Analyzing Popular Music
Edited by Allan F. Moore
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ix + 270 pp.
Reviewer: Jacqueline Warwick, Dalhousie University, Canada
Some 20 years ago a group of scholars from many disciplinary backgrounds held its first conference and organized an international association for the study of popular music. Since then the field has become well established; there are several first-rate journals, most major universities offer courses in this area, and leading graduate schools are producing popular music specialists who - shout it from the mountains - are getting jobs. Scholars who study popular music need no longer feel disregarded in academia, thrown together like unwed mothers attending a wedding, whether or not they have anything in common beyond discomfort in that setting. Whereas once, at the faculty club, the Sociology professor who teaches a course on gangsta rap might have sought out the music theorist who writes about Pink Floyd simply because no one else will talk to them, now these people can nod politely to one another over their drinks and return to other conversations.
Does the new respectability of popular music studies, then, undermine the collegiality between scholars from different disciplines who might once have felt united in their marginalization? Recent essay collections on popular music gather together the work of scholars from fields such as sociology, media studies, literature and historical musicology, demonstrating that the field's eclecticism is still alive and well. In the past two years alone, David Hesmondhalgh and Keith Negus' Popular Music Studies, Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook and Ben Saunders' Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture and Eric Weisbard's This is Pop all prove that different kinds of popular music scholars can rub shoulders and share ideas with one another.
Still, there is evidence of a certain distrust of the tools and methods of music scholars trained to analyze "classical music"; can music scholars free themselves from the shackles of scores, Schenker graphs and technical terminology that bores and intimidates those without a conservatory education? Robert Fink writes in Rock Over the Edge about the need for "disciplinary diplomacy" between popular music studies and musicology, wondering if "musicologists who venture out from their crumbling ivory towers of Music Appreciation [are] doomed to be the Elvis impersonators of popular music studies - wiggling our hips as best we can, slipping a 'hey baby' or two in among the chord analyses."[1]
Those of us trained to find meaning in music by examination of its sounds may indeed feel clumsy and dowdy compared to our colleagues from cultural studies, but this does not mean that our skills and insights are irredeemably pedantic and feeble. Now that the larger field of popular music study is secure, the time seems right to consider anew what musicologists can offer, and to explore what can be gained from close readings of the grammar and vocabulary of musical expression. Allan Moore's 2003 essay collection Analyzing Popular Music asserts that "it is necessary to begin [to study music] from some conceptualization of how the music sounds" and brings together the work of ten established popular music scholars (p. 6). All of the contributors are based in university music departments, whether as musicologists, ethnomusicologists, researchers in sound media or music specialists of another stripe. The subjects examined range excitingly from discussions of REM lyrics to a typology of beats in dance music, from the function of television soundtracks to a consideration of meaning in cover versions and to a Marxist reading of hip hop song structures. This variety in and of itself demonstrates that music analysis is not synonymous with myopia.
In his introduction to the volume, Allan Moore meditates on the meaning and purpose of music analysis, pointing out that an analysis is an interpretation, subjective and flexible rather than scientific and autonomous. Coming from a scholar with Moore's expertise in notation-based exegesis of music, this should be heartening to the reader wary of graphs and charts. Moore goes on to discuss music's existence as an experience, not an object, but he also insists that to ignore sounds in our study of music is ultimately disabling: "listeners everywhere are encouraged to conceptualize the invention of music as a branch of magic, to believe that musical actions and gestures cannot be subject to any level of explanation, and hence understanding, beyond the trivially biographical" (p. 7). He does not - but I will, never fear - stoop to acknowledge that tiresome witticism concerning dancing about architecture.
The stage is set for some lively examinations of popular music and its function in social experience. And on the whole, the collection delivers on Moore's promise: the essays that follow are elegant discussions that are culturally insightful but do not shy away from the messy business of talking about music. Several of the essays tackle weighty questions of theory and methodology in popular music studies, while the others demonstrate the value of particular styles of analysis, encompassing various genres.
