The ideal instrument with which to jangle is a twelve-string Rickenbacker (not least because it was McGuinn’s weapon of choice), but credible jangles have been perpetrated with Telecasters, Jazzmasters, ES-335s, and Les Pauls, among others. The notorious jangle of “Turn! Turn! Turn!”-with an overhanging ninth that seems to contain all the real wonder and tumult of an era now reduced to montages of hippies and Hueys-is an imponderable koan compared to the jangle of “So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star.” You want to be a rock and roll star? It’s as simple as this. Stephen Malkmus’s Ess-Dog undoubtedly loved it. This jangle is a prime specimen: clean, bright, endearing. As presented, however, the jangle’s essential jangleness is unmistakable it inheres in the syncopation that brings the A halfway through the second beat rather than on the third, the leaps from string to string, the ringing sustain. In the right light, the parallel fifths that outline the harmonic progression from ♭VII to I are no more than deconstructed power chords. The song’s jangle itself betokens rock and roll: a heavier touch, a heavier amp, and it might have anchored someone else’s arena-rock single ten years down the line had McGuinn not scooped it up. In this relatively good-natured entry in the only somewhat sufferable canon of songs about what a drag it is to be an impossibly cool and famous rocker in 1967, the stereo mix is your invitation to walk a mile in David Crosby’s Chelsea boots. You want to be a rock and roll star so badly? Here, join us on the stage-the only place where the guitarist is on your left and the drummer is on your right. Until the silence of the right channel is broken by the drums, one has to wonder: did I buy the wrong version? Has one of my hi-fi’s banana plugs gone rotten? But the Byrds are laughing with you, not at you. The stereo release of Younger Than Yesterday begins with a riddle: a jangle, but only in your left ear. Three of them are explored in greater detail below each transcription is accompanied by a hierarchical reduction on the lower staff. ![]() They may not be what makes the album great-that distinction might go to the record’s wit, its geniality, or its generosity-but they’re the medium in which it is made great. Younger Than Yesterday is a Wunderkammer of jangles. In virtually every case, a jangle is a warning that a white man is about to cut to what he perceives to be the heart of the matter in a way that is at once earnest and coolly detached, sunny and in shades. Jangles lend themselves especially well to introductions, where the intricacy of their glimmering wiry webs can be admired before the singing starts. ![]() ![]() It’s often an accompanimental texture, but just as often-deemed sufficiently pleasing on its own-it accompanies nothing. The jangle is a kind of figuration, an element of musical material that occupies the foreground-most parallax plane. (The Replacements’ Let It Be is a catalog of embittered, dysphoric anti-jangles.) In far-flung Manchester, Johnny Marr became the preeminent jangler of his or perhaps any generation in Glasgow, Edwyn Collins wore his fringe, by his own admission, like Roger McGuinn’s. The Byrds compelled the Hang-Ups and the Jayhawks to jangle up one side of Hennepin Ave. and Love Tractor, the Antipodean jangle of the Go-Betweens and the Church. ![]() It’s because the Byrds jangled that we have the Athenian jangle of R.E.M.
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