R.E.M.‘s “Losing My Religion” Reworked from Minor to Major Scale

There is a rea­son why it was writ­ten in a minor scale.

Great one. Maybe they should rework all minors into majors then they would have even more songs “unique” enough to be shared.

Y’know guys… I’m not con­vinced the idea was to cre­ate a supe­ri­or ver­sion of the song. In fact I think it quite obvi­ous­ly was­n’t, what the heck are you all talk­ing about?

Tru­ly sad nasty excus­es for copies of good music. The scale cho­sen ini­tial­ly is for a rea­son not to be molest­ed like this for LOL’s.

All I can do is hope this is some sad joke that dis­ap­pears fast.

This def­i­nite­ly isn’t meant to be tak­en seri­ous­ly, so stop being so seri­ous about it. It’s just an insane and hilar­i­ous exper­i­ment, because some­body want­ed to know what it would sound like. Nobody was try­ing to make the song “bet­ter” or any­thing like that by doing this. Please light­en up.

Com­par­ing this to the orig­i­nal is not the point of this exer­cise. This is a great exam­ple of the dif­fer­ence between Major and Minor scales and chords — worth lis­ten­ing to to under­stand the DIFFERENCE more ful­ly.
The fact is: peo­ple like sad things, because so much of life is sad, so minor res­onates with us all. But they also like hap­py things because it lifts them up. As anoth­er exam­ple of this, con­sid­er ABBA songs: incred­i­bly upbeat dance­able music, but with real­ly, real­ly sad lyrics. That dichoto­my of “happy/sad” was key to their suc­cess.

Think I pre­fer depressed and angsty Michael Stipe but I’ve emailed all my friends a link to this so they’ll hate me as much as I hate the per­son who emailed it to me :)

Actu­al­ly I pre­fer to go the oth­er way — espe­cial­ly with nation­al anthems, which often then become thought­ful rather than jin­go­is­tic.

This is about the ‘good ol’boys’ want­i­ng to sell more records. Hav­ing the gall to try and con­vince us, the con­sumer, that the minor key is just to sad. Put in major and every­one will be hap­py and spend more mon­ey. While you at it, Mr Ol’Boy, why don’t you pass around some of those hap­py pill. I can see Charl­ton Hes­ton at the end of SOYLENT GREEN, yelling at the hun­gry mass­es “IT’S PEOPLE!” and they don’t lis­ten. They just want their gov­ern­ment issued food, Soy­lent Green. So I’m stand­ing on top of the roof yelling “IT WAS WRITTEN IN THAT KEY AND TO CONVINCE SOMEONE TO CHANGE THE KEY FROM MINOR TO MAJOR IS JUST PLAIN STUPID.”

Reminds me of the “hap­py end­ing” ver­sion of Gilliam’s Brazil. Inter­est­ing intel­lec­tu­al exer­cise, but not worth shar­ing.

There is sim­i­lar FB group, MajorVs­Mi­nor, that make both minor to major and major to minor rework. They have Abba, Queen, Nir­vana and Bea­t­les: http://www.youtube.com/user/MajorVsMinor

I think this is a supe­ri­or version…the minor scaled tune was so suf­fo­cat­ing­ly maudlin and pitiable. It had too much emo­tion and was way over the top. It was utter­ly with­out irony and just down­right sap­py. It actu­al­ly marked a turn­ing point for REM where they kind of left the “tongue in cheek” world for the sap­py “I’m so very very sad about the world — whoa is me” non­sense. This major scaled ver­sion wakes the tune up! It puts an inter­est­ing spin on the heavy lyrics. It makes me love REM again.

Major and Minor — the Stre­be­tendenz-The­o­ry
If you want to answer the ques­tion, why major sounds hap­py and minor sounds sad, there is the prob­lem, that some minor chords don’t sound sad. The solu­tion of this prob­lem is the Stre­be­tendenz-The­o­ry. It says, that music is not able to trans­mit emo­tions direct­ly. Music can just con­vey process­es of will, but the music lis­ten­er fills this process­es of will with emo­tions. Sim­i­lary, when you watch a dra­mat­ic film in tele­vi­sion, the film can­not trans­mit emo­tions direct­ly, but process­es of will. The spec­ta­tor per­ceives the process­es of will dyed with emo­tions — iden­ti­fy­ing with the pro­tag­o­nist. When you lis­ten music you iden­ti­fy too, but with an anony­mous will now.
If you per­ceive a major chord, you nor­mal­ly iden­ti­fy with the will “Yes, I want to…”. If you per­ceive a minor chord, you iden­ti­fy nor­mal­ly with the will “I don’t want any­more…”. If you play the minor chord soft­ly, you con­nect the will “I don’t want any­more…” with a feel­ing of sad­ness. If you play the minor chord loud­ly, you con­nect the same will with a feel­ing of rage. You dis­tin­guish in the same way as you would dis­tin­guish, if some­one would say the words “I don’t want any­more…” the first time soft­ly and the sec­ond time loud­ly.
This oper­a­tions of will in the music were unknown until the Stre­be­tendenz-The­o­ry dis­cov­ered them. And there­fore many pre­vi­ous research­es in psy­chol­gy of music failed. If you want more infor­ma­tion about music and emo­tions and get the answer, why music touch­es us emo­tion­al­ly, you can down­load the essay “Vibrat­ing Mol­e­cules and the Secret of their Feel­ings” for free. You can get it on the link:
http://www.willimekmusic.homepage.t‑online.de/homepage/Striving/Striving.doc
Enjoy read­ing
Bernd Willimek

Why do Minor Chords Sound Sad?
The The­o­ry of Musi­cal Equi­li­bra­tion states that in con­trast to pre­vi­ous hypothe­ses, music does not direct­ly describe emo­tions: instead, it evokes process­es of will which the lis­ten­er iden­ti­fies with.
A major chord is some­thing we gen­er­al­ly iden­ti­fy with the mes­sage, “I want to!” The expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to a minor chord can be com­pared to the mes­sage con­veyed when some­one says, “No more.” If some­one were to say the words “no more” slow­ly and qui­et­ly, they would cre­ate the impres­sion of being sad, where­as if they were to scream it quick­ly and loud­ly, they would be come across as furi­ous. This dis­tinc­tion also applies for the emo­tion­al char­ac­ter of a minor chord: if a minor har­mo­ny is repeat­ed faster and at greater vol­ume, its sad nature appears to have sud­den­ly turned into fury.
The The­o­ry of Musi­cal Equi­li­bra­tion applies this prin­ci­ple as it con­structs a sys­tem which out­lines and explains the emo­tion­al nature of musi­cal har­monies. For more infor­ma­tion you can google The­o­ry of Musi­cal Equi­li­bra­tion.
Bernd Willimek