Composition
Jackson stated in his 1988 autobiography Moonwalk that the lyrics to "You Can't Win" are about humiliation and helplessness, feelings, he stated, that many people have experienced at one point in their life. The singer added that the song was also about "the feeling that there are people out there who don't actively hold you back as much as they work quietly on your insecurities so that you hold yourself back". "You Can't Win" opens with the lines, "You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the game. People keep sayin', things are gonna change, but they look just like they're staying the same." William F. Brown, who wrote the book for the Broadway musical, stated that such verses made "You Can't Win" a "black message song". Musically, the track has been described as an R&B, pop and soul song by Renée Graham of The Boston Globe. According to the sheet music published on Musicnotes.com by Alfred Music Publishing, the track was performed in common time, with a tempo of 80 beats per minute. It adds that the song is composed in E with a range from B3 to C♭5.
Read more about this topic: You Can't Win (song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such;Mor DIE—perplexing alternative!”
—Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)