"Prince Ali" and Why We're All Music Theorists

Switched on Pop

Vox Media Podcast Network

Music Interviews, Music History, Music, Music Commentary

4.6 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 June 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Fans are not happy with Will Smith's update of the classic Disney song "Prince Ali" in the live-action Aladdin. Their complaint? The new "Prince Ali" is slow, sluggish, and dull. Indeed, the Smith version is 8 BPM (beats per minute) slower than Robin Williams's 1992 original—a subtle musical detail. We dig into the properties of tempo and key to understand why people have such a visceral reaction to a relatively small change and consider whether it suggests that we—meaning all of us humans, from musicians to amateurs—are more musically literate than we think. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Sabotage hired goons and a landfill in Utah.
0:05.0	How Steve Jobs' revolutionary catastrophe of a computer, the Apple Lisa, earned a brief
0:10.7	second life and then was buried for good.
0:14.8	Watch the Verges documentary Lisa's final act now on YouTube.
0:30.0	Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.
0:37.0	And I'm a songwriter, Charlie Harding.
0:39.0	Okay, Charlie, today I want to talk about a song that's both new and old at the same time.
0:45.0	Okay, it's fun.
0:46.0	And it's giving people a lot of feelings.
0:48.0	Oh, okay, there's a new Aladdin movie out, right?
0:50.0	A ferd.
0:51.0	Live action update of the 1992 original.
0:54.0	Yep.
0:55.0	And there's a lot of reactions, both positive and negative.
0:58.0	But I want to focus in on people's reactions to one of the most famous songs from this iconic
1:03.0	Disney movie musical, Prince Ali.
1:06.0	Because as soon as this new version by Will Smith dropped, people felt some kind of way.
1:12.0	People had strong opinions about this.
1:15.0	And I think it's interesting, not just that people have opinions, okay, but that people are responding to something
1:21.0	like a very subtle and yet profound musical element.
1:27.0	So I think in a way that people are having such a strong reaction in this new version shows that we might all be music theorists.
1:34.0	Whether we know it or not.
	...

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