On Popular Music and its Unruly Entanglements ‘aims to capture something of the way in which popular music weaves into our society, culture, and lives’ (p. 2). Containing 11 contributions (not including introduction and afterword) on subjects as divergent as amateur Ukulele bands in Aotearoa/New Zealand, relationships between Jimi Hendrix and Wagner, and spectogram analysis of semiotic audiovisual relationships in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1992), this volume is decidedly eclectic. Eclecticism is favoured in order to ‘foster increased engagement between different specialized approaches, thus countering a potential fragmentation of the field’ (p. 4). Popular Music and its Unruly Entanglements offers a way for popular music scholars to feel out some of the many branches of the field through its many timely and novel analyses of a wide range of subjects. There are approaches ranging from more traditional semiotic analysis, over ethnographic fieldwork, to cognitive psychology, and discourse analysis. Despite the wide array of subjects, theoretical considerations and methodologies resonate across different essays, which attest to minor similarities despite the disparity in subject matter across the volume.

The anthology opens with an equal measure of call to arms and provocation from Kyle Devine. He calls for a ‘musicology without music’, which might be summarised as a move away from ‘decoding musical texts as objects […] [or] from analyzing what a piece of music might represent and mean’ and towards ‘observing musical practices in action […] and understanding what music makes possible’ (p. 19). He argues that ‘conventional textual readings only scratch the surface of what is possible in musicology’ (p. 33). In changing focus from ‘musical text’ to the ontics of vinyl production, ‘the seemingly straightforward contact between a shellac and sedimentary groove, a steel needle, and a silicate diaphragm is an interface at the surface of global-historical infrastructures of forestry and quarrying and mining, of war and empire, gender and labor, international standards and shipping lanes and much more’ are made evident (ibid.). All of this, Devine argues, is encountered in consumption of vinyl, and ‘[f]or these reasons, conventional textual readings only scratch the surface of what is possible in musicology’ (ibid.). Yet, while Devine's chapter amplifies ‘some of the distinctly unhappy conditions that we encounter in recorded music's surface textures’, which is sorely needed in the study of popular music, his eagerness to expand the analytical capabilities of musicology runs the risk of simply leaving the discipline behind, despite him claiming the opposite (ibid.). Thus, the entirety of his theoretical aggregate is appropriated from media and communication studies. It would have been enthralling to witness a longer, unfolding analytical framework that could encompass both the ‘traditional’ approach as well Devine's ‘mediatic musicology’. After all, in order to get to the depth of things, one has to ‘scratch the surface’ first (ibid.).

Despite the quality of the individual chapters, the function and audience of the anthology is difficult to discern. The entries in themselves are too narrow in scope to serve as an introduction to popular music studies, yet the degree of variety between the chapters is far too large to offer a cohesive argument about popular music and the ways it entangles with all aspects of our lives. At most, On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements as a volume pays testament to the fact that popular music is polyvalent, plural and viral in its penetration of various public and private spheres. I doubt that any popular music scholar was not already aware of that. As such, it feels like collection of essays haphazardly put together when it would have been more beneficial either to divide the essays into several different anthologies or to double or triple the length and reimagine the volume as the popular music studies version of Martin Clayton, Richard Middleton and Trevor Herbert's (eds.) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2012).

In a similar vein, the eclecticism makes it difficult to recommend the volume to any particular strain of popular music scholar. Precisely because the scope and range of subjects are so wide but the individual scopes so narrow, there is no particular field of research that would have increased interest in this volume. Most if not all entries deliver compelling and rigorous arguments, but it is hard to imagine a situation where reading more than one or two essays would be relevant, simply because the range of treated subjects is too wide and yet the individual entries too narrow.

The first and second sections, ‘Broad Strokes’ and ‘Second Takes’ are by far the most eclectic sections, and the thematic line between these sections can, at times, be hard to identify. Devine's investigation of the politics of vinyl production makes way for Alexander Harden's analysis of narrativity in popular song. Harden's approach is conventional, but offers intriguing insights, particularly that ‘we arguably are more likely to construct narratives [from poplar music] in which the characters do not sing, nor rhyme, to communicate […] [and] this process of accommodation illustrates the potential to examine the ontological status of the persona and other aspects of recorded popular music and the construction of belief’ (p. 53). Also of note is that ‘narratives is by no means a persistent, “objective” property but rather an emergent phenomenon involving the agency of both the text and listener’ (p. 54). Matthew Bannister then presents an enlightening ethnographic study of amateur ukulele orchestras and the critical potential of analysing amateur music scenes. Nick Braae's excavation of linearity in popular song suggests that even in so-called ‘groove based’ styles, linearity is present in parameters such as vocal pitch and style, groove, arrangement and lyrical content. The trauma of war in Bruce Springsteen and the way music can ameliorate such trauma is in focus in Susanna Välimäki's chapter, but one struggles to find novelty in her readings of Springsteen's music. That his music – and not just the lyrics – can be said to engage in conversations on trauma is hardly a surprise. Pulling on Friedrich Kittler, Erik Steinskog theorises sound as a material thing and demonstrates how such thingness can be found in both Hendrix and Wagner, arguing that ‘Wagner invents […] an artistic machine capable of reproducing sensuous data as such’ and that he thus creates ‘the first mass-medium in the modern sense of the word’ (p. 138). The real challenge here is the refreshingly nonchalant implicit claim that Wagner constitutes popular music. If such a claim is accepted then the field of popular music studies expands exponentially. Andrei Sora uses Alan Moore's conception of persona (cf. Moore Reference Moore2012) to theorise personas in instrumental synthwave music. Framing individual synth voices as ‘protagonists’, Sora cleverly shows the way in which non-vocal sounds constitute certain personalities. Yet, this reviewer is still unsure what exactly grants lead synths the ability to take on personaic traits. As the final entry in these two sections, Steven Gamble bravely tackles the impossibility of theorising an individual listening subject and the way music engenders emotions in listeners.

In comparison, the third part, ‘Audiovisual Entanglements’, puzzles me. Contrary to the extreme diversity in subject matter in the two prior sections, ‘Audiovisual Entanglements’ offers a much more narrow approach: semiotic analyses of audiovisual texts. Brøvig-Hanssen offers timely and highly useful models for understanding both virality and humour in audiovisual remixes and mashups based equally in humour discourse and audiovisual studies. Megan Lavengood proposes the use of spectograms in order to analyse timbre and argues that timbre is as important as instrumentation in the determination of musical genre. Finally, Kai Arne Hansen explores audiovisual framings of violence and identity politics in the music videos of The Weeknd. It seems odd that audiovisuality of all subjects was deemed to be deserving of its own section over any other issue. Why not a section on, say, archival work, liveness, affect theory, K-pop or contemporary studio production? When aiming for eclecticism, having an entire section on one particular field of inquiry seems odd – and this is coming from a reviewer whose primary academic interest is audiovisuality.

Closing the collection is an afterword by Alan Moore which attempts to forge links between the preceding chapters. The attempt, however, only delivers a modicum of success in that the relationships are primarily framed as either treating music and sound as ‘narration’ or as a ‘quiddity’ (p. 258). Furthermore, a unifying link is identified in that ‘the perspective offered by all these analyses is, necessarily, personal (p. 260). Such loose connections hardly constitute thematic cohesion.

These shortcomings notwithstanding, Popular Music and its Unruly Entanglements offers novel approaches and profound understanding to the multifaceted ways one can study popular music. The scholarship is rigourous and the execution of the individual entries are concise and well done.