hey, welcome to 12tone. on March 20th, 1993, two bombs went off in
a shopping center in Warrington, England. the Provisional Irish Republican Army would
eventually claim responsibility, but representatives for the IRA maintained that sufficient warning
had been given to allow for an evacuation, with precise instructions for where the bombs
were going to go off, and that they only intended to damage property, not people. however, the authorities insisted that the
warnings they had received were too vague to identify a specific target, and ultimately
no evacuation took place. 54 people were injured, and the attack claimed
the lives of two children, 12-year-old Tim Parry and 3-year-old Johnathan Ball. it was a particularly heartbreaking moment
during The Troubles, a decades-long violent conflict over the sovereignty of Northern
Ireland. not far from the site in Warrington, though,
a young rock band called the Cranberries sat in their tour bus. the experience of being so close to such a
profound tragedy deeply affected the band's lead singer, Dolores O'Riordan, herself an
Irish national. she decided to channel the rage and pain she
was feeling in that moment into her art, and the resulting song, Zombie, lives on as a
haunting reminder of the human costs of these sorts of conflicts. let's take it apart. (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) the song starts like this: (bang) but I think
most listeners would agree that it really starts a couple bars later, when they do this:
(bang) and the first thing we have to talk about is tone. in most Cranberries songs, the guitars sound
something like this: (bang) but while the band was working on Zombie, O'Riordan kept
asking for more and more distortion. the end result is something that sounds less
like the Cranberries and more like Alice In Chains. and that's the point. distortion in guitar-based music often conveys
a sense of anger, and Zombie is the heaviest and angriest song the Cranberries ever made. but it's not the sort of explosive, immediate
anger that comes from a single event. the thick distortion, coupled with the consistent,
pounding 8th note chords at a relatively slow, ballad-like tempo, conveys a seething rage
born of decades of pain and grief. it's an anger that can't see the finish line,
that knows tomorrow's gonna be just as bad as today, but it's an anger that's willing
to fight to make sure that some day it won't be. and we can see that pretty clearly in the
dynamic structure of the song. I skipped over the first part of the intro,
but I probably shouldn't have, because it's actually pretty important that they don't
start with distortion. y'see, while distortion can convey anger,
it can also convey a sense of confusion and chaos. starting off with a clean, echoey guitar tone
creates a slightly uneasy but ultimately tranquil soundscape that's suddenly, violently interrupted
by an explosion of harsh, distorted noise. (bang) it's a powerful musical metaphor for
the sorts of attacks O'Riordan was responding to. but the most important choice they make is
to not stay at that level. the song oscillates between big, distorted
choruses (bang) and much quieter verses, where the guitars drop into the background, handing
the reins off to Mike Hogan's ominous bass. (bang) this cycle of nervous peace and sudden
eruptions speaks to the experience of living through a time like The Troubles, where violence
could break out anywhere, at any moment. and that same sense of confusion can also
be found in the harmony. in principle, Zombie uses a pretty mundane
chord loop. (bang) that's what they're playing for most
of the song. not all of it, we'll get there, but most of
it. theorists call this the Minor Axis Progression,
and I have a whole video about it if you're interested, but the point is you've probably
heard this in dozens, if not hundreds, of other songs. sort of. as is often the case with rock harmony, a
simple chord chart doesn't tell the full story. like, let's look at the clean intro. (bang) while the basic structure of the loop
is there, it sounds to my ears like O'Riordan is leaving the top two strings of the guitar
open and just letting them ring over every chord. those strings play E and B, and as we move
through the loop, those notes develop increasingly complex relationships with the underlying
harmony. like, we start with E minor. E is the root of that chord, and B is the
5th, so they both blend in perfectly. next, though, we move to C major. here, E becomes the 3rd, which is the most
colorful chord tone, the one that makes it sound major. but the real star is B, which is the 7th. this is a sharp, jagged sound, giving the
serene major chord a slightly bitter edge. after that comes G major, and now B becomes
the 3rd, but E is no longer a chord tone at all. now it's the 6th. honestly, it's debatable whether the major
6th actually sounds more complex than the major 7th, but I still find this chord more
striking than the last one simply because the E is on top. when listening to chord voicings, we tend
to latch on to the highest and lowest notes most easily, so while theoretically, this
chord may be more consonant than the last one, the disruptive tone is also more prominent. and finally, she goes to D major, and all
hell breaks loose. neither B nor E is a chord tone here. they're the 6th and 9th, respectively. this gives the chord a rich but pretty ambiguous
sound, which she amplifies by voicing it with an F# as the lowest note, so it's not entirely
