The utility of musicological analysis has long been a contested issue in popular music studies. Some scholars – often operating within a strictly sociological framework – do not find the tools of musicology to be generally useful in furthering our understanding of popular music. Others argue that the employment of musicological theory is necessary in order to engage directly with the sonic material that constitutes the actual subject matter of our study. For the editors of this essay collection, affirming the importance of musicological analysis is but a preliminary answer that leads to the more pertinent question: what sort of analysis? As they assert in the Introduction, ‘there cannot be just one universal method of analysis […] every subject and every issue demands a different set of tools’ (p. 2). Thus, while every chapter in this volume is rooted in musicology, the individual authors' understanding of what constitutes a musicological analysis differs widely, ranging from traditional Schenkerian discussions of tonality to innovative dissections of digital waveforms, micro-rhythms and contemporary production techniques. In addition, the essays maintain a constant dialogue with a variety of disciplines – linguistics, literature, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, and more – utilising them in order to ‘show that musicological analysis is not necessarily an aim in itself, but a toolbox that can be used to address many different issues of broader relevance’ (p. 2).
The origins of this book – a two-day workshop, an annual conference of the German ASPM and a five-day international summer school – are integrated into its structure, as it is split into two parts: the first consists of essays by the organisers of the aforementioned events and the keynote speakers, while the second is dedicated to collaborative efforts by the participants of the summer school. The unifying theme that ties the volume together is that each chapter is dedicated to the analysis of a single song from the last 15 years, covering most of the currently popular genres in the Western world: mainstream pop, R&B, EDM, indie rock and hard rock (hip-hop is conspicuously missing). The choice to focus on individual songs is a welcome approach, as it prevents the authors from making grand and generalised claims about ‘music’, compelling them instead to pay close attention to each and every element of a single recording and locate the most productive theoretical tools for making sense of these elements.
As Simon Zagorski-Thomas notes in his analysis of Kings of Leon's ‘Sex on Fire’, ‘[t]he conventional tools of musicology are geared towards analysing melody, harmony and form’, yet these are often the least interesting or developed aspects of contemporary popular music (pp. 115–16). Therefore, some of the more thought-provoking essays in this volume are the ones where the interpretation goes hand in hand with the introduction of ingenious theoretical approaches. Zagorski-Thomas's chapter gives precedence to the features that characterise ‘Sex on Fire’ as a recording. Taking his cues from ecological perception and embodied cognition theory, Zagorski-Thomas demonstrates how subtle details and transformations in the track's production work to ‘suggest different levels of togetherness, different forms of activity and even different types of environment’ (p. 130), and are thus poised to play an influential role in our experience and interpretation of ‘Sex on Fire’.
Ralf von Appen's meticulous diagnosis of Ke$ha's ‘Tik Tok’ offers another fascinating look at contemporary production techniques, as he painstakingly details the vast array of production choices and nuances employed throughout an allegedly formulaic dance-pop hit that might sound quite simple and unrefined to the casual listener. However, Appen's choice to structure the chapter as a fictional dialogue between Ke$ha and her producer, Dr Luke, is questionable, as it mainly serves to reproduce the sexist trope of a calculated, musically proficient male producer who is the real brain behind a clueless and shallow female performer.
A stress on the medium specificity of recorded songs also appears in Dietrich Helm's study of Lady Gaga's ‘Poker Face’. Rather than turning to cutting-edge approaches, Helms utilises Roman Jakobson's classic ‘six functions of language’ model in order to dissect the recording as a communicative act. Though Jakobson's brand of structuralism might be considered outmoded in many literary and linguistic circles nowadays, Helms deftly applies it as a framework for a detailed discussion of the many facets of ‘Poker Face’, arguing for the dominance of the phatic function – the one that opens and maintains the actual line of communication – in mainstream pop.
Anne Danielsen's theoretically dense yet rewarding examination of the groove in Destiny's Child's ‘Nasty Girl’ approaches rhythm as an interaction between ‘virtual reference structures’ and actual sounds. By foregrounding the track's rhythmic ambiguities, Danielsen establishes the necessity of considering the temporal character of the groove: ‘every new rhythmic gesture’, she claims, ‘gets its meaning from what immediately preceded it, but it is also affected by the larger cultural and historical context’ (p. 69). Danielsen's theory is put to interesting use by Arns et al. in their interpretation of Janelle Monáe's ‘Tightrope’, as the authors incorporate the song's video into their analysis by relating the dance moves performed by the video's participants to the virtual reference structure that the chapter identifies (p. 203).
Arns et al.'s study is but one example of the fertile and dialogic nature that results from the book's conference/summer school roots. Yet certain chapters also reveal limitations that might be an unfortunate side effect of the volume's origins. Some of the ‘keynote’ essays lack serious engagement with prior scholarship, while the reflexive musings on group work that appear in the collaborative chapters tend to repeat themselves. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, this essay collection not only makes a convincing case for the relevance of musicological analysis in the study of popular music, but also provides us with an impressive demonstration of the myriad ways by which it can be done.
