Shuffleoffagus

It's all about re-shuffles today (funny old word - shuffle) so I thought I'd take a look at the shuffle in music. Wikipedia defines it thus: 'In music, a swung note or shuffle note is a performance practice, mainly in jazz-influenced music, in which some notes with equal written time values are performed with unequal durations, usually as alternating long and short. In shuffle rhythm, the first note in the pair is exactly twice the duration of the second note.'

Got that? Me neither. Maybe it'll help if I memntiion a few 'Shuffle Hits'; Tears For Fears' Everybody Wants to Rule The World, Buddy Holly's That'll Be The Day, The Doors Roadhouse Blues - helpful? Can you hear those rhythms in your head? (If not you can check them out without buying (!) at Spotify.)

Can you hear the way it literally 'shuffles'? Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go's another, as is Diana Ross' Bee Gee penned Chain Reaction. The lazy nature of the shuffle beat evokes (for me at any rate) hot, steamy days by the bayou (not that I'd know a bayou if it hit me in the face, but you get my drift), mint juleps (never had one) and grits (absolutely no idea whatsoever what grits might be but as a name for a foodstuff it leaves some room for improvement). In fact it evokes, as I have just proved, a world that is completely alien to me. Now THAT's a beat!

As to what a re-shuffle beat might sound like we can only speculate, but judging by today's goings on I reckon it's a death march, a dirge, a requiem that eventually stops mid-phrase leaving us all hanging in space waiting for a new drummer.

And a brand new beat.