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Fall Out Boy Analysis

Decent Essays

Joshua Heiner
MUSC 1010
Final Paper The two songs I will be comparing are “Centuries,” by Fall out Boy and “21 Guns,” By Green day. I chose these songs, because I love the bands and even more importantly, I love their music. Not one song is the same, so I chose these songs to research so that I can better understand what I enjoy in a song and what interests me. I first found Fall Out Boy when listening to the radio. After that, I looked them up on YouTube and now they have become one of my favorite musical groups ever. I found out about Green Day while listening to a Pandora Station. I have been listening to these bands for around three years each and have been hooked on every song they release. Fall Out Boy’s music can be defined as …show more content…

The band is made up of lead vocalist/guitarist, Billie Joe Armstrong; and bassist, Mike Dirnt; lead guitarist, Jason White; bassist guitarist, Sean Hughes; and percussionists,Tré Cool, John Kiffmeyer, and Raj Punjabi. They have currently made over 30 albums and the song, “21 Guns” is in the album labeled, “21st century Breakdown” It was released May 25, 2009 and peaked at 22 on the Billboard Top 100. The song itself has sold over 2 million copies and has over 115 million views on YouTube. The inspiration of this song is from the 21-gun salute for someone that has …show more content…

The vocals and guitar kick in at 17 seconds. The vocalist plays his guitar to the line, “Do you know what’s worth fighting for when it’s not worthing dying for?” Still with only the singer playing it goes into the second phrase that has the same melody. At this point in the song, it is at a medium tempo. The melody is homophonic and conjunct. Then the third phrase has a accelerando and crescendo and is when the hook starts and the entire bands joins in to the line of, “One, 21 Gun, lay down your arms, give up the fight,” it then repeats the melody with a different line and the same hook, “One, 21 Guns, throw up your arms into the sky, you and I…” When the hook is over, it goes back to the first melody, but with drums, doing a decrescendo and ritardando until the beat is back to being just the vocalist with his guitar. This pattern repeats until the end of the song. The song is played in common time. It is homophonic and has bits of monophony and imitative polyphony. There is syncopation on beats 2 and 4. The song is consonant and conjunct. It is played in major key. The tempo varies on which phrase is being played, the hook is closer to allegro, while the solo phrases are closer to adagio. The dynamics are piano and then jump to forte in the main melody. The song ends with birds chirping to address the 21-gun

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