The melodic-harmonic divorce in pop

Having your melody match your chords is so five minutes ago

This week in pop theory class, we are talking about the melodic-harmonic divorce, where the chords and melody to a song are all from the same major or minor key, but do not necessarily agree with each other at the local level. This is a common feature of current pop. It's so common, in fact, that my students are having a hard time hearing it. This is not due to any lack of musicality among my students; it has to do with their listening expectations.

In Western European tonal tradition, melodies are supposed to relate closely to their underlying chords. (More accurately, those chords are the result of counterpoint between the melody and the bass or other voices.) If you are in C major and you are writing a melody on top of a C chord, that melody should emphasize the chord tones, C, E, and G. These notes will sound stable and resolved. You can use any other notes you want, but they will feel unstable. So you use chord tones to set the listener's expectation, use non-chord tones to create tension and suspense, and then return to the chord tones to relieve the tension.

In the early part of the 20th century, Anglo-American popular and vernacular music mostly followed the conventions of Western Europe. However, there were also styles of music that followed different conventions, most notably the blues. Jazz, R&B and rock musicians combined ideas from the blues with tonal and modal concepts from Western European tradition, resulting in melodies that sometimes don't align with the chords in the way that Mozart would expect them to. The music-theoretic term for this "misalignment" is the melodic-harmonic divorce. That term is a problematic one, because there is nothing misaligned about the blues, but it's the term we have.

With each passing decade, Anglo-American pop has moved further away from Western European convention, to the point where melodic-harmonic divorce is practically the defining sound of the pop mainstream. I'll talk through some examples, and then discuss why my students might be struggling with this.