4-Chord Pop

Way back at the dawn of time I took guitar lessons for awhile.  I always thought how great it would be to be one of those guys who could just pick up an axe and start riffing and singing and wouldn’t that really be a great way to impress girls.  Well it would have been, but it turned out that acquiring such skill required a crap-load more work than I was willing to put in and a lot of talent I simply didn’t have.

Nonetheless, I do remember one thing from the class.  I was surprised that right from the outset we were learning Beatles songs.  I figured I’d be strumming Mary Had a Little Lamb or something.  But the teacher said pop songs were more interesting, and most could be played with just a few chords.  I thought that was great until I realized that even a couple of chord changes seemed to tie my fingers in knots.

I’d kind of forgotten all about that until I ran across this video of an Australian comedy band called Axis of Awesome.  (As a side note, that’s maybe the greatest band name ever.)  They perform a 5 minute medley of Pop songs using not only the same four chords, but in the same progression.  This is either very cool or incontrovertible evidence that pop music is even more lame than you thought.  (Warning: some NSFW language)