Beyoncé, Plato, and the Foundations of the Polis

John Richard Ahern
EIDOLON
Published in
13 min readMay 22, 2017

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Gustav Klimt, “Die Musik” (1895)

I was in my freshman dorm, studying Plato’s Republic along with most of the rest of my hall, when I read it: “So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him; — he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” And it will be an indication to you of how severe a nerd I am when I tell you that this sentence filled me with a surge of conflicting emotions.

I was studying in Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education program. I had had some years of Latin and a few of Greek in high school, so I felt like Plato’s Republic was going to be pretty predictable territory. My primary interest in life was, and still is, music, and particularly its theory and history. I had been raised as a classical pianist, and when you are raised as a classical pianist, you are almost brainwashed to think a certain way about classical music. Real music, good music, is art for art’s sake. It doesn’t have a function or a topic outside its own existence. What matters is the sheer, timeless beauty of the music.

So when I read in Book 4 of the Republic that, when the musical modes change, the foundations of the state change with them, I almost fell out of my chair. Alongside a disgust for Plato’s willingness to dirty music with political associations, I also felt a thrill of excitement and disbelief. Plato wasn’t exactly saying music had political implications. He was saying musical modes did.

Do you know what modes are? No? I do! I’m a music nerd. This is my moment to prove to everyone that I’m useful. Plato is basically saying that I, music theorist, hold the keys to political revolution. I know this is smug of me, but music theorists get little opportunity to be smug.

Musical modes were sets of pitches or rhythms that were used to construct music in the pre-modern West. Since the Enlightenment, we’ve basically replaced modes with major and minor scales. But even today, music students study modes that were named after places in Greece. For instance, to help them memorize, I tell my theory students that Clocks is in the Mixolydian mode and Mad World is in the Dorian—these modes are frequently used to get fast access to that otherworldly faux-spiritual sound.

The current names for modes were assigned in the early Middle Ages and represented different entities in ancient Greece. But we do know that thinkers like Pythagoras and Plato considered modes to have powerful effects on human emotion and behavior. Boethius in De Musica recounts an anecdote about Pythagoras attending a particularly rowdy party and suggesting that, when one guy got too hot and bothered, they change the music from one mode to another mode. “For who does not know,” he asks, “that Pythagoras calmed a drunk adolescent of Taormine who had become incited under the influence of the Phrygian mode, and that Pythagoras further restored this boy to his rightful senses, all by means of a spondaic melody?” It sounds implausible, but you can imagine changing from EDM to Jack Johnson at a party would potentially have a similar effect today.

But even so, Plato isn’t just saying that music changes people’s emotions. He’s saying that political philosophies change with musical modes — music theory, in our modern description. But that can’t be true, right? There’s no way that music theory can have implications for the modern world. That may be even more absurd than suggesting that the field of Classics has implications for the modern world. After all, I am writing for Eidolon, which champions the relevance of classicists to modern social dialogue, and, even before Eidolon came along, weird things happened to classicists every once in a while, like Stanford’s Ian Morris giving a presentation at the CIA headquarters once. But I sincerely doubt that my theory professor would be invited to the CIA. He probably wouldn’t be interested if he were invited. He just wouldn’t have anything to say.

But let’s be honest. You clicked on this link for Beyoncé. And you can probably guess what I’m going to say: Beyoncé’s peculiar approach to music production has, in fact, accompanied changes in our social assumptions.

I’m not arguing that Beyoncé is a political musician or that her songs have political themes. I’m assuming this is not really up for debate. The longer her career lasts, the more overt seem her political messages. But I am interested in testing Plato’s particular claim that the musical modes themselves affect (or even effect) political change. What about the specifics of Beyoncé’s musical approach? I’m going to take Beyoncé’s role in popularizing feminism and look at a few pieces: “Single Ladies,” “Love on Top,” and “Run the World (Girls).” These may not be surprising choices, since two of them are unveiled panegyrics to female empowerment, and, in the case of “Love on Top,” the music video makes it clear that it’s as much about sexual politics as romance. But more on that later. What about the music itself?

To begin, Beyoncé is fond of word-painting in music. That is, she’ll try to reflect a particular word of her text in what happens musically. For instance, Beyoncé honors a long tradition in folk, rock, jazz and pop music of doing “stop time” on the word “stop,” which means that the rhythm section (bass, drums, and keys) stop the beat temporarily until the next measure. We’ve all heard it before: “stop” in Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk” or in James Taylor’s “How Sweet It Is.” In Beyoncé’s music, here’s an example of that, at 1:21 in “Love on Top,” and subsequently in the piece when the word “stop” comes up. Even more interesting, starting at 1:43, she suddenly changes keys one step higher when she says the word “top.”

This continues to happen every time that word “top” comes up. She gets higher and higher, and we get closer and closer to the edge of our seats. “Top” here ends up meaning several different things. “Finally you put my love on top” just seems to mean something like “finally you prioritized our relationship”; there also seems to be a reference to the woman-on-top sex position, judging from her position at the end of the music video.

