Wil Williams Writes

The chorus is in 4/4 but even that has crazy shit going on, like

Hello???

I need you to freak out with me: Willow Smith, performing under the stylization WILLOW, just dropped a pop song with verses in 7/4 and a 4/4 chorus with weird syncopated accents. Go listen to it, obviously. Now. The video rules, too.

Okay. Now that you’ve listened, let’s talk about this forever until we die.

Stop saying 7/4 literally what does that even mean

Yeah fair, that’s fair. 7/4 is a time signature that says how many beats are in each measure of a song. The most common time signature in American pop music by far is 4/4, which means you can easily count the beats to 4 over and over again for the duration of the song. It feels nice and sturdy, very familiar. A “four on the floor beat” is commonly attributed to pop music with a steady and strong 4/4 time signature, established and popularized by early disco songwriting from Black queer subcultures. We don’t besmirch disco in this house.

The next most popular time signature is 3/4 (or 6/8 — don’t worry about that distinction right now. Please.) which is commonly called a “waltz.” In this time signature, there’s a different feel and momentum; it was used commonly for, literally, waltzing.

So what makes 7/4 so special? It’s weird and nobody uses it unless they’re weird. You can think of it like taking a 4/4 measure and adding a 3/4 measure, basically combining the two aforementioned examples, but even that isn’t quite right. It’s jazzy. It’s off-kilter. It has a lot of character, and because it’s an odd time signature — literally, an odd number, but also “odd” as in “strange” — it has a feeling of being continually unresolved.

Try counting the beats of “Symptoms of Life.” It’s a lot harder than the 4/4 in “Hot Stuff” or the 3/4 in “I Got You Babe.” It’s easier to get lost and lose track of where you are unless you’re tuned the fuck in, hard. Even then, listening and playing are two very different things. I was in my school orchestras from fourth grade to my senior year of high school, and I don’t think I played a song in 7/4 once. Any time we were given sheet music outside of 3/4 or 4/4, the complaints from my classmates would be so incessant, the teacher would just cave and give us something more normal.

This isn’t to say there aren’t any contemporary songs in 7/4. There are — again, they’re just by weirdos.

With some very choice exceptions (I love you, Blondie), they’re almost never pop songs. They’re hard to sing to unless the melodies are meticulously crafted to be singable. They’re not danceable. They’re not familiar. They’re strange and unresolved. They lead you astray and whip you back to the beat over and over again.

Why would she do that then?

Because she’s fucking weird!

I’ve been watching WILLOW’s career closely for a little while now. When her 2015 song “Wait a Minute!” was making the rounds on pandemic TikTok, it stuck in my head — not in an earworm way, but in a scientific fascination way. Have you ever listened to the entire song? Listen to the entire song.

But “Wait a Minute!” did come out a year after Daft Punk’s celebrated and beloved final album, Random Access Memories, and it pays homage to the 70s in a much more authentic way than the disco pastiches that followed. The 70s are there in “Wait a Minute!” if you listen intently, but it can also feels like its own, non-referential bop, whereas Random Access Memories is very clearly, deeply, inextricably referential. “Wait a Minute!” was paying homage while also doing its own thing.

And then there’s something else that has always stuck out to me about “Wait a Minute!”: WILLOW does a little MARINA esque voice on the delivery of, “🥺I think I left my consciousness🥺 in the……. fifth di men sionnnn. 😎”

True Tumblrinas recognize MARINA as the weird girl music as the early 2010s. Part satire, part earnestness, mixing sweeping orchestrals with a goofy baby voice and weird mouth sounds, MARINA’s 2009 The Family Jewels is a fascinating and deeply divisive album.

I obviously cannot say that WILLOW is a MARINA fan, or even fashioned her delivery after MARINA, but I would not be shocked if there was direct influence here. Either way, a performative mix of very intentionally chosen voices always signals to me a performer who is willing to let marketability go second to expressiveness, and that’s always exciting.

You’re not even talking about “Symptom of Life.”

WILLOW has been maligned as a performer since she released “Whip My Hair.”

Certainly you remember “Whip My Hair” from all of the jokes people made about it constantly all the time. Ironically, the joke that was repeated over and over again was that the song was . . . repetitive. WILLOW was 10 years old when she released this song. When I was 10 years old, I was tending to my Neopets. WILLOW came out with a song about Black girls embracing their hair — a source of rampant misogynoir, a coined in 2010 by scholar Moya Bailey — and people, summarily, lost their shit. Most of the complaints about the song, released in 2010, were thinly-veiled misogynoir. Of course.

What’s strange, I suppose, about the comments on the video for “Symptom of Life” is that so many of them say things like, “She’s really grown since ‘Whip my Hair.’” To that, I say:

She was literally a 10 year old?

She’s 24 now.

You are not my friend.

Additionally: “Whip My Hair” is fun. It’s celebratory. It’s repetitive, sure, but it’s so silly to act like that was WILLOW’s doing. She was literally a 10 year old. “Whip My Hair” was written by Ronald Jackson and Janae Ratliff, not by WILLOW. Jackson only has two other songwriting credits to his name: “Girls Talkin’ Bout” by Mindless Behavior and Everyday Birthday by Swizz Beatz featuring Chris Brown and Ludacris. He has no credits past “Whip My Hair.” Ratliff seems to have had a successful career in the Kidz Bop industrial complex.

