What is the key/mode of "you are the government" by bad religion?
I'm trying to make sense of keys and modes, and I'm studying simple songs note by note to reach this goal. One of them is "You are the Government" from Bad Religion.
It starts with a riff that goes : Fm A? B? D? E?... followed by a verse that goes D? A? E? Fm D? A? E? B?.
The voice melody is made of notes that could come either from keys Fm or D? because neither G? nor G? is sung, though if I try to modify the melody, inserting some G sounds better to me than inserting some G?.
As D? sounds to me like the home chord of the verse, does it make it a D? lydian melody ? Or am I just in Fm ? How do I know ?
To complexify things, the second syllable of "along" is a D, which is not of any of these scales. Is there a key change happening ? My understanding is that the B? might imply a key change as it should be a B?m to respect the triads of the Fm key. Is that the right way of thinking?
I think it's a fairly simple song, but it's enough to confuse me. Could you help me clarify it by critiquing my reasoning and telling me what keys and modes are used and whether there are key changes happening ?
The song:
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F minor
As you said, the notes fit in both F minor and Db major (thus in Ab major and Bb minor too), so all you have to do is to determine the tonal center of the whole thing.
In the intro, it's pretty clear to me. When it loops back to Fm, it feels like home. Also Db Eb Fm is a well known cadence in minor keys. Sometimes they do Db C Fm instead, another well known cadence.
In the verse, you said Db is the home chord. In my opinion, that Fm in the middle is still stronger. And in the end of the verse they do Db Eb Fm again, which makes it sound more like the tonal center.
The Bb in the verse is a deceptive IV. You would expect the Eb to resolve to Fm like in the first part, but instead it resolves to the IV degree of the scale (Bb) in a deceptive cadence. The fact that it is major and not minor does not necessarily imply a key change. It's just one note, D, borrowed from the major mode, and right after, everything returns to F minor again. The key has not changed, they just added some color.
Now about your reasoning: You correctly identified the possible scales; your intuition about G and Gb was correct; if Db was the tonal center, it would indeed be lydian (and it's still a plausible option, I just disagree...); and you picked up the note outside the scale correctly. Great job!
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