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The well-known four chords, the "axis" development, the timeless and infamous pop song chord development. It is thought about utterly common but when did songwriters really begin using it, and has it now finally fallen out of style?
I was going to put the list of all of the songs I collected here in the description but it in fact goes beyond the character limit, so I have actually put it on this public Patreon post:.
Axis of Incredible comedy skit:.
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0:00 Intro.
0:55 the earliest tunes to use the Axis progression.
2:45 the 1970s.
3:38 the 1980s.
4:26 the 1990s.
5:08 flowkey.
5:39 the 2000s.
7:00 the 2010s.
7:55 which artist has used it the most?
8:38 the Axis progression in 2022.
9:36 piano outro.
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I’d never noticed that “Please Play This Song On The Radio” uses the axis progression but that’s entirely in line with the song’s joke – it’s deliberately as catchy and radio-friendly as possible before ending with a string of expletives and the refrain “can’t play this song on the radio”.
Interesting name for a song
yay a fellow NOFX fan
First NOFX song I ever heard. Meta humor always gets me.
I’m so glad to finally have a NOFX song mentioned in one of these David Bennett vids
Makes me think of the Queens Of The Stone Age Song called “Feel Good Hit Of The Summer” which has lyrics that are just a list of drugs over and over
When you explained that this chord progression is the 12 bar blues progression of the 90s and 2000’s – it made me want to know what are they other “go-to” chord progressions of each musical era in the past century. Maybe an idea for future videos?
The simpler I-IV-V-I was quite popular in rock&roll. Eg. Elvis really loved it (eg. Burning Love).
@David Bennett Piano And in the 1950s/60s – known as the Doo Wap progression as explained in one of David’s earlier videos
Chord progressions are highly memetic. Not just in time, but in different regions. In addition to the Royal Road, JPop also has vi–IV–V–I (a rotation of the doo-wop) which was popularized in the 90s by writer/producer Tetsuya Komuro (aka TK), which is called in Japanese now the Komuro progression.
@David Bennett Piano please do the vi-IV-I-V progression. Same chords as this video but the first two swapped with the last 2. Sadder sounding progression and came to prominence in the 90s, no coincidence there lol
In the middle ages, the go-to was the bubonic plagal cadence which went: D-E-A-D
Wow – Leave it to greats like Phil Spector, Carole King & Paul McCartney to be the first pop artists using this progression to make ear-candy, giant-hit songs. Btw, the Beatles loved _To Know Her Is To Love Her_ and did it in their early 60s club act. Never before did I see how it influenced _Oh Darling_ & _Let It Be_ (chord-wise).
But the middle bit of the Teddy Bears Spector song is where the sublime kicks in
@H K Agreed! 😂 I’m hard-pressed even to say what key it’s in.
Interesting
Maybe a video about how different this chord progression can sound (happy, sad, up beat, slow, angry and so on). And what the bands and songrighters do to change the sound and energy of the same 4 chords.
Keep one thing constant and see if we can learn something about tempo, time signature, instrumentation, melody, baseline, beats and so on.
Maybe we can see how much of a song is the chord progression.
I think if you also included the two other common variants of the Axis progression (6-4-1-5 and 4-1-5-6) you would find a lot more examples in the modern day. To me, those seem to be just as common and cliche as the original progression.
I think 6-4-1-5 actually sounds better and… I don’t know… moodier? than the more straightforward 1-5-6-4 (even though theoretically they are the same, just differing in where you start).
It’s known as the ‘minor variant’ because it’s basically priming your brain to see the 6 chord as the temporary ‘root’. And a lotta people prefer songs in the minor key!
I even found a song that started on the five chord, Once in a Lifetime by All Time Low.
I don’t need to write my comment now, this was exactly my thought. Saves me some typing…d’oh!!
I remember when I joined a pop-punk band for a while in the year 2000, and the first song we played was NOT a I-V-vi-IV, but a I-iii-vi-IV. Wow, such a modification!
it doesn’t change that much the V chord has just one note different to the iii chord
@Alessandro Summer I think you missed the joke here…
@Mickey Rube ah I got it now
It would be interesting to compile similar statistics for the “sister” chord progression, the vi – IV – I – V one. My instinct tells me that it peaks later than I – V – vi – IV, but that is just a hunch.
Offspring – Self Esteem is a great one
And its common variant, the vi – IV – I – III7 (or i – bVI – bIII – V7).
