A Live Performance of 4 Chords Making Dozens of Songs
This really explains a lot. Why do I dislike pop music but certain songs are guilty pleasures that just sound right somehow. Axis of Awesome was my introduction to this concept. I'd seen other similar videos like the Pachelbel Rant, but it's so well packaged by Axis of Awesome and the songs are so varied the 4 Chord Song really hit home for me.
I love Save Tonight, by Eagle Eye Cherry, it's a great song I'm not embarrassed to love and completely ruin at Karaoke night. But then crap like Pictures of You, croaked by The Last Goodbye, also sounds kinda good. It's the chords man, the chords!
If you fall down the YouTube rabbit hole you'll find people belting out hundreds of songs to these four chords (and other chords of similar ubiquity). I guess nothing is new.
At one point I tried to learn the chords on piano (easy, but doesn't sound great), since so many YouTubers used a guitar I tried picking up an axe and rocking away... I'm not a guitar player, but how hard could it be to learn 4 chords. Pretty hard as it turns out. My fingers just aren't sturdy enough, it was painful, and sounded like crap; maybe the guitar wasn't tuned. Still, it's a testament to how much I enjoyed this favourite of mine!
Join me, The Gillos, as I go through my list of YouTube favourites spanning 9 years of content curation. Enjoy!