But there’s another angle. When I listen to this song, I always think to myself, “Wow, how much higher can she go? This has to be the last key-change, because she just can’t go higher.” But she does. By choosing to modulate on the word “top,” it is basically like the poetic trick of enjambment, in that the word “top” syntactically belongs to what came before, but is formally associated with what follows. “Top” is now describing something happening to the next musical phrase.

There is also one crucial moment in the music video of “Love on Top” that will become important later on. Throughout the whole song, the bass is pretty prominent and active, sending us right back to the days of Motown. As the song progresses, the video shows Beyoncé in various different outfits, all of which are occupational and to varying degrees androcentric. In practically all of them, she is dressed like her male backup singers, in pants and a blazer. But crucially, near the very end, she tears off the pants at exactly the moment the bass stops. The rest of the music continues, but the pants and the bass—together either by intention or serendipity—cease at the same moment. I’ll just leave that there for now and return to it later.

This isn’t the only example of word-painting in her music. In the mind-blowing “Countdown,” she creates a pun on every number from 10 to 1 as a chorus of jazz a cappella singers sing chords chromatically lower and lower as they get closer to 1. Here again the tension builds as we sense some connection between the lowering of the numbers and the lowering of the pitch. In the music video, she even has ten versions of herself, each one progressively joining in on the music as the numbers go down.

Beyoncé and her producers also enjoy letting the music and lyrics interact on a more ironic level. The title of “Irreplaceable” itself plays on our expectations, as do the calmly strumming acoustic guitars and the light percussion: everything but the lyrics point to some tender expression of love. Taken separately, the phrases “Don’t you ever get to thinking” and “You’re irreplaceable” could feature perfectly in a One Direction song, assuring us that we’re insecure and shouldn’t be; taken together as one phrase, the words bite. Something similar is going on in “The Best Thing I Never Had,” which has all the musical qualities of a Disney love song.

So it seems that, early on in her career, Beyoncé and her producers were interested in music and lyrics interacting with each other, not in a subordinating way (in which the music is merely a vehicle for the transmission of words), but in a reciprocal way (the text and music are influenced by each other). So much for her methodology. Things get a little more political in “Single Ladies,” and we’ll need to zoom out for a moment.

The history of rock, if I can paint in really broad strokes, is a history of musical rebellion. This is the music of social revolution, civil rights, war protests, drugs, sexual emancipation. But a problem has always plagued this music: “rock” is always at war with “commercial,” and their interests are almost never the same. If a music wants to be rebellious, it throws off the shackles of musical convention — let’s call them “musical modes” — and does something different. The only problem is, music producers and record labels care about their bottom line. Producers often can predict, down to the minute decisions of music theory, what will appeal to what audience and what won’t. In fact, this is pretty much entirely what they’re paid to do. The “commercial” part of commercial popular music is always risk-averse, and rebelling against convention is potentially threatening to revenue.

There are certain musical conventions, though, that seem so sacred they cannot be challenged, even by alternative rock or indie music. These are rules like: a melody must be accompanied by chords; all songs must be arranged into groups of four measures and even groups of groups of four measures; all songs must have a clear polarity between melody line and bass line. Ironically, rock music has never seriously challenged these conventions, and, in this respect, it never really departed from the conventions of Western Classical music established during the Enlightenment.

Of course, to us twenty-first century listeners, Mozart and Black Sabbath seem to be completely disparate musics, but it might not seem that way to someone in the twelfth century. Black Sabbath uses triads, they make great use of a polarity between melody and bass, and they do an aggressive amount of four-bar hypermeter. What this means is that the music of rebellion just can’t break out of the mold. It’s insistent — slavishly — on using the idioms made by Enlightenment colonialists two centuries ago, and it’s delightfully ironic. If you don’t believe me, I challenge you to find me a song you regularly listen to whose phrases don’t boil down to four measure units, or that doesn’t use chords but has multiple melodies simultaneously instead.

I’ll tell you what real rebellion looks like: “Single Ladies.” Just think about how amazing this song is for a moment.

There are no chords in this song.

There is no bass in this song.

I’ve taken years of music theory and I still have no idea how the meter or hypermeter work. (For instance, when you first hear “If you like it, then you should have put a ring on it,” the emphasis is on “like” and “ring,” whereas the next time the emphasis is on “should,” since she is overlaying the same musical material over a different set of beats.)

And yet this song is an earworm. It’s not a bizarre or avant-garde song, it’s not an incoherent flop. It’s amazing. And yet, it breaks so many rules of well-produced commercial music.

Somebody astute is going to point out, “Wait, there are one or two chords, and there are about 10 seconds of bass.” And you’re right, the backup singers do sing some harmonies in there. But this is not what music theorists would refer to as “chords” — i.e., there is no progression of functional chords the way you would hear in a normal pop song. In other words, if there is only one chord static in the whole piece, there isn’t enough context to really act as “harmony.”