clear that this is really even a D chord at all. taken as a whole, this gives us a chord progression
that seems to fall apart as it goes, with less and less structural coherence the deeper
we get, until we wind up on a pile of notes so jumbled that putting any particular chord
symbol on it almost feels like cheating. and while they don't keep up these specific
voicings in every section, they do keep the basic idea of destabilizing the later chords. this is most obvious in the bass part, where
Mike Hogan does that F# under the D chord throughout the song. (bang) it's a subtle dissolution that reflects
a world that refuses to make sense. after the initial burst of distortion, things
settle back down again, and right before the verse, O'Riordan plays this devastatingly
simple riff. (bang) I'll keep the last note a mystery for
now. anyway, what makes it so powerful? well, let's start with the rhythm. the underlying meter is clearly 4/4, but these
little fragments of melody are each three 8th notes long. that doesn't fit, so the notes seem to fall
in disarray against the pulse. and this is emphasized by leaving an 8th note
rest at the end of each one, so they can't flow into each other. each fragment is its own thing. each one is positioned differently relative
to the underlying beat, and that carries over across bars, so the downbeat of the second
bar is missing. there's still a pattern here, but it's awkwardly
imposed on the structure beneath it. but the real secret is the notes. possible the most fundamental tool in a songwriter's
toolbox of metaphors is melodic direction. which way are the notes going? rising melodies, especially ones that go up
by step, tend to convey a sense of brightness and hope, while falling melodies tell stories
of disappointment and failure. in the first bar: (bang) all we get is a single
step up, but each time it starts a little bit lower. we have these little moments of hope that
are slowly sinking into despair. the second bar starts similarly, then it turns
around, skipping over the root and settling on D, the b7 of the key. (bang) and that brings us to our mystery note. these Ds are on beats 3 and 4, so what note
does she play on the downbeat? well, if you guessed that she steps up to
E, resolving the line to the root of the key: (bang) then congratulations, you've successfully
used your pattern recognition skills, along with your understanding of tonality and musical
motifs, to identify the note this riff is very clearly telling you it's going to end
on. it's not subtle. there's a big, flashing, neon sign that says
we're about to hear an E. and in most songs, that's exactly what would happen. but in Zombie, she instead plays this: (bang)
and that's devastating. we have this fading hope, this constant effort
to rise up in a world that keeps pulling her down, and in her final moment, she slow down,
musters her strength for one last push upwards, and… falls. *sigh* damn. as we move into the verse, the first thing
I want to talk about is Fergal Lawler's drums. (bang) it's a pretty standard rock beat, with
one significant difference: he's replaced the backbeat snare with a tom. this does a couple things. first, it mellows out the verses: the snare
drum has a sharp, piercing sound, whereas the tom is a much warmer tone. he does play
the snare in the choruses, so this feels like a deescalation, reducing the intensity of
the music. but in this specific song, the sound of a
tom also kinda reminds me of a bodhrán, a kind of hand drum that's common in a lot of
Celtic folk music. now, to be clear, it's not a perfect comparison:
the rhythm is just a simple backbeat, not the sort of rolling reel patterns you might
expect to hear from a bodhrán player, and a tom drum doesn't have nearly the level of
tone control that a bodhrán has either. but as someone who listens to a lot of Celtic
folk rock, it's still a very familiar sound to me, and the clever use of these deep, resonant
toms feels like a subtle nod to the song's deeply Irish roots. but the biggest thing here is, of course,
the vocals. (bang) first, let's talk melody. this is doing a similar thing to that guitar
line, taking a simple motif and sliding it down. here, the motif is another walk down the scale,
so we've got a descending line of descending lines, but honestly it feels a lot more hopeful
to me than the riff did. if I had to guess, I'd say that's down to
the lack of rests between the phrases: in the riff, there's a pause after each fragment,
drawing your attention to the way the starting notes keep getting lower, but here they flow
into each other, so each one begins by jumping up. as she gets to the bottom, she sings this:
(bang) where she hits a G, then the notes above and below it. remember that shape, it'll come up again later. but the main thing I want to emphasize here
is her phrasing, and to understand that, we're gonna have to talk about poetic meter. in traditional english-language poetry, a
poem gets its structure from the distribution of accented syllables. like, you may have heard that Shakespeare
often wrote in iambic pentameter, which just means that each line in his poems consisted
of five iambs. an iamb is a pair of syllables where the accent
is on the second one, like "mistake" or "alone". iambic pentameter, then, means 10 syllables
with an accent on every second one, like "shall I compare thee to a summer's day". the verse in Zombie, on the other hand, is
basically using trochaic septameter, or lines consisting of seven trochees. a trochee is like the opposite of an iamb:
