Blog Entry #6: Rent's "Will I?"

One of my favorite songs is from the Broadway musical Rent. I enjoy many songs from this musical, including the popular “Seasons of Love,” but I particularly like one of Rent’s less famous musical pieces called “Will I?” The main structure of the song is the repetition of its chorus, comprising the only words in the whole song. This chorus is sung through five times, so I suppose you could say the song is broken down into five stanzas. Each stanza is lyrically identical with the words:
Will I lose my dignity?
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow
From this nightmare?

Although the lyrics never change, several harmonies are employed besides just the base melody. Interestingly, the song is performed in a round. Rent character Steve begins the song by himself and sings the chorus through once (with conviction) at a medium volume. While he holds out the last note of the word “nightmare”, group 1 (consisting of a few chorus members) joins in and starts to sing the chorus. After they have sung the chorus through alone one time, they repeat it. Just a few notes after they start, the next group (who we can call group 3) begins singing it. The rest of the song continues in this fashion creating what sounds like an “echo effect.” The song is built on the musical element parallelism because of the repeating chorus. It has a solid tempo with an A-B-C-B rhyme scheme. The vocals are strong and tend to overpower the background music-a light, repeating guitar sequence and occasional symbol tap.

All of this repetition doesn’t make the song static though. In fact, I would consider it to be quite dynamic. Every stanza builds on the stanza before and the song gradually becomes louder and more aggressive. It ends with each “round group” on a different note and different word from the chorus. The lyrics themselves are intriguing because Rent focuses on a group of friends (from different lifestyles) who reside in New York City. Many of them are infected with HIV or AIDS. This back story obviously makes the lyrics highly appropriate to the musical. I also believe the lyrics can be directly connected to the specific daily struggles in many people’s lives.