Tighten Up
by The Black Keys
- 108
- BPM
- F# minor
- Key
- 11A
- Camelot
- 51
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
The first video for "Tighten Up" was a placeholder. The label asked for a teaser ahead of the Black Keys album Brothers, and director Chris Marrs Piliero made a low-budget clip of a puppet dinosaur named Frank dancing beside a plant. Subtitles list facts about the video, the band and Frank, including that he has a profile on eHarmony. Piliero drew on Yo Gabba Gabba! and old puppet shows, and he first considered an ALF doll.
The song is the third track on Brothers. It was released as its first single on April 23, 2010, and was the Black Keys' first song on the Billboard Hot 100 and went to number one on the Alternative Songs and Rock Songs charts. At the 53rd Grammy Awards it won Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, the last song to take that award, and it was nominated for Best Rock Song.
Piliero also directed the official video, released on May 18, 2010. Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney sit on a park bench while their fictional sons fight over a little girl. The two men end up brawling with Carney's drum kit. It won the 2010 MTV Video Music Award for Breakthrough Video. Rolling Stone later put the song on its list of the 15 best whistling songs of all time.
Tighten Up runs at 108 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in moderato territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.22 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 556 ms. It is in F# minor, Camelot 11A, which shares its notes with A major and mixes cleanly with B minor and C# minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.