In 1997 John Covach and Graham Boone published a collection of articles, most of which were analyses of rock'n'roll ‘classics’ (Covach and Boone Reference Covach and Boone1997). In these analyses, popular recordings were examined using methods normally applied to classical music, including descriptions of the tonal language, use of Schenker's theory of compositional analysis, and formal analysis of parts of the ‘composition’. The reactions that followed the publication of this work were as interesting as the results. Graeme Boone, author of the analysis of Dark Star by the Grateful Dead, made the group aware of his work. Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir were content to make some further remarks about the tonality of the piece, but Tom Constanten ignored the result, preferring to criticise the method: ‘The paper sounds like a weather report in French, delivered perfectly by someone who doesn't speak a word of the language. While the points made are all true, the spirit of the paper has nothing to do with the spirit in which the music was made’ (Covach and Boone Reference Covach and Boone1997, p. 205). In a more academically inclined review, Robert Walser was even more severe. He described Understanding Rock as: ‘a disappointing retreat from the state of the art in musicological study of popular music into an intellectually isolated formalism’ and the various authors as having worked ‘the new terrain with old tools’ (Walser Reference Walser2000).

Thirteen years later, John Covach, this time working with Mark Spicer, again published a collection of nine analyses of different rock and pop classics, and they appeared to take little notice of the critiques levelled by Constanten or Walser. But should they have? Is it really true that popular music can't be analysed using the ‘old tools’ of musicology? Is it really a methodological error to use traditional methods of musical analysis to analyse music that comes from a different time period from that of classical music, or from a different culture? Is it the case that methods that have been proven to be useful in analysing certain repertoires are unable to be adapted for the purposes of analysis of other repertoires? I don't think so. I take this position because the language and the grammar of the music analysed in Understanding Rock and Sounding Out Pop display many points of parallelism in relation to ‘classical’ music. We find similar chord sequences, rhythms, melodies, modal scales, etc., and types of formal construction that can be described using a common vocabulary, which is a kind of lingua franca of musical composition. This terminology is not universally shared, and it is only appropriate for some parts of popular music – although it is without question applicable to the pieces of music mentioned above. And despite the apparent dryness of traditional methods, their methodological shortcomings and their lack of rock'n'roll ‘spirit’, their use is still justified because they produce results.

In this new book, John Covach demonstrates the role played by the form AABA in a number of successful songs written by Leiber and Stoller; Albin Zak analyses the melodic structure of Only the Lonely and shows that ‘Orbison employs such techniques as dropped or added beats, shifting harmonic rhythm, and elision in ways that dilute strophic repetition and contribute to the development of the miniature dramas that so often unfold in his recordings’ (p. 22); James Grier takes an interest in the artistic interaction between Bob Dylan and Roger McGuinn, showing the differences in harmonic, metrical and melodic arrangement in quite essential songs like Mr. Tambourine Man, All I Really Want to Do or Lay Lady Lay, which in the Byrds' version uses a strange female choir in a way that anticipates other uses of the same technique. Andrew Flory writes about the way Marvin Gaye composed his vocal melodies and describes his ability to blur the boundaries between performing, recording and composing. One may nonetheless ask oneself if the particularly ‘groovy’ aspects of his music are not dependent on certain very delicate vocal tricks, such as those described by Anne Danielsen (Reference Danielsen2006) in the case of James Brown. The article by Kevin Holm-Hudson – undoubtedly one of the best in terms of analysing rock music with methods that were developed in connection with the music of another era – takes its inspiration from neo-Riemannian analysis of late Romantic music in order to explain the chromatic voice leading used by keyboardist Tony Banks on most of Genesis' albums. In another article, Mark Spicer takes a look at the musical style of The Police, describing in a very closely argued manner how their stylistic eclecticism, which is often simply described as ‘reggae-influenced pop/rock’, really works. In this effort, he uses the ‘Universe of Topic’ method used by Kofi Agawu in order to map out the music of Viennese classicism, showing that the method is perfectly capable of being applied to music from a different time period. Rebecca Leydon uses a quite similar approach to the idea of style in examining Golem II, the Bionic Vapor Boy by Mr Bungle, and she connects it in a very entertaining (if not always convincing) manner with the digital aesthetics of sampling (Chapter 8).

I was anxious to read the chapter devoted to Radiohead's Kid A which, despite numerous recent studies about this ‘eerily comforting blend of rock riffs, jazz chords, classical textures, and electronic devices’ (p. 218), appeared to be less amenable than other works to traditional analysis. Marianne Tattom Letts shows that processes of construction and destruction of meaning interact, appearing to contradict each other continually. She examines the tonal arrangement of the recording and its formal arrangement, its metrical aspects; the ‘groove’ is a group of parameters that all confirm the original hypothesis. But as regards Kid A – and this is also the case for all the works analysed in this book – we still are lacking a means of analysing the strange sounds that are for many listeners the essential unique aspect of a repertoire. In every case, we remain frozen because of a vocabulary that works by means of analogy. While for every one a marked rhythm, a ground, a dominant chord can be reproduced, it remains very difficult to make a mental image for oneself of a New Age-style filtered guitar sound (p. 235) or the sound of a booming electric bass guitar (p. 44).

All these analyses allow us to display the objective elements that explain the originality or novelty of a work, while stopping short of affirming in an implicit manner its autonomy. One of the qualities of the analyses in the book is that they all take care to contextualise the works and/or to present them as tests of a more general theory. The authors prove, at any rate, that the ‘old tools’ are sometimes still quite handy for describing popular music, and that this musicological discourse is still both valid and fruitful.