Production Breakdown: Bei Maejor’s “Drunk in the Club”

Have you ever flipped on the radio, heard the first couple bars of a record, and immediately thought “Hey, I love this song!” only to realize, a few seconds later that it's a song you hate, and that you only thought you liked it because of its familiarity? It's happened to me more times than I can count and, barring the possibility that I'm just nuts, I'm pretty sure that phenomenon points to an essential fact about how we listen music: recognition through repetition is a powerful thing – especially when it's occurring on an unconscious level.

The track that brought this topic to the forefront of my mind was “Drunk in the Club,” the latest single from singer/producer Bei Maejor, While some praised the cut's pop appeal, others described it using phrases like “unoriginal,” “cookie-cutter,” etc... And, you know what? There's a good reason for that perception; try listening to the track alongside Usher's smash hit “Love in This Club,” a record which at least one commenter brought up in comparison to Bei Maejor's.

Ignore the similarities in title and subject matter for a moment and focus on the instrumental... do you hear it? Both tracks use the same chord intervals (“I V vi IV,” for any music-theory buffs who may be reading – but you already know this stuff anyway, right?). They're simply in different keys, chosen presumably to suit each singer's vocal range.

Now, don't call me a hater here – I know full well I'm picking on one song out of roughly a million that do the exact same thing, and that's kinda my point. Rather than hammering it home with one example after another, though. I'll present this as evidence:



Guy can't really sing, but you get the point. Now, is it somehow wrong to build a song on this ever-reliable progression (or the 12-bar blues, or “the '50s chord progression”...)? Hell no! It's used and reused simply because it works and, as I've said so many times, the ingenious recontextualization of musical elements and motifs can have spectacular results. The danger, however, is when songwriters get lazy, using these well-worn tricks of the trade to cover for a song with no substance of its own.

To put it simply, a good percentage of hit records succeed not in spite of but because they're a rehash of stuff we've heard over, and over, and over... (etc) again. There's nothing wrong with enjoying 'em, but you should be aware, and use your judgment, when it comes to paying those 89 cents for a record that sounds like the same old, same old – after all, you're the ones setting the course for pop music to come.