Bateman Writes: Eye of the Tiger

I don’t often write about music at quantixed but I recently caught Survivor’s “Eye of The Tiger” on the radio and thought it deserved a quick post.

Surely everyone knows this song: a kind of catchall motivational tune. It is loved by people in gyms with beach-unready bodies and by presidential hopefuls without permission to use it.

Written specifically for Rocky III after Sylvester Stallone was refused permission by Queen to use “Another One Bites The Dust”, it has that 1980s middle-of-the-road hard-rock-but-not-heavy-metal feel to it. The kind of track that must be filed under “guilty pleasure”. Possibly you love this song. Maybe you get ready to meet your opponents whilst listening to it? If this is you, please don’t read on.

I find it difficult listening to this track because of the timing of the intro. Not sure what I mean?

Here is a waveform of one channel for the intro. Two of the opening phrases are shown underlined. A phrase in this case is: dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-dun, dun-dun-durrrr. Can you see the problem with the second of those two phrases?

Still don’t see it? In the second phrase the second of the dun-dun-duns comes in late.

I’ve overlaid the waveform again to compare phrase 1 with phrase 2.

The difference is one-eighth (quaver) and it drives me nuts. I think it’s intentional because, well the whole band play the same thing. I don’t think it’s a tape splice error, because the track sounds live and surely someone must have noticed. Finally, they play these phrases again in the outro and that point the timing is correct. No, it’s intentional. Why?

From this page Jim Peterik of Survivor says:

I started doing that now-famous dead string guitar riff and started slashing those chords to the punches we saw on the screen, and the whole song took shape in the next three days.

So my best guess is that the notes were written to match the on-screen action!

The video on YouTube is only at 220 million views (at the time of writing). Give it a listen, if my description of dun-dun-dun’s was not illustrative enough for you.

Notes:

• The waveform is taken from the Eye of The Tiger album version of the song. I read that the version in the movie is actually the demo version.
• I loaded it into Igor using SoundLoadWave. I made an average of the stereo channels using MatrixOp and then downsampled the wave from 44.1 kHz so it was easier to move around.

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A very occasional series on music. The name Bateman Writes, refers to the obsessive writings of the character Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. This serial killer had a penchant for middle of the road rock act Huey Lewis & The News.