the MARZONYEAH shuffle - "The Hellcat Spangled Shalala" by Arctic Monkeys
It’s crazy how music can trigger memories, old feelings, and dormant, everlasting emotions. I recently (manually / painstakingly) ported over my “MarzonYEAH!” playlist, basically my master playlist made up of songs that I loved over the years and still love, from my local iTunes library to my Spotify account, and shuffling this playlist brought me back to those moments in my life that I discovered them, or memories of listening to them. For this series, I plan to write at least one song a week, chosen by pressing Shuffle on the playlist. Each post would be about my experience with the songs and a little analysis with a cover to accompany the post. I’m not going to talk too much about lyrics, since, weirdly, that isn’t what I listen for in a song. I’m into chord progressions, melodies, basically whatever the musicians are doing that makes me conjure up some sort of emotion. Lyrics don’t always do that, but I will be sure to talk about it if they do. (You can find lyrical analysis on the Genius pages, so I’ll defer to those.) I’ll try to break down these little features into sections as best I can! I highly encourage you to listen to the song on repeat while reading this!
MarzonYEAH playlist on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3bmmlB4
To start off, indulge me as I write about my favorite song by my favorite band!
Lyrics: https://genius.com/Arctic-monkeys-the-hellcat-spangled-shalalala-lyrics
CHORD PROGRESSIONS
Verses: B - G#m [I - vi]
Chorus: E - F# - D#m (coda: C#m) [IV - V - iii, ii]
Bridge: E - B - E - B [IV - I]
C#m - F# - F#7 [ii - V - V7]
G#m - C#m - G#m [vi - ii - vi]
E - F/Bdim - B - E - B - E - F# [IV - io - I - IV…]
B - E [I - IV]
MY LISTENING EXPERIENCE(S)
Me circa when this song was released. I still wear those sandals.
“The Hellcat Spangled Shalala” is the fourth song of the band’s fourth album, Suck It and See. Refer to my Arctic Monkeys musing that chronicled how I came upon the album (and my subsequent, inane anger at my girlfriend at the time), as well as more context on where the album fell within their discography. I bought the CD in the summer of 2011 after I returned from a family vacation to the Philippines and popped it into the car stereo while on a drive with said girlfriend and listened through the album multiple times throughout the day. The nostalgia-drenched, Beatles-esque album (and especially this song) became a staple of that summer, and one that reminds me of that post-high-school-graduation-into-college period with her and AlMaJaRiJuGa (yes, that’s what Matthew/James/Richard/Justin/Gabe and I called our friend group).
The night before I moved into LMU for my freshman year in August 2011, I left my girlfriend’s house for the last time in a while (although not really, since Diamond Bar and LMU were relatively close), and blasted this song while bawling and screaming my lungs out to it. We were all emotional teens at some point.
THE SONG
“The Hellcat Spangled Shalala” begins with a little pre-roll, with the musicians readying themselves to start the song. One of my favorite drummers, Matt Helders, stick clicks to 4, and guitarist Jamie Cook kicks off the song with a sick lead melody that starts off with a minor 3rd interval, then settles on the 5th and 7th of the tonic chord of B major, the key of the song.
Major 7 chords sound nostalgic, which may speak to why this song connected with me right away. I think I got the nostalgic gene from my grandmother, who kept bountiful photo albums her whole life, and my parents, who kept various keepsakes of my brother’s and my childhood (sometimes to my Pop’s chagrin…). Something about the way Major 7 chords hit transports me to the past, slightly dreamy. The imperfectness of the chord can make you perk up and need to keep listening, hoping for some sort of resolution for that 7th note to rise to the octave root note.
Lead singer (and my favorite musician of all time) Alex Turner plays some backing chords, Helders starts with a straightforward beat which later gets syncopated snare hits in the verses, and Nick O’Malley explores the neck of his bass guitar throughout the song. This track has one of my favorite bass lines, always moving and prancing, never resting on the root note of the chord for very long. In the second verse, O’Malley plays the peaking intro line after Turner’s entrancing lyric “I took the batteries out my mysticism, and put them in my thinking cap,” a deft little touch that highlights how well the individuals in the band work together to create moments like this.
The chord progression is relatively simple throughout the song, but really gets the chills flowing through your body once they shift into the bridge. In most songs, bridges are usually a little break from the normal progressions that make up a song. Imagine if a song kept cycling between verses and choruses without any breaks from the normal. Boring! No thanks! Bridges lend some variety, and a chance for artists to catch the listener’s ear once more before the song ends.