The “bass” that comes in on the second part of every chorus, I admit, is a bass. But it actually comes in for 10 seconds in a completely different key. The song is in E major, but the bass notes are C natural, B, and A, which is something like A minor or C major or just something else completely. (If you don’t believe me, this theorist spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out the complexity of this polytonality.)

Let’s think about it. This is a song about women who don’t need men in order to be human. What better way to register this than remove bass and chords? And when the bass does enter, it enters in a different key from the female singers. I think it’s a metaphor.

Think that’s a little far-fetched? The connection between bass and masculinity and soprano vocals and femininity goes way back, and it doesn’t take much more than watching a metal band to figure out how prominent that connection is in our public consciousness. But the metaphor can be viewed in almost the exact opposite way: chords and bass are that which, in modern Western music, are sublimated underneath a melody and exist for no other purpose than to bolster that melody. If you really want to rebel, rebel against that.

Such rebellion is Beyoncé’s signature. Not just in this song, which creates a soundscape of feminism, a soundscape of musical independence, but she uses the same musical format in “Run the World (Girls).” It’s women’s voices and percussion and not much else. I feel safe in betting that you don’t listen to a whole lot of music like that, besides Beyoncé. And remember, in “Love on Top,” when she chooses to tear off the pants? It’s when the bass drops out. This is an association she has cultivated across her career to date.

To put this in perspective, the kinds of boundaries she and her producers are transgressing are the sorts of boundaries Radiohead is acknowledged for self-consciously crossing (even in academia). The difference is, Radiohead has not been invited to two Superbowls or even one Superbowl, and they have not sung for President Obama’s inauguration. Their music is alternative to its core and its commercial success depends on its appeal to the alternative demographic.

Beyoncé, on the other hand, is rivaled by practically no one in her mass appeal. You may still be skeptical that these decisions and transgressions I’m pointing out are intentional on Beyoncé’s part, but never forget that music producers are incredibly conservative and hate doing things they aren’t sure will make them money. This is why innovation in popular music is much slower than in alternative genres where return-on-investment is not so much of a concern. Any convention of music production that Beyoncé bypasses causes massive commercial repercussions in its absence. Beyond a doubt, these decisions are intentional and they are successful.

But surely I can’t prove that what Beyoncé did to the “musical modes” actually itself had an effect on political society? No, to be honest, I am not sure I could prove that. But that is not exactly Plato’s point, nor is it mine. I can point at how closely her music accompanies shifts in social power that have taken place in the last decade. It is one thing for her to sing while the Obamas danced in 2009; it is another thing for her to release “Run the World (Girls)” and then sing the national anthem in 2013.

The symbolism of the moment was powerful: yards down the National Mall, exactly 50 years earlier, Martin Luther King spoke and Mahalia Jackson sang. Whatever intention might have been present behind the symmetry of this moment, it is at least in part a reflection of the “how far we’ve come” sentiment. But it’s important to realize that that is not all that is being communicated in this moment. Beyoncé is not a reducible synecdoche of civil rights progress in the intervening decades. The 2013 Beyoncé that emerges from this moment stands for much more than that: she is now becoming an outspoken and peculiar brand of feminist in her music and her interviews, and it is that Beyoncé who sang the national anthem at an inauguration.

In that sense, Beyoncé is not a fulfillment of the promise of the opposite end of the National Mall. She is the next iteration of a similar battle. What gave the Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan social force could not simply have been the content of their ideology, which had been present and vocal long before they sang; it was the combination of content and musical form that combined musical and social revolution into a similar moment. A moment similar to that hasn’t really happened since.

As mainstream musical attention has shifted, it has tended to only be interested in sexual transgression or acceptable sorts of political dissidence. Rarely has an idea which has originated in music caused or been correlated to social change. The idea that music could mainstream a fairly nuanced treatment of feminism would have seemed far-fetched a decade ago. This mainstreaming of social change has to be accompanied by fitting, formal transgressive acts in the music itself.

Just before Plato writes that “when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them,” he makes a curious distinction: “not new songs but a new way of song.” The threat to his established order is not merely new music, but new approaches to composition that are popular enough to be “most regarded among men.” What is perhaps so implausible or disturbing to us about Plato’s statement is that there might be an unseen Machiavellian intelligence residing behind the music we listen to, controlling us through musical forces we don’t fully understand into either social submission or “insensible corruption.”

And yet, like me, Plato can’t fully prove, nor does he claim, a causal connection between musical modes and the laws of the state. His connection is a correlative connection, and I think Beyoncé turns out to be an excellent example of that. When the bass and chords disappear, an older set of social norms seem to disappear with them.

John Ahern is a graduate of Stanford University and will be a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University in Musicology as of fall 2017. He loves his wife and his son and his two cats.

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Graduate student at Princeton University studying musicology, as of fall 2017. Loves his wife and his son.