It Will Rock You

By Sara Hart

Hey there Blog of Sound readers!  Sara here, joining the Blog of Sound family to bring you my little take on music every month.  I may not know everything there is to know about music, but I love it—music is my life.  I am lucky enough to be the lead singer in an amazing rock band called She Eats Planets.  You may have read about us on the Blog of Sound before, but if not, I hope you'll look us up!  Introductions aside, I'm here to write about some music!

Have you ever found a song that you just can't stop listening to?  Maybe you have your iPod on shuffled and a song comes up you can't skip; an awesome hook, a catchy bass line, an infectious beat.  Maybe it's a classic rock anthem or maybe it's the bubblegum pop hit of the day.  Some songs just have that extra something that makes you want to hit 'repeat'.  I'm here to talk about those very songs by sharing the ones that I just can't stop listening to!  Here's a song I think is pretty catchy!

I figured this first song would be a good one to start with, just one month after the Super Bowl.  This anthem is absolutely infectious as well as influential; Rolling Stone ranked it at number 330 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time—"We Will Rock You" by Queen.

There are so many reasons that this unique piece of music is catchy and deserves to be the first song written about here.  Let's start with the music.  There practically IS none.  You probably haven't thought about it in depth before now, but listen to it.  The song is almost entirely accapella!  The percussion given by the stomping and clapping is all done by the band by overdubbing themselves and adding delays to create the effect of a crowd of people.  

Freddy Mercury sings over the stomp-stomp-clap rhythm with lyrics that anyone can relate to; whether you've played team sports before, have a favorite team you watch all season, football, baseball or otherwise, or even if you take it on a personal level and use it to fuel efforts in your own life.  The words start a fire in you when you hear them.  Soon you find yourself getting caught up in singing them out loud, adding fuel to that fire.

The simplicity of this song is what makes it truly great.  It's just over two minutes long, the song is almost entirely done without any sort of instrument and the lyrics are basic and straight to the point.  Everything comes together to inspire, to drive, to bring people together in a way that only music can.  Any song that can unite people time and time again, for any reason...is a truly great piece of art.