That Mendes song makes all sorts of twists and turns that your brain doesn't expect (want?) it to. Personally I find it deeply uncomfortable to listen to, it might as well be four songs playing at once.
This kind of stuff is fascinating to me, that we can react so differently to music and specifically to various chord progressions.
Of course personal taste is inscrutable in some sense, but could it also be about conditioning? E.g. if you listen a lot to certain types of jazz you might get used to some stranger chord movements.
I have a lot of friends who cant stand Steely Dan progressions for example, though I love them myself.
Here's an example of strange chord movements that I personally like a lot more than the Sergio Mendes song:
After accidentally abandoning my likes/dislikes and disengaging disgust, my experience of music viscerally changed. I can enjoy all music now.
So much of it is conditioning, maybe all of it. There's conditioning around chords, progressions, dissonance, harmony, repetition, subjective ideas of what constitutes music, and so much more.
The only way to prove it isn't mere conditioning is to remove the conditioning and then evaluate.
Here's instructions for the practice I adopted. Note: how it's executed makes a difference. The initial acknowledgment of opposites (this will make more sense after reading the instructions) needs to be done compassionately, and not dismissively. There may need to be more steps at the beginning to, otherwise it's a little gaslighty. It worked great internally as is, and I think it may have trained callousness in me in the long-term when applied in relationships with other people.
So I did it by choosing to abandon all judgment and then reframing perspectives I heard using the words "like" and "dislike." The reframing always had in it "I can learn to enjoy everything."
I do think conditioning must be a big part of it. I hadn’t ever listened to this song since getting a little familiar with music theory but it was certainly on the types of playlists my parents listened to when I was a kid. Listening to it now, I can see what’s unusual about it but it never would have occurred to me to consider it hard to listen to. Repetition legitimizing and all that. My parents weren’t jazz listeners so it took work for me to appreciate it as an adult, and now I can’t help but wonder if the better path for my kids is to get them used to it early or to let them have that same “whoa” experience later. (Only partially serious; of course they should be exposed to it. :D)
You could give them access to instruments and let them make their own "whoa" moments. Also, Sun Ra's music exists well beyond most jazz, especially mainstream jazz, as he tried to create jazz that's not catering to white tastes.
For me a big part of what makes this song great is that it sounds so innocuous. It’s a nice, catchy, easy-listening pop ballad. As Rick says incredulously at several points “this was a number one song!”
For me, the difference between that Steely Dan song and the Mendes song is like the difference between a seemingly-inscrutable really thick scottish accent and an ESL speaker trying to affect a native accent and kind of flowing between several different accents.
However uncomfortable the Steely Dan song might be, it has a nice consistent construction to it, and, once you get into the groove, it becomes straightforward. Almost all music I listen to that I'd call complex, from classical to prog metal to jazz, can be described like that too.
The Mendes song, however, sounds disjointed to me. It sounds built out of all sorts of fairly standard bits and pieces, but thrown around completely haphazardly.
Wow, I have completely the opposite reaction! I’m not saying you’re wrong, of course; it’s just fascinating how reactions differ.
To me, the jazzy changes in the Steely Dan song are very in-your-face -- the song is built around them. It’s pleasant enough but feels very random and meandering to me.
The Mendes song, as you say, is “built out of standard bits” -- it feels like a “proper” soul ballad. For me the unusual changes work because they’re used a bit more sparingly, and each one comes as a little jolt, either to elevate the emotion (in the conventional “go up one key at the end of the song” way) or alternatively to ease off the pedal a bit for a change in lyrical tone. It’s like the whole song consists of final choruses and bridges, which are often the best bits of a good song. :)
Hmm, I disagree. That Shostakovitch piece (nice one, thanks for the link, btw!) feels to me more like trickery and misdirection. It builds up your comfort then throws you off, and it gets more and more off-kilter the longer you go. It's very deliberate and purposeful about where it's going.
Again, it may not look like it, but if you analyze the chords and their substitutions, that's what you get. The genius of jazz is to make everything look more complicated than what it really is.
While I also agree with the sentiment, I do think it's a little bit like saying "90% of all programming is flow control and assignments"--it hinges on wide definitions that can be contextually helpful, harmful, or both. Resolving to those chords from tones that are outside of the key? Tritone substitutions? Modulations that change what chords exactly ii, V, and i are? &c.
I think it also depends on what jazz is actually being discussed -- it applies well to most jazz standards, but a lot of modern jazz and jazz-adjacent (or perhaps just what I'm familiar with) seems to gravitate heavily towards nonfunctional harmony.
Ha, I don't think I've ever heard that song before and I love it. Usually increasing the complexity of music makes it less comprehensible. I really respect those rare songs that are technically impressive to musicians while also being comprehensible (and sometimes downright catchy) to "normal" people. And I think Never Gonna Let You Go nails it. But of course, it is totally subjective.
And they called it "easy listening", haha. But it's really typical of lounge to do lots of weird complex things and still make it sound like it's no big deal. I believe Girl from Ipanema has a couple of YouTube videos about its weirdness as well.
