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Posted by Ben S
on 11/6/2009, 9:17 am, in reply to "Where the hell is beat one in this song?"
Man, that's tricky. Here's how I think it works:
The lyrical phrases all start on the and of one. "I'm not loving you" is "and two and three and." The percussive bass part goes: three-and-four -- one. The last low thumpy note is the one. So perhaps it's better to describe the bass part like this: thump -- three and four - thump -- three and four. But the very first beat of the song you hear is the three; also, the word "love" in the chorus is on three (the "down" of "locked down" is also the one). This is what makes it so hard to hear: all sorts of structural emphasis that would normally indicate the one is actually misdirecting you to the three. For dancing most people only need to pick up the pulse of the beat, not the metrical divisions. Me, stuff like this keeps me up awake all night if I can't figure it out. The intros to Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" and to "Rock and Roll" by Zeppelin each took a ridiculous amount of time and mental anguish for me to figure them out. But I eventually got them. Also the intro to "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and my Monkey." But those are all just intros that I initially couldn't get to mesh with the song; this is much harder in that the whole song is off unless you crack the code. Even then it's hard to hear.
