The Axis of Awesome
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2012–2025
6:20 · 51M views · Jul 20, 2011
A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.
HN commenters use it as the canonical demonstration that popular songs reuse one chord progression, especially in threads on music analysis and AI-generated music.
16 comments from Hacker News
On a related note (corniest pun of the day), the Australian musical comedy act Axis of Awesome made a song called Four Chords Song , which is basically a 47-song medley all using the same chord progression. [LINK] They've said that the chords are used by some of the most well known songs in the world, and their performance demonstrates this nicely, as in this clip: this video The above link is the official video; but they explain their reasoning better in this live performance: [LINK]
Heh, I just this afternoon listened to a radio show about the famously popular vi-IV-I-V/I-V-vi-IV chord progression [1]. If you haven't heard it before, the "4 Chords" medley by Axis of Awesome is a great demonstration of its ubiquity [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Though a bit more on the "actual implementation" side of things, there's an Australian group called "Axis Of Awesome" who did an interesting song called "Four Chords". It shows the use of a set of four common chords in a lot of different songs. this video
I think there's a lot of different reasons all simultaneously going on. Most human musicians have very little power; that's been going away for a long time, even since "canned music" "robots" pushed live bands out of cinemas a century ago: [LINK] Most popular music already feels, and to an extent is, fake. Not only because mere recording allows repeated takes until it's inhumanly "perfect". When I played an MP3 of Britney Spears to my mum around the turn of the century, she thought it was a robot singing because of the autotune. The Monkees was famously an attempt at a manufactured band whose members just happened to not feel like playing that game and did it for real, Gorillaz is even more obviously manufactured. Parasocial relationships are inherently different from "real" relationships, but the performers have to pretend that it's personal when they address a crowd or a camera. Axis of Awesome demonstrated the similarity of most modern hits with their "4 Chords": this video Those with the power were, possibly still are, the record labels; but if the AI are trained on the works of small musicians that can't afford the copyright cases or the political influence, but also whose works are not under the umbrella of the labels who do have those resources but not the right or short term motivation to intercede on their behalf, the big labels themselves may lose the consumer market to free AI output, while professionals will dismiss both the AI output and the label's output as "just
Primarily, it's about payoff / benefit. Imagine you're 40 years old and you've never played an instrument. You have limited ambition - you want to have fun and play a little bit around campfire. How do you start, let's say on a guitar: 1. I show you G, C, D chords and print out a simple, easily understandable chart you can take home. You now can play hundreds of songs after 30 min lesson and a few mins of practice. You can spend time playing around and slowly learning rhythm, strumming techniques and patterns, while singing to your songs and getting a feel for your instrument. A week or three later I show you E-minor and now you can play virtually every pop song made in last 20 years. [1] If you get excited and interested, we throw in Aminor, and eventually F Major and now you know power chords and you're the master of it all. You're having fun, you're playing, you're improving, and you're having FUN. You can focus on good techniques and sounding good. When and if you want more, we can learn basic music theory and pentatonic patterns, and then one day if you're serious and ready for some pain, you can learn some staff notation. Or! 2. I give you some books and tell you to learn notes. You download an app or six to enable you to mindlessly practices notes every day. You spend months studying by rote and can maybe play Twinkle Twinkle Little star, poorly. But it's academic because you gave up a long time before you got there as there was no FUN to be had and you have children a