And for comparison: the top charting songs when “Whip My Hair” was release were:

1. “Like a G6” by Far*East Movement Featuring Cataracs & Dev,
2. “Just the Way You Are” by Bruno Mars,
3. “Just a Dream” by Nelly,
4. “Only a Girl (In the World)” by Rihanna, and
5. “DJ Got us Fallin’ in Love” by Usher featuring Mr. Worldwide, Pitbull

So like, be nice. The best thing we got charting high that year was a B-list Rhianna cut. We weren’t exactly burdened with too much inventive, genre-bending pop music. It was a time during which we would be rewarded for being repetitive. Get real.

You’re still not even —

The first thing I thought when I heard “Symptom of Life” was, simply, “Radiohead.” Radiohead isn’t shy with complex time signatures and rhythms, of course. Their 1997 single (and end credit theme for iconic industrial goth anime Ergo Proxy) “Paranoid Android,” a big fuckin fave here, is also occasionally in 7/4 with an otherwise 4/4 beat.

Tonally, something about “Symptom of Life” remind me of “Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi” and the other delicate melodies from the 2007 In Rainbows.

What I hear of Radiohead most in “Symptom of Life” is something different, something more difficult to nail down than just rhythms and chords. It’s somewhere in the alchemy of the song, that inexplicable something that sounds like invention. It’s the audacious ambition of the song, paired with a sense of stoic factuality of its existence. The song does not intend to prove anything to you, but it will be proven to you anyway.

Where “Symptom of Life” differs from Radiohead so dramatically is in its confidence and ease. Radiohead is anxious and frantic and introspecive whereas WILLOW conveys a confidence that is cool and collected. A confidence driven by patience, consideration, and contemplation. It’s a much comforting foothold in this whirlwind of a song that also gives the song room to breathe on its own. It isn’t pointing at its 7/4 or its wild chords. It’s a fucking good song, and those factors add to it being incredible, but they’re not crutches for a memorable sound. They are just facts of how the song exists.

I still don’t really understand 7/4

I feel like we really devalue Lorde as a society right now. Overplay has soured people to 2013’s Pure Heroine, but that album, produced by Joel Little before Lorde began working closely with Jack Antonoff, shifted the landscape for alternative music when it came out. Like James Blake’s phenomenal Overgrown, Pure Heroine was a massive step in 2013 towards darker, moodier, synth-based alternative music — and away from acoustic stom-and-clap folk a la Mumford & Sons. Thank fuck, truly. Things were getting dire in there.

Every time WILLOW has a multi-layered harmony as she sings, “Yeah.” in “Symptom of Life,” I immediately recall Lorde’s “Tennis Court” — the music videos strike me as similar in their dead-on, centered, unflinching gaze, too.

And alongside Lorde, James Blake brought smooth, stunning vocals to the moody indie electronica scene, complete with jazz- and gospel-informed stylings.

WILLOW and other female artists like Billie Eilish might have very different careers had it not been for Pure Heroine. The album was a mainstream success from a very young woman with a deep, dark voice, and a knack for sardonic lyrics, all wrapped up in melodies and production that sound but apathetic and incredibly vulnerable. This album helped change what “alternative” has been ever since.

Well, let’s not take that too far.

And then, right as you think you have a hold on the verses in 7/4, you get swung into a little aria before being dropped delicately into the sturdy comfort of 4/4. For a moment it feels like you have solid rhythmic footing — and then the accents come in, the stresses and quick note hops adding tension into each line of the chorus.

This makes for a chorus that is surprising not just in the sudden change of rhythm, but in how solid of a groove the chorus is. The bass line is more forward in the mix and more agile in riff. The vocals are more stripped back and textural than on the verses. The accents keep you hooked onto the momentum of each line. It fucking rules.

And even more impressive than how all that sounds musically: it’s relevant lyrically. “Symptom of Life” is about conflict and caution, a sense of concern about being the version of yourself you want to be:

Gotta know that life is fragile
Gotta know, but gotta go
I stood in awe inside a temple
Of a God I didn’t know, wanna go
Find the one who understands
Why we wait for pain to change us
To let me know what life is fragile

It’s like a turtle in sand
Making way to the ocean
Almost meeting the end
Because the birds are in motion

The lyrics swirl around the philosophical and metaphysical, but always in a questioning sense instead of as a statement of authority. The chorus continually asks, “Why?” This unsettled feeling is conveyed in the 7/4 and the syncopated accents. The deep and spiritual thinking come through in the high art composition and luscious vocals. The song reflects is lyrics in its structure, and it’s so satisfying.

Oh yeah, I can kind of see what you mean.

And of course, WILLOW’s parents have likely informed a good deal of WILLOW’s songwriting in many different ways. First and foremost: both Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are themselves musicians. I didn’t actually know Jada Pinkett Smith was until I started screaming to everyone I know about this WILLOW song, and I was thrilled to learn she’s in a nu metal band.

Will Smith’s musical career has been a bit less alternative, but endearingly memorable. He was a hitmaker in his day, maybe.

This is all to say that I don’t know if WILLOW was informed by Radiohead, or Lorde, or James Blake, but I am so grateful for the web “Symptom of Life” has woven for me around that selection of favorite artists. I’m grateful, too, that WILLOW has been afforded the ability to become such an incredible musician.

Go listen to this song over and over and over again until it becomes a part of your brain forever. Dive back into Radiohead if it’s been a while. Give respect to other wacky time signature songs like The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s “Take Five.” And celebrate, with me, some of the coolest shit I’ve heard in pop music in ages. Thank you, WILLOW. Cannot wait to see what you do next.