it's two syllables with an accent on the first one, like "taken", "silence", or "zombie". string a bunch of those together, and you
get a line like "When the violence causes silence we must be mistaken." even just spoken like that, the poetic meter
gives it a clear rhythmic, almost lyrical structure. but this isn't a poem, it's a song, which
means we also have to consider the interaction with musical meter. take the first line. (bang) the trochees are emphasized melodically,
with the strong syllables mostly coinciding with those upward leaps. after this little grace note on beat 2, she
starts hitting every offbeat 8th, spacing the syllables evenly throughout the phrase
and avoiding all the beats until the very end. but let's look at the end. here, she finally drops the syncopation and
sings the final note on the downbeat, but remember, she's singing trochees. that means the last syllable, the only one
in the entire phrase that's accented rhythmically, is not accented poetically. when you hear the word "taken", the stress
is clearly on the first syllable, not the second one. this effectively buries the last note, so
while it's in a strong metric position, it doesn't feel like it belongs there. it's a resolution of sorts, but not a comfortable
one, a fact that's emphasized by her hanging on a relatively unstable F#. next, we move into the prechorus. (bang) here, we've got a new kind of poetic
structure. instead of trochees, she's singing amphimacers. poetry words are weird. anyway, an amphimacer is a three-syllable
pattern with accents on the first and third syllables, like "it's not me" or "in your
head". this allows her to break the lines up into
more discrete fragments, with a faster rhythm, to build excitement and tension at the same
time. she positions these three-note phrases in
the cracks between beats 1 and 3, so while before she was avoiding all the beats, here
she's just avoiding the strongest ones. she does still keep the emphasis on the off-beats,
though, using that amphimacer structure to position the weakest syllables on beats 2
and 4. and just like in the verses, she ends each
phrase on the downbeat, adding an extra syllable to the end of the final line, but once again
that syllable is weak. "they are fighting" is right back to our trochee
pattern, and the note on the downbeat feels linguistically out of place. it sounds like this: (bang) and, hey, it's
that same G-A-F# figure that ended the verse phrase. what a weird coincidence. that probably won't come up again. and then, of course, there's the chorus, where
all of this really comes together. (bang) so, ok, a couple things going on here. first, melodically, we've got F#, and then
the notes above and below it. that… sounds familiar, doesn't it? it's the same motif that's ended all our phrases
so far, but shifted down a step. and that's a huge deal: in the original motif,
we start on G, a relatively stable chord tone in the key, then hit A and F#, which are both
tensions. we're moving from resolution to dissonance. but here, we start on F#, an unstable note,
then move up to G, a chord tone, before ultimately falling to E, the root. by moving all the notes down a step, we've
gone from a cliffhanger to a solid landing. the second line elaborates on that: (bang)
singing basically the same thing but with some added As for decoration, and then we
get this: (bang) where the motif continues down, this time starting on E. this feels
like a kind of middle ground for the dissonance: the line ends on D, the minor 7th, which is
neither as stable as the root nor as unstable as the 2nd. it doesn't feel resolved, but it also doesn't
really feel like it needs to. but I know what you're all thinking: hey 12tone,
what about the poetic meter? great question. glad you asked. let's go back to the first line: (bang) like
I mentioned earlier, "in your head" is an amphimacer, with accents on the first and
third syllables. nothing's changed. well, except for everything. you see, when she moves into the chorus, she
delays the line slightly, starting it on beat 4, which means that now it ends on beat 1. and that's what we've been building toward
this whole time: up to now, whenever she sang on the downbeat or, really, any beat at all,
it's always been a weak syllable, contradicting the implied rhythmic strength. but here, finally, the two are aligned. poetic meter and musical meter agree that
right now, in this moment, you need to feel how powerful this note is. and by keeping that from you for so long,
she makes it so that, when it finally arrives, it feels like a revelation. the sky opens up as she hits this chorus,
not just because the guitars turn on the distortion, but because the lyrics finally make sense. it's just such good vocal writing. and, of course, we also have to talk about
vocal tone. we already discussed the emotional impact
of guitar distortion, but that's a setting you can change by just turning a knob. vocal distortion, on the other hand, requires
you to physically change the shape of your throat, making it much more viscerally impactful. there's lots of different kinds of vocal distortion,
but when O'Riordan sings (bang) that sort of uncontrolled, guttural rasp gives it a
desperate edge that builds as she repeats the same word over and over. the other thing I want to highlight in the
chorus is Mike Hogan's bass. in the verses, he was mostly hammering out
roots: (bang) with a little extra flourish on the last bar of each phrase to set up the
start of the loop: (bang) and here it's largely the same, but with a similar flourish at the
