it into an article or a video that lots of normal people will want to watch there's certainly a lot of models lord knows adam neely here on youtube offers a great example of how to do that so does 12 tone here on youtube check out that channel in fact corey from 12tone was actually with me a couple years back at a music theory conference where i first delivered the paper that i just adapted just now for you i was at the university of south carolina and i want to thank dr danny jenkins there for inviting me to do that and for encouraging me to write about this experience and thank you mariah carey you're blameless in all of this mimi you are merely an innocent bystander you're simply an accessory to good holiday cheer and long may you reign as the new queen of christmas

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 471,920

Rating: 4.9245281 out of 5

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Id: fxUnwsttr_8

Length: 29min 16sec (1756 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/lushlife_]

Wow, what a wild, angsty ride. Love it and well done.

[u/himanxk]

I love Adam Ragusea