Talk:Part of the Band

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Does it have a chorus or not?[edit]

The description currently says that this song doesn't have a chorus. In my opinion as a classically-trained but amateur musician, it totally has a chorus, musically if not lyrically, so I removed the "without a chorus" part. That was subsequently reverted because professional reviewers have said it doesn't have a chorus.

I don't want to start an edit war, so I just want to point out that lyric and guitar tab websites think the song has a chorus; and while a review post says it has "no defined chorus", it's immediately contradicted by a screenshot of the singer and co-composer's Instagram referring to the song having a chorus. (Can't link to the post because the band are apparently in the habit of deleting their social media accounts when they announce a new album, so it's now gone.)

I suppose the way I would resolve this contradiction is that many music reviews are by people who predominantly focus on the lyrics, so they'll have seen "no repetition of the same block of lyrics" as meaning "there's no chorus"; whereas as a musician I listen to the song and think "there's different lyrics, but there's still a verse / pre-chorus / chorus structure".

Ping: @Bilorv:

Skington (talk) 22:17, 13 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for raising this Skington. Genius.com is user-generated content, so not reliable for Wikipedia's purposes. (An excellent website, don't get me wrong, but Wikipedia has limited scope.) I'm not familiar with Guitartwitt but I'd be quite surprised if we considered this reliable for the claim "The song has a chorus".

If you can find reviews that do comment on the chorus as being part of the song's structure then we can say sentences like "X and Y said that its lack of chorus contributed to the song's 'stream-of-consciousness' style while Z said that there was a chorus, although the lyrics vary each time" (this sort of thing, not this exact thing). Without that, if you think the claim is particularly controversial then we could perhaps attribute the claim to the reviewers who said it. Even if it's most accurate, we can't say things like "lyrically there is no chorus because there is no repetition of words" unless the sources actually say that exact thing.

For the record, on a personal level, I do see your point. I don't necessarily think the question "does this song have a chorus?" has an answer. We're agreed that there's no lyrical repetition but there is musical repetition. I'm not so convinced the structure can be so easily categorised as "verse / pre-chorus / chorus". But recognising and interpreting chord progressions is not my strongest musical talent. — Bilorv (talk) 16:40, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose the way I would characterise this is (to take tvtropes terminology), Word of Dante (professional reviewers) says there's no chorus, but Word of God / Word of St Paul (the singer and co-composer) says there's a chorus. Personally I'd say that if the singer says it's a chorus, it's a chorus?

I'm happy to wait for more reviews to come out (the album itself hasn't been released yet) and see what happens. Skington (talk) 19:06, 14 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia doesn't have a rule about death of the author per se, but our focus on secondary sources over primary sources probably lends us to look more through the eyes of Dante than God. — Bilorv (talk) 08:59, 17 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]