To begin with, Robert Walser theorizes ten rules of thumb for popular music study and proves their usefulness by examining four songs that demonstrate the wide variety of musics considered "popular." Walser warns that extolling complexity and virtuosity in popular music to prove its value may well help to elevate it to the status of classical music, but it also risks creating a canon of great works that seem detached from human experience: "instead of aestheticizing popular music, we should be historicizing all music" (p. 20). Chris Kennett argues also for a reflexive method that acknowledges the fluidity of musical meaning; the same sounds mean different things to different listeners in different contexts, and an analysis that assumes fixed meanings for music is incomplete. Adam Krims works to bring popular music studies out from the shadow of its most notorious analyst, Theodor Adorno, and his discussion of mainstream rap demonstrates the possibilities of a Marxist approach to analysis that follows neither Adorno nor the Birmingham school model of celebrating only subcultural, resistant practices. Martin Stokes' closing essay grapples with similarly momentous issues, namely the widely divergent understandings of heavily freighted terms such as "culture," "theory" and "analysis" in ethnomusicology and other disciplines of music study.
In between, Dai Griffiths rehabilitates the importance of examining lyrics in popular music, demonstrating how lyrics take on rhythmic and other kinds of sonic importance through the ways they occupy "verbal space." A similar concern with rhythm shapes Stan Hawkins' contribution; he explores the rhetorical impulses that govern house music, explaining how the experience of dancing is dictated by the DJ's skill in creating a groove. Since rhythm has long been the overlooked stepchild of music analysis, these two essays will have profound implications for the study of all genres of music (imagine, for example, what we might learn about a Mozart aria if we investigated how the words line up with or against the downbeat, and considered whether the energy of the track derives from rapid figures in the strings or the "four on the floor" tympani! ). Rob Bowman interprets the social meanings of different recordings of "Try a Little Tenderness" through close readings and careful comparisons, and Allan Moore and John Covach explore notions of the modern and postmodern in 1970s rock genres, discussing the work of art rockers Jethro Tull and new wavers the Cars respectively.
Robynn Stilwell finds troubling exoticism in the music of the massively successful series The X Files, drawing our attention to a genre of near-universal music (television soundtracks) that often passes beneath the radar of the most avid listener and critic. The Othering impulse she identifies is relevant to her position in this collection as the only female contributor; the omission of other women's voices is unfortunate in this kind of book. Feminist theory has been tremendously influential in creating a language and methodology for resisting canons formed on abstract values of "greatness," insisting on reflexivity in criticism, and ceding power to discourses positioned as marginal despite their ubiquity - in short, the very goals of popular music studies. Explicit feminist theorizing would have amplified several of the essays here, including both Rob Bowman's thoughtful discussion of Aretha Franklin's version of "Try a Little Tenderness" (what does it mean for a woman to sing this song? How can we understand this in relation to other men's songs recorded by Franklin, ranging from Otis Redding's "Respect" to Puccini's "Nessun Dorma"?) and John Covach's useful distinctions between aggressiveness and "predatory sexuality" in 70s rock and new wave introspectiveness and vulnerability, exemplified by Yes's "Awaken" and Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him" (how do these stances connect to representations of masculine identity, and to what extent are they influenced by the predominantly female singer/songwriter genre of Joni Mitchell and others?). An article exploring the possibilities of feminist analysis of popular music would have been a welcome addition to this otherwise valuable volume.
In his review of the Experience Music Project's second annual Pop Conference, The New Yorker's Alex Ross fulminates against pretentious terminology and too-specific analysis in popular music studies, quoting Ian Maxwell's concern that an inchworm's eye view of music reduces "the objects of analyses to desiccated cadavers on a slab."[2] This view of the function of music analysis appears with depressing frequency, and assumes that too great an understanding of music's logic and language kills our enjoyment of it. The best response, I have always thought, is an analogy with viewing sports events; would anyone agree that my pleasure in watching football (or basketball, hockey, golf, cricket...) is greater than that of someone who actually understands the rules and goals of the game? I may indeed take delight in beholding the grace of players, their colourful costumes, and the shapes and patterns created by their movements, but (and you'll have to trust me on this point) my enthusiasm is tepid indeed compared to that of a knowledgeable sports fan. Close analysis of sounds can, as this collection demonstrates, serve to heighten our understanding of and joy in popular music, and the field of popular music studies is richer because of the methods and tools of music scholars. Go team!
Notes
[1] Robert Fink, "Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon," in Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, ed. Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook, and Ben Saunders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 60-109: 61.
[2] Ian Maxwell, cited in Alex Ross, "Rock 101: Academia Tunes In," The New Yorker, issue of 2003-07-14 and 21.