Break It Down: 'Cult of Personality' by Living Colour

By Brian Poedy

Vernon Reid is not your average 80’s shredder. While his lightning-fast solos were a hallmark of the era, he was well known during his early career in the New York avant-garde jazz scene, as a member of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s group The Decoding Society. The influential mixture of jazz, rock, funk, and ethnic music can be heard in both in Living Colour’s work and in Vernon's solo projects.

While the solo in “Cult of Personality” is both fast and technical, it follows a predictable and musical arc — an important concept, particularly when you want to make an improvised solo sound familiar to your audience, even when it’s anything but. Live videos of “Cult of Personality” show that Reid’s solo was never quite the same twice, but it did almost always follow a somewhat predictable pattern on its journey from beginning to end.

The solo begins anchored at the 15th fret and stays largely within a G minor pentatonic pattern, with the notable addition of the major sixth, played on the second string at the seventeenth fret. This is also a prominent note in the song’s main riff. The solo makes a lot of use out of the top four strings in this position, with Vernon playing a number of blazing fast repeated patterns. From one performance to another, this is always the anchor of the beginning of the guitar solo, and sets the shreddy tone for what follows.

From here, Vernon journeys way down the neck a full octave to play within the same G minor pentatonic scale anchored at the third fret. This is where the solo’s arc really starts to take shape. Vernon doesn’t linger long in this lower position, and he begins to climb the fretboard once again settling in around the 10th and 11th fret. While he remains largely in a G minor pentatonic, the three-notes-per-string pattern in this section of the solo gives it a different feel than the opening.

Never one to linger, Vernon's ascension continues and we find him back at the very familiar G minor pentatonic pattern anchored at the 15th fret, thus completing the arc. As a listener, we are always far from any sort of feeling of rest, but there is a sense of closure – Reid sets out from one point returns us there again, essentially bringing us home.

Reid’s jazz background likely had a great deal to do with his ability to phrase improvised solos in a way that really makes the listener feel like they are being taken somewhere. His solo feels like it has a musical purpose, rather than simply being a bunch of very fast patterns thrown out on the spot.

Brian Poedy has served as a notetracker and audio designer for Ubisoft San Francisco since 2013. In his scant free time, he also builds custom instruments, pickups, amps, and pedals from scratch at Poedy Guitars.

"Living Colour Graz 2010" by Clemens Stockner is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Vernon Reid photo by Mario is licensed under CC BY 2.0.