end of every bar. it's a little more subtle, both because it's
buried under the distorted guitars and because he only plays the extra note once, but on
beat 4 of each of the first three bars, he sets up the next chord by playing its 5th,
so he prepares C major with a G: (bang) G major with a D: (bang) and D major with an
A: (bang) before playing that same half-step flourish to walk back down to E minor. (bang) this gives the section a bit more momentum,
and it helps set us up for the next big change. that happens after the second chorus, where
the guitars drop out and we find ourselves in the bass breakdown. here, Hogan plays this: (bang) which is an
even more elaborate version of that pattern, starting on E, jumping up to C, then doing
a big walk back down. remember how I said earlier that they only
played the chord loop for most of the song? this is where it breaks. there's no explicit harmony here, but it seems
pretty clear that if there was, it'd just be alternating between E minor and C major,
the first two chords of the loop. combine that with the sudden drop in intensity
and the fact that everything Hogan plays here can be drawn from the C major pentatonic scale,
and this section really doesn't seem to be moving. it's not relaxed, but it's waiting, like a
spring coiled up under tension. so what's he waiting for? O'Riordan answers that by returning with a
new guitar lick. (bang) but is it actually new? well… ok, so, yes, it is, but not as new
as you might think. remember that motif from the vocal melody,
where she hit G, then the notes above and below it? remember how it defined pretty much every
important melodic moment in the entire song? yeah, this is that again. except… not exactly. do you remember that devastating walk-down
O'Riordan played at the start of the verse, the one where she took an upwards step and
slid it down the scale? this is that too. it's both, but it's also kinda neither, and
to understand just how important that is, we're gonna have to look at how she changed
each line to fit into the other. let's start with the trill. there's three main changes here. first, she moved it up to start on the next
chord tone, B. we already saw her changing the starting note in the chorus, but those
all went down, so lifting it higher is still a new and exciting thing. second, she resolves it at the end. instead of hanging on the dissonant A, she
slides back up to B, releasing the tension by returning to a stable point. (bang) and third, she changes the meter: up
to now, she mostly sang the lowest note on the downbeat, emphasizing the lack of resolution,
but here, she puts the Bs on beats 1 and 3, the two strongest metric positions, with the
trill happening on the off-beats in between. with all these changes, it feels like we're
seeing the trill in its complete, final form, the way it was always supposed to sound, with
a clear, unambiguous resolution that she just wouldn't let us hear until now. from the perspective of the walk-down, though,
the change is a lot simpler: she just stops playing after the second fragment. (bang) this leaves us back on B, so instead
of slowly falling down an octave, we stay right where we started. everything else, including the rhythm and
the register, remains exactly the same, but by ending the line before things go downhill,
it becomes hopeful again. one could easily read this lick as a sort
of plea for unity and peace, taking all the different kinds tension from earlier and combining
them together to create something beautiful and whole. from there, the rest of the band comes back
and O'Riordan takes a solo based on this same idea: (bang) except now she's playing two
notes at a time, adding in a second line a perfect 4th below the main one. if we're reading this motif as a plea for
peace, then as it progresses that plea seems to grow increasingly desperate, working its
way into every element of the solo as the band beneath her grows in intensity, culminating
in Lawler pounding the drums with snares on all 4 beats as she loops the phrase over and
over. (bang) at the end of the solo, she and guitarist
Noel Hogan drop out, leaving us in another bass breakdown, then we get some building
guitar feedback before the song suddenly, unceremoniously ends with one last hit. (bang) and that's pretty much it. even without knowing the history, Zombie is
a pretty intense song, but once you understand where they're coming from, it becomes an undeniably
powerful piece of protest music. it puts a voice to the grief and rage that
ravage communities where violence has become a part of everyday life, and it reminds us
to honor the dead by doing everything we can to avoid creating more of them. thankfully, the Troubles officially ended
in 1998, a couple years after Zombie's release, with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. but while the violence is largely over, these
sorts of scars take a long time to heal, and until they do, works of art like Zombie will
be there to remind us of everything, and everyone, that was lost along the way. anyway, thanks for watching, thanks to our
Patreon patrons for making these videos possible, and extra special thanks to our Featured Patrons,
Susan Jones, Jill Sundgaard, Duck, Howard Levine, Warren Huart, Kevin Wilamowski, Grant
Aldonas, and Damien Fuller-Sutherland! if you want to help out, and help us pick
the next song we analyze too, there's a link to our Patreon on screen now. oh, and don't forget to like, share, comment,
subscribe, and above all, keep on rockin'.
