Difficult to define a musical idea if you’ve not done so before with any success and are not a musician.

“Driving drone” is my limited attempt at defining a song construction which does not vary its rhythm throughout, except for a few bars of repetition, minus melody, at one point. That melody is actually a series of melodic interludes overlaying the core driving rhythm … not unlike baroque basso continuo … and it takes skill to blend them.

It’s also a style where the lyrical content is secondary to the rhythm and melodies … yes, the lyrics make short statements of seeming wisdom but you’re essentially in there for that life rhythm, for that soul.

And that becomes apparent when reactors to the songs try to make sense of them, especially young Millennial and Gen Z reactors looking back at these 70s and 80s ventures, realising how much better they were, musically, compared to anything else since in popular music.

Here are three examples of this “driving drone” idea:

So much to say about that … someone wrote that it was elements of funk, soul, jazz, pop, all thrown in together. And the young lady … always a buzz when a student “gets” something and there’s a link established between past and present. Now this one in which the musical break comes at the 4 minute mark:

Now I can quite understand those who think “repetitious mumbo jumbo” … the whole thing again is the driving rhythm which underlays and transcends any lyrical content, also any overlaid melodies until, at 4 minutes, some sort of break is needed.

In the last one below, that needed break or interlude comes at 06:56 and goes for almost exactly a minute, then returning to the original phrasing for the the outro:

Granted … it’s not everyone’s cuppa cha but it’s a distinct genre, most rhythmic, and some of us need that now and then. The closest I can get in RL to that was WN2 and I when, once the rhythm was started by her, I overlaid melodies afap, working off one another … a marriage of rhythm and aesthetics perhaps?