Music and Structure
"Hollaback Girl" is a moderately fast song, with a tempo of 110 beats per minute, and it is played in the key of D# minor. It combines old school hip hop with dance music, and—like the majority of pop music—is set in common time. The main chord pattern of the song alternates between B major and D♯ minor triads. Most of the harmonic content of the song revolves around a two-chord alternation which music theorists may regard as an L (leading tone) transformation, in which the root of the major chord is lowered by a half-step to form a second inversion minor chord on the third scale degree (see image to right), a slight tonicization of B major, but resolving back to D# minor by having the same A, a perfect fourth down from D#. This stepwise motion between B and A♯ highlights this chord change. It is in verse-chorus form with a bridge before the fourth and final chorus. The song features sparse instrumentation, primarily a minimal beat produced by drum machine. A guitar plays the song's riff, a six-note pattern as Stefani repeats "this my shit" during the chorus, and a brass section joins during the second chorus. In part because of its cheerleading motif, it drew comparisons to Toni Basil's 1982 song "Mickey".
Read more about this topic: Hollaback Girl
Famous quotes containing the words music and/or structure:
“As I define it, rock & roll is dead. The attitude isn’t dead, but the music is no longer vital. It doesn’t have the same meaning. The attitude, though, is still very much alive—and it still informs other kinds of music.”
—David Byrne (b. 1952)
“A special feature of the structure of our book is the monstrous but perfectly organic part that eavesdropping plays in it.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)