The Anatomy of a Banger

Why do some songs work so well?

A banger, according to one definition on Urban Dictionary, is a song that you can listen to for three unbroken hours. Another definition calls it a song that makes you want to headbang to a beat. India’s most enduring banger is a song about jilted love.

The story goes something like this: in the winter of 1998, or thereabouts, a young writer from Jalandhar named Kumar Gill received a melody to write lyrics to. The verse was warm, very ballad-y, with rising two-note phrases; the chorus, long and heavy, carrying a sense of desolation and melancholia, as if composed for a solo violin. To that tune Gill wrote his words. He wrote about longing for his lover through the night, the incessant downpour of sadness from his eyes, the dense gloom of loss.

The song was recorded and released. When Kumar heard the finished product, he swore never to work with the singer again. The singer was another young, strapping lad from Jalandhar named Sukhbir; the song, Ishq Tera Tadpave.

The song descended on India like a ball of fire. Within six months, it was playing on loop on every radio station and music channel in the north. Within twelve, Sukhbir was a national celebrity. Every party anthem cassette and CD in the early 2000s had Ishq Tera Tadpave as the last song on Side A.

The song occupies a singular, unique space in Indian consciousness. It’s not an exaggeration to say that no party, no gathering or celebration is truly over until Ishq has played and everyone has sung the hook—“Oh ho ho ho, Ooh ho ho ho”—as a makeshift choir. There is no dancefloor across the country that goes empty when this song plays. Give or take, and this is complete speculation, I’d say around seven out of every ten above-thirty adults in India will be able to hum the hook and the chorus. DJs have learnt the trick: cue the hook in, maybe the first four notes, and the crowd fills in the rest. Most find it impossible to not move their bodies. I have seen Oxford scholars, hopped up on Bengali literature chauvinism, lose their robe of poise once Sukhbir’s voice thunders through the speakers.

India produces a few hundred thousand songs every year, many of them good. And yet, Ishq Tera Tadpave endures. I’ve always wondered why.

This is, in fact, anthem season. Every four years, between April and May, FIFA commissions a famous musician to write a song for the World Cup. The brief is quite demanding: the song must have a hopeful, inspirational tone; it should nudge people off their seats; it should carry some cultural essence—vanilla pop numbers rarely fly; it should have enough push and pull to sit neatly behind montages and highlights. And ideally, a World Cup anthem should have enough recall value to be remembered and associated with the World Cup long after the tournament is over.

The theme song for this summer’s World Cup, Dai Dai, comes via Shakira and Burna Boy. It feels like a song suited for beach shacks, those late-afternoon pulsers that play in the background as visitors lean back on cane chairs with margaritas to watch the sunset. The lyrics and the music do nothing, just one loop blurring into another. About two minutes into the song, Shakira goes, “Pele, Maradona, Maldini, Romario. Cristiano. Ronaldo.” Burna Boy responds with some footballers of his own, to which Shakira, incredibly, starts reciting names of participating countries. The more I hear the song—I found I only have the patience for a couple of runs—the more it feels completely airless.

World Cup theme songs have become a global, cross-sport phenomenon. Even cricket does those now. One can understand the pressure on the artists, who are given broad-stroked prompts and asked to engineer a cult hit. Not all of them succeed.

So, what makes a good anthem?

The Groove

Rhythm can be loosely defined as a depiction of events happening over time. You brush twice a day and eat thrice—that’s a rhythm. You wake up in the morning and sleep around midnight, you drink coffee within a few minutes of waking up, you workout every evening, you curse your trainer every third pushup. We live in rhythms.

Rhythm is also how we meet music. When sound enters the ear as a pattern of waves, our brain extracts the pulse before registering the melody. It then starts predicting where the next beat will fall. Finding the beat to fall approximately close to where it expects is a form of pleasure. A song meant for a wide audience must give them a steady rhythm to hold onto.

A groove is the manifestation of rhythm into music. A rhythm is numerical, a groove is sentient. And groove is what makes a song.