What I don’t understand is why this progression (vi – IV – I – V) is written this way (major) and not otherwise.
When the harmony loops back it resolves at a major scale sixth so maybe it’s not a vi but a relative minor i?
And maybe this progression should be written like this: i – VI – III – VII?
I’ve just started to delve deeper into music theory and I just can’ t wrap my head around this.
@Bill Razor What feels ‘resolved’ is subjective and dependent on more than just the chords – voicing, arrangement, and many other factors also play a role. In my comment you see I wrote it both ways. Interpret it how you want.
Anyway, cyclic progressions like that work so well specifically because they don’t conclusively resolve, they sound good just going round and round and round…
@ben ben There’ s so much talk about scales and modes, about how different they sound, but on paper – C Major, A minor, D Dorian, E Phrygian etc. – are exactly the same. Same notes, same chords. I don’t understand what makes them sound different, how that works.
Once again, you’ve piqued my interest in chord progressions. Thank you for the time you spent putting this video together, getting the list of songs, etc. I am sure it was time consuming and daunting! Thank you for this video and your knowledge of music!
Up to a point, its popularity might have had a lot to do with its versatility, with a series of satisfying but not dramatic chord changes that makes it work for a range of moods and genres. But now that everyone’s heard about it, it’s hard not to notice it, and so (as you say) people start to avoid it. It might just be the context, but in that montage of recent examples the songs all sounded a bit retro or nostalgic, which might be due to the feeling that they’re hanging on to a tired trend. On the other hand, it’s possible that its “saturation” in the 2000s might be overstated. There were 30 examples in 2011, but there must have been hundreds or even thousands of equally popular songs that didn’t use it. If the y axis (no pun intended) of the graph went up to the number of songs that charted in a year, the axis progression line might look more like a blip than total domination.
I call it the “let it be” progression. It was the first song I learned to play that uses that progression.
I wonder how much the Axis of Awesome skit directly contributed to its decline in the 2010s. I remember the sketch being pretty popular pretty quickly, at least in the UK, and I imagine any songwriters hearing it must have been very conscious of it if they started to think about including the progression in songs after that.
This may explain the peak just 1-2 years after the release of the skit (it takes time for it to become popular), then the MASSIVE decline the year right after- quite interesting to think about
@SulfurRingROKer Yes, definitely. There’s also a wee bit of lag time with when people write and release songs, so I think the timing is pretty consistent with that massive drop off. Not to say it wouldn’t have happened eventually anyway, but the decline is so steep it feels like there was a definite trigger.
David, a question for you: how did you find all the songs with this chord progression? Probably this trick is a topic for another video:-)
It’s interesting how little this seems to matter to making the song “good” or not. Like, a bunch of these songs are terrible and boring, and others are great. It just goes to show that good music isn’t entirely about the progressions (nor is bad).
In high school after watching the axis of awesome video i had compiled a list of roughly 200 songs that i personally knew that used this chord progression (and the 6-4-1-5 repetition too), it sure was a trip down memory lane for me to watch this
When I was in high school in the early 1960s, I was trying to teach myself to play the ukulele, and I learned a few chords. I discovered that I could play a series of three or four chords that would work with almost any “slow dancing in the gym” type of song (and that helped me understand how many acts were criticized as being “just a jumped-up three-chord garage band”.
I teach lots of new songs to kids and while this chord progression isn’t as common as it once was, I find that modern pop usually consists of primarily I, IV, V and vi but in various permutations and combinations, with ii showing up to provide variety.
I think there’s another reason why this progression is getting rarer nowadays: in the last ten years minor key (especially aeolian) has become more popular than major in charts’ songs.
Seeing you mention “Time” and “Carousel” (among others) by blink 182 made me feel like I was 15 again, browsing through the giant music store we had in my nearest city, and pulling out blink’s early indie releases feeling like I hit the jackpot!!! I feel bad for kids today who will never know that joy. CD shopping and finding rarities, EPs, demos, singles, and imports and bringing them into your collection is truly an unmatched experience!
To me the Axis chord progression has a pensive, sombre “things kinda suck, but I’ll keep on going” quality, which I imagine speaks to a lot of people – especially young people, accounting for its overuse in punk and pop-punk. I’m curious how other people feel this progression sounds?
This was the first chord progression I ever learned. To this day it still hits different than all other progressions on an emotional level.