The Seinfeld Theme Is Way Cooler Than You Think

By: Connor Lenahan

I really wish I were a good musician. I can drum in correct time and I can play Rock Band with a solid enough rhythm to do well on expert, but that’s mimicking music. I wish I were able to create music. Actually, I’d even settle for being smart enough to figure out patterns and structures of music like Jonathan Wolff in the video below.

For anyone even roughly familiar with television in the last twenty years, the theme song to Seinfeld is an earworm like no other. It’s an absurdly simple song that opens the show – basically a couple of bass notes and some random percussion thrown in. It’s not a sing-a-long like some others. It’s just the type of thing that you have playing in your head at work or you find yourself tapping a pen to the beat without consciously meaning to.

Well, turns out there is an absurd level of craft that goes into the theme. For example: the theme changes for every show, and consists of sounds produced from a keyboard by the aforementioned Wolff, playing them in time to Jerry Seinfeld’s monologues. The percussive noises are just things Wolff could do with his mouth when he was tinkering with writing the show. It’s absurdly impressive – and slightly maddening to know he did this for every episode, but it looks formulaic to an extent, thank God.

Guys aren’t smart people the coolest? I want to be like the smarts. Possiblie I are a smart two.