The first World Cup theme song I heard was Ricky Martin’s The Cup of Life, rewritten in English from the Spanish original, La Copa de la Vida. It begins with four shots of fireworks, like a drummer tapping his sticks to cue in the band, and then dives straight into a steady batucada groove often heard on the streets of Brazil. In a batucada groove, multiple instruments play in conversation with each other, often in different rhythms but always locked in. In The Cup of Life, that groove is the song’s heartbeat. Even as heavier percussion and a full band dips in and out, the groove stays.

The song’s tempo—120 beats per minute—sits in the perfect spot for its function. Over the last few decades, as our neural relationship to music has been dissected through brain activity research, scientists have found the range of 110-120 BPM (beats per minute) as the optimal tempo at which listeners like to dance. Afro-Brazilian rhythms, like batucada, can span a wide tempo range, as they travel between streets and carnivals, but their sweet spot overlaps significantly with the dance tempo range. Notice how, through the song, your body feels locked in with the tempo.

But tempo, by itself, is not enough. For example: a kick drum loop at 120 BPM becomes stale after a few seconds. Sustaining interest needs surprise. Researchers studying the brain’s reaction to rhythm and tempo also found clues about syncopation—basically, variance. There is a small pocket of just enough syncopation, but not too much, which forms the brain’s ultimate pleasure zone. For this, The Cup of Life goes traditional, with tamborim accents that land just off the expected beat and a montuno piano riff that repeats beneath the surface.

Martin wrote in his autobiography, Me, that his team had approached the album “with the sole mission of getting the entire globe to dance and sing in Spanish.” On the evening of 24th February, 1999, Ricky Martin performed La Copa de la Vida at the 41st Grammy Awards, backed by a full conga and percussion band, a horn section, and dancers on towering stilts. The room, as any Grammy night room, was packed with the brightest showbiz talent in the USA. As Ricky Martin moved from the elegant first verse and asked, “Do you really want it?” Madonna and Celine Dion were on their feet. The rest of the room was up with, “Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”

Percussion is, of course, one way to project rhythm. You can use melodic instruments, the way Hans Zimmer uses cellos and violas to create propulsion in He’s a Pirate. Or, if you want to go really earthy, you bring out the most naturally available instrument in the world: voice.

During the Second World War, Cameroonian soldiers used to sing to each other through long marches. Some phrases carried pain and helplessness, some others carried defiance. One of those phrases, sung as call-and-response to boost morale, was “Tsamina mina zangalewa”. It roughly translates to, “Where do you come from?”

In 1986, a band called Golden Sounds recorded these chants in their Makossa song, “Zangalewa.” Makossa means dance. The song crossed the Atlantic and DJs in coastal Colombia were soon playing it on repeat. And when a Colombian superstar was asked to make the theme song for the 2010 FIFA World Cup—the first football World Cup in Africa—she dipped into her childhood.

“I decided to bring a little bit of my culture too, which is attached to Africa with an umbilical cord,” Shakira said in an interview. “I was raised listening to music that was heavily inspired by African music.”

Waka Waka, like The Cup of Life, leans heavily on energetic African—Latin percussion, topped generously with digital, club-music beats. But its driving force, its rhythmic engine, comes from its vocal lines.

The Melody

There is one common quality amongst all the songs we remember well: we can sing the melody. You could be woken up at 3 am, and you’ll nail the chorus of Country Roads. Similarly, rare is the person who hasn’t hummed “Wise men say, only fools rush in…” at least a few hundred times. A memorable melody is, almost by rule, easy to hum.

Ease comes from repeatability and small vocal movements. Waka Waka feels fun to sing because of its cycle of two syllables: tsa mi-na mi-na eh-eh wa-ka wa-ka eh-eh. The pattern repeats so quickly and frequently, it catches on before we realise. In The Cup of Life, the chorus—“Go, go, go! Allez, allez, allez!”—holds little melodic resemblance to the rest of the song. But, like Waka Waka, it’s easy and repeatable—three single-syllable hits followed by three two-syllable hits.

And notice how, in both choruses, the notes in the cyclical patterns feel adjacent. These patterns—called conjunct melodies in music theory—are easier to sing because the vocal cords have to make smaller physical adjustments between notes. They’re also easier to remember because the brain can encode a smooth, continuous shape more readily; it naturally recognises scales in linear progression. For e.g. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star spans a range of six notes, first ascending then descending in adjacent intervals.

