XTC’s “The Wheel and the Maypole” is two of Andy Partridge’s song fragments smashed together to good effect. The first (the “Wheel” part) is a verse-chorus-verse-chorus folk-traditional, crypto-medieval fertility-love wedding song; the second (the “Maypole” part) is a celebration of personal mortality and cosmic entropy that doesn’t have anything that sounds like a traditionally subdued verse – it’s more like dual choruses with the “And what made me think we’re any better?” lines functioning as a bridge section (and reprised in the second iteration of that second chorus).
**Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia” **is, stylistically, an epic, proggy smash-up of 60’s-style surf rock and 70’s-style glam, with an Ennio Morricone-western twang running through it, complete with horse-hooves sound effects and mariachi horns. But its underlying structure is just as bizarre; the analysis that follows is based on the Wembley '07 (the HAARP concert) version, BTW.
The song begins with a variable prologue (horse hooves and other sound effects on the LP version; a drawn-out bit of John Williams’ “Close Encounters” theme in the Wembley concert). That’s curtailed by a machine-gunned surf-rock glissando on guitar, kicking off an intro section of epic, inarticulate, banshee wailing (the “aah…aah…aah…” part). Another glissando leads to a twangy, Morricone-spaghetti-western-inspired guitar solo. A third glissando kicks of a transitional smashup of the “aah…aah…aah…” part and the verse (musically, it’s the verse, but articulated as simply more “aah” sounds: “aah, aah-aah-aah, aah-aah-aah, aah-aah-aah…”) and then finally, we get the first proper verse (“Come ride with me…”), roughly at the song’s halfway point, at 4:15. [Whew!] That’s followed by a repeat of the original “aah…aah…aah” intro, ending in a fourth glissando. Then comes the epic chorus (“No one’s going to take me… alive!..”) with its doubled lyric, leading to a rollicking guitar solo, followed by a regular chorus, a reprise of the second guitar solo and then the outro.
Listed in an itemized way, it looks like this (with vocal sections capitalized):
prologue (sound FX/John Williams)
[glissando]
Intro (“aah…aah…aah”)
[glissando]
twangy guitar solo
[glissando]
Transitional smashup of intro & verse (“aah, aah-aah-aah…”)
Verse (“Come ride with me…”)
Intro [redux]
[glissando]
Doubled chorus (“No one’s going to take me alive…” x2)
rollicking guitar solo
Chorus [single take]
rollicking guitar solo [reprise]
outro
A while back, I found an old dispatch from the music-festival front (IIRC, in the NME online archives, '06-'07) by a female music critic. Her reaction upon hearing “Knights of Cydonia” for the first time (at this festival set) was priceless: she fell into such a state of uncontrollable laughter, she wrote, she had to actually lower herself to the ground because she couldn’t stand up.
While I didn’t share her reaction, I think I understand it. As a pro, she would’ve been pretty knowledgable about song structure and Muse’s reputation for outrageousness. Her analytical, critical faculties were probably checking off the song-structure rules as they were being broken, and her system simply got overwhelmed by the flagrant nonconformity of it all – and of Muse managing to top even her expectations of outlandishness. Sadly, she didn’t mention what the final straw was (The mariachi trumpet? The third surf-rock glissando? The second time Bellamy launched into the banshee "aah"s? The over-the-top epic call to survive?) The visuals probably helped push her over the cliff… namely, Matt Bellamy’s outfit, hairstyle, or prancing about on stage? – it all adds up to the same giddy spectacle in the end.
My first take on the song was, sadly, that it was one of the most moronic, clunky, awkward-as-ass pieces of shit I’d ever heard – admittedly, it took a few listens before I “got” it… or did KoC simply wear me down by attrition? Now, of course, I think it’s f’n brilliant, but it’s possible that repeated listens to it has simply damaged my brain… 