One of the things I find the most in my favorite songs is a build up of tension, followed by a release of that tension. If a song can build up to a 10 in tension before exploding into a cathartic section, it’s an automatic staple in my library. “Hellcat” is quiet in its verses, with the vocal melody staying in a lower range and calm drums, but opens up in the choruses, as the chords are strummed louder and longer and the drums ride the open hi hat.
But when the switch clicks and the bridge arrives, the song climactically opens up even more. We get a plagal cadence (IV - I) twice, which is countered with a minor ii into the V chord, and that final chord changes to a V7 chord, a little more motion to illustrate the progression wants to find its way back to the I chord. Then there’s more uncertainty in this mini journey we’re on as the next few chords are minor [vi - ii - vi], then fall to the IV chord, resulting in a brief moment of major sounding solitude.
BUT WAIT - [at ~2:17 for those who aren’t following my music theory nerdout] the root note of the IV chord goes up one half step, and the minor 3rd note of the scale is added (unusual, since this note doesn’t exist in the song’s structure of a Major key). This diminished chord is crucial in the build of the bridge to get us back to our (I) chord, our home chord. Diminished chords are made up of 4 notes that are equally 3 semitones apart, resulting in a dissonant, uncomfortable chord. It also consists of two separate tritones, a tritone interval being made of notes that are 6 semitones away from each other; this tritone was banned in church hymns because of its dissonance and was viewed as an evil/the Devil’s interval. When played, it’s begging to resolve to a pleasing harmony, which is what we get. Alex Turner even calls out the interval’s owner in the lyrics during this sequence, “Her steady hands may well have done the Devil’s pedicure,” are a great illustration of what’s going on with that diminished chord. (Note that the bass goes from F - B, a tritone interval.) The subsequent jump to the home/(I) chord and IV chords to end the song are a beautiful relief from the “hell” we just went through in the bridge.
In addition to that amazing chord progression, the vocals make a melodic peak twice here, reaching a G#, the highest note of the song. Turner has been comfortable in his middle, baritone register for most of the song, but goes more full-voice during the whole bridge. At the top of this section, the lead guitar goes from descending-ascending (like mountains and valleys!) plucked intervals to strummed intervals at “Did you ever get the feeling…”, then goes back to plucking when the chord progression reaches that home B chord. The drums don’t do anything “special” at this specific moment (having been just coasting on the crash/syncopated snare/bass pattern that is similar to the chorus), but there’s a fill during “the devil’s pedicure” that’s played twice before settling back to the cool groove, a little variation to what is a relatively laid back drum pattern. Helders holds back a lot in this album, and I really wish he went wild since I love insane drum parts (i.e. “Pretty Visitors”).
“Shalala” ends with the drums hitting one last crash and fading, and the final chords of the rhythm guitar and bass are on the E/IV chord and not on the B/(I)/home chord. My choir director in college loved to emphasize notes that end phrases by having us project/throw the notes into the air above us. It’s hard to explain without making hand motions or actual examples, but this song ending on a IV chord is like the band throwing this chord into the air, as if hoping someone would catch it. Most songs that don’t finish on the root chord remind me of what Dr. Breden would ask of us many a time, and I’m probably not explaining it to the best of my ability, but this is an instance, just a little touch of uncertainty, even after going through a metaphorical storm of the song.
Most interestingly, the lead guitar’s main motif (starting around 0:09) never strums the root note + 3rd (known as a Major 3rd interval) until after the “Devil’s pedicure” moment, when we settle back into our reverse plagal cadences (I IV). It’s a beautiful little touch that I just discovered as I was writing this. As the band “throws” up that last chord, the lead guitar is there to “catch” it, as it plays this root Major 3rd interval for a few instances before letting it fade out.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
The last time I saw Arctic Monkeys live (at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in May 2018 to promote the upcoming release of their new album, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino), they played a new arrangement of the song which caught me by surprise. I had seen them twice before this show (in 2013 and 2014), and “Shalala” had fallen off their setlist. I wasn’t expecting to hear my favorite song played here, and instantly burst out into tears. It was a surreal experience to behold, and hearing a new version of it was thrilling. The new arrangement sounded a little more folksy to me, with the drums removing the syncopated snare hits in the verse hits, opting for a constant (if I may say boring?) beat, while highlighting Turner’s chords more and utilizing the additional touring musicians to fill out the sound. The live climax that I love oh so much doesn’t reach the peak that the record does, but it’s still effective. (See the video not taken by me below my cover at the bottom of this post!)
This is the automatic answer to “what is your favorite song of all time?” It’s forever tied to the people I listened to it with, me turning 18 in the summer of 2011, coming back to it after all my breakups, drives down PCH with the windows down. I’m sure that this song will stay with me for eternity, and I hope that you can appreciate it as much as I do.