Shape is an important signal for remembering a melody. A 1978 study by psychologist Jay Dowling found that most brains store melodies through two axes: the shape—the pattern of ups and downs; and the tonal framework—the functioning of scales that we’re subconsciously familiar with. In his book, This is Your Brain on Music, Daniel Levitin says, “a melody is an auditory object that maintains its identity in spite of transformations, just as a chair maintains its identity when you move it to the other side of the room, turn it upside down, or paint it red.”

This has a direct consequence for how anthems function. A song that will be sung by sixty thousand people in a stadium—or by the millions watching on television—cannot depend on precision. The melody must be robust enough to survive being reproduced badly, in the wrong key or at the wrong pitch. It must be memorable, and it must sound good for a listener to even be interested.

The Arrangement

Much of the latter is a function of orchestration, or as is commonly known, arrangement. A slightly broader term, inclusive of mixing and mastering, is production. Most musicians are sticklers for this. In fact, playing the same melody on, say, an oboe and then the trombone, and playing it with the rest of the song to check which one sounds better, is very much part of the songwriting process.

The horns in The Cup of Life come in short bursts, like fireworks. And when the song begins to take off, the horns give it momentum. The choice seems conscious. Brass instruments work excellently as sources of energy because of their natural depth and our deep association with them with fanfare and celebration. The intro melody of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie, immediately transporting you to a party, is played on a trumpet. Similarly, consider what the keyboard riff is doing for Ishq.

The stomp-stomp-clap rhythm of We Will Rock You is perhaps the greatest living example of a simple idea, driven through a conscious musical choice, turning a song into an anthem.

Cultural Significance

Composing and producing a song aside, does an anthem necessarily have to convey something grand? Does cultural rooting matter to its success? One can argue otherwise and make a strong case: you don’t ever think of a song’s roots while singing or dancing. As Ishq Tera Tadpave is proof, you often don’t think of the lyrics either. Our entire generation danced to Barbie Girl without ever, unfortunately, looking at the lyrics.

But, zooming in, a World Cup anthem needs to have a cultural grounding. It needs to be rooted to a place, ideally the host country. La Copa de la Vida might be the only exception because it’s written in Spanish, by a Puerto Rican artist, as a complete homage to Brazilian music. The World Cup it was written for was held in France and “Allez, allez, allez!” is the extent of French influence in the song.

Waka Waka is a more textbook example because it carries genuine African music into a significantly African tournament. But, I want to talk about another song. It wasn’t written for a World Cup, but licensed and repurposed for one.

Wavin’ Flag was written as a song about Somalia. Keinan Abdi Warsame—K’Naan—was born in 1978 in Mogadishu. His name means traveller in Somali. His grandfather was a famous Somali poet, and his aunt a renowned singer. In his book, K’Naan recalls how whenever he was frightened, whether during violence in Somalia or being bullied by classmates in Canada, his grandfather would comfort him with the words, “When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.”

Wavin’ Flag’s lyrics address war, displacement, poverty, and the agony of losing your home to violence. When Coca Cola selected it as their promotional anthem for the 2010 World Cup, the lyrics were rewritten, with a more hopeful tenor, for a version called, “The Celebration Mix.” You couldn’t speak about war and displacement in a theme song for a tournament played in a continent most affected by war and displacement, now, could you? K’Naan kept the chorus; he wouldn’t have it any other way. The song became a global sensation, with the chorus as its emotional anchor. You hear the lyrics as you sing them.

Four songs, then. One written to “make people dance”; another born out of military chants; one, a poem about a painful childhood; and one, the result of exuberance, of not letting heartbreak come in the way of a dance beat.

They share many of the same foundations. The tempo is right, the melodies are simple and easy to hum, the rhythms compelling, pressing the right buttons within us. But foundations do not make an anthem, and Shakira and Burna Boy are about to learn this soon. You can lay every beam and pour every footing and the thing can still stand there, perfectly structured, with no life inside.

The true magic—the uncomplicated freedom of La Copa de la Vida, the choral percussion of Waka Waka—is born from human ingenuity. If it were so easy to engineer an anthem, Ishq Tera Tadpave wouldn’t be the most awaited song at every party, twenty-six years after its release.