In his introduction to Analyzing Popular Music, editor Allan F. Moore identifies two overarching problems with which the authors are concerned: 1) the “status of the musical text,” and 2) the “activity of music analysis” (5). Analysis is construed liberally in the volume with interpretation of public/private experiences of (mostly Western) popular musics. The community of analysts formulate questions of pertinence about musical experience, evaluate mediations between musical texts and social contexts, and develop methods that engage musical sound.

After reading Moore's introduction, one might skip to Martin Stokes's concluding chapter in which he evaluates institutional discourse surrounding problems of cultural and musical analysis. As he indicates, divisions between music theorists and ethnomusicologists reflect an elementary struggle between thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic to bring together close readings of musical texts with real world contexts. Central to this dialogue remains the problem of what constitutes the “primary” as opposed to “secondary” text. Likewise, methodological divisions reflect an ongoing tension between theoretical (professional) and nontheoretical (everyday) ways of knowing music. In this context, the sophisticated music theories of Richard Cohn, Douglas Dempster, and Lawrence Zbikowski provide promising ways for the fields of music ethnography and analysis to unite.Footnote ¹ Further, as Stokes suggests, Cook's trope of analysis as performance can usefully bridge these intellectual disciplines. Sara Cohen's research into two Liverpool rock bands and Stokes's study of Turkish Arabesk serve to illustrate various degrees of “cognitive dissonance,” which he uses to describe the “complex ensemble of knowledges” attending musical experience in “everyday situations” (233).Footnote ² In a stroke of critical acuity, Stokes problematizes poststructural distinctions between musical and linguistic kinds of meaning, asserting that “language about music, and indeed all ‘language,’ broadly conceived, might bear the mark of ‘musical’ experience, as Blacking's musical anthropology (1977) so forcefully asserted” (230). He concludes that everyday discourse about music, “whether making it or listening to it” (231), should be a vital aspect of any theory of music.

The framing chapters by Moore and Stokes enable readers to better appreciate why, in his contribution, Robert Walser questions what analysis is and how it should be conducted in the field of popular music studies. Like them, he encourages intellectual discourse that “blurs the lines among historical, analytical and ethnographic approaches,” claiming that “musical texts and practices are just as complex, and just as historically situated, as people are” (18–19). Echoing the concerns of Moore and Stokes, Walser introduces ten apothegms or axioms about popular music studies, covering topics such as cultural and institutional hierarchies, writing about music, aesthetic value, and music analysis. Apothegm no. 5 revisits a stance Walser commonly takes in response to the self-directed tendencies of much music theory: “Analysis is a relational activity, its success is relative to its goals, which analysts should feel obliged to make clear” (24).Footnote ³ Concise analyses of country music, heavy metal, “smooth” jazz, and rap are insightful for what they uncover about musical analysis, value judgment, interiority, and identity. Walser's commentary on Ice Cube's music leaves unexplored a potentially powerful connection with Adam Krims's materialist analysis of rap music. Moreover, the first two analyses provide a fascinating instance of “musical worlding,” and could have led Walser to negotiate a fresh dialogue with music theorist John Covach.

Stan Hawkins and Rob Bowman share Walser's view that musical meaning is discursive, intersubjective, and performative. Christopher Small's concept of “musicking”—whereby music is understood as a human activity, not as an abstract aesthetic object—is used by both authors as a tool for criticism. For example, Hawkins locates the rhetoric and affect of house music not only in the DJ's creative manipulation of technology, but also within the immediate, ritualized, often drug-induced bodily responses of clubbers to aspects of groove and beat. In the context of African American expressive culture, Aretha Franklin's and Otis Redding's performances of “Try a Little Tenderness” demonstrate Bowman's position that “Meaning rests within the act of doing, rather than within an ‘exact’ realization of some abstract notion of the set cultural object [written score] itself” (128). Although both authors are openly skeptical of analytic formalisms, Hawkins's form charts of “French Kiss” by DJ Lil' Louis are explicitly hierarchic. Likewise, Bowman's examples of improvised vocal lines cast a shadow of irony on his arguments against the objectifying and repressive effects of European (written, “frozen”) notation on oral culture.

Dai Griffith's essay proposes a lyric/anti-lyric dialectic, which serves to organize syntactic and figurative aspects of song lyrics (e.g., rhyme and non-rhyme, alliteration) either in the direction of poetry or prose. Deriving ideas from W. K. Wimsatt and others, Griffith's method effectively contests “romanticized reading of rock lyrics” (42) prevalent in popular culture by restoring to song lyric analysis what Richard Middleton refers to as the “structural specificity of the verbal and musical signifying systems.”Footnote ⁴ Yet Griffith misses an opportunity to connect with the work of Covach and Moore by showing how the lyric/anti-lyric model expresses a postmodern break from modernism in 1960s rock music and culture.

Robynn J. Stilwell's chapter explores the semiotic function of music and image in both television and film manifestations of The X-Files. She analyzes how composer Mark Snow created a unique TV scoring style combining function and aesthetics, the metaphoric effectiveness of which depends on an ever-present ambiguity between diegetic and nondiegetic worlds. In many episodes, a string of stereotyped visual-sonic signifiers associating ethnicity with exoticism and extraterrestrials lead to problematic representations of ethnic groups—what Stilwell calls “slippage between ‘others’” (74). Her approach successfully forestalls an ahistorical reading of music as autonomous, and hence fits comfortably within the poststructural boundaries of the collection.

Chris Kennett's notion of music as “personal text” locates musical meaning in the “locus-specific aspects of the aesthetic level” (206). A method termed “functional music analysis” identifies particular circumstances, usages, and competencies impinging on musical meaning as understood along a scale with absolutist, immersive, or “supercompetent” listening in dialectical relation to functional, or task-oriented, listening situations such as dancing. Based on this method, he offers fictitious personal texts of the drum ’n’ bass song “Shadowboxing” by Doc Scott as heard in a wine shop by the store manager, a bank clerk, and an army major. Aspects of the listening situation evoke different responses from each listener, and intricacies of their respective musical experiences evince useful parallels with Stokes's notion of cognitive dissonance—a meaningful connection both authors bypass.

In his chapter about Jethro Tull, Moore argues that the angst of the band's persona suggests not so much a manner of postmodern relativism as modernist eclecticism. Aqualung (1971) epitomizes this mannerism, wherein themes of alienation, cynicism, loss of control, and historical consciousness find voice in a transient surface style set against a relatively consistent musical idiom (idiolect) drawing on folk and rock traditions. Within the same general historical window, Covach contends that new wave's “return-to-simplicity aesthetic,” as heard in music by Elvis Costello and The Cars, expresses a self-consciously ironic postmodern response to modernist tendencies of 1970s “corporate” rock such as Foreigner, with their stylistic links to 1960s–70s hippie rock music and culture. Even though Covach's concept of musical worlding has critical value, it does not deter him from habits of structural listening.Footnote ⁵ For instance, harmonic reductions still attribute (abstract) priority to pitch structures, and his analyses tend to downplay aspects of medium and performance.Footnote ⁶ I can imagine how Covach and Moore might have developed their style analyses to model more directly David Harvey's dissolution of the “categories of both modernism and postmodernism into a complex of oppositions expressive of the cultural contradictions of capitalism.”Footnote ⁷

Adam Krims achieves this measure of theoretical modeling in his “non-Adornan” Marxist critique of the genre system of rap. He argues that the advent of flexible accumulation in the age of post-Fordism has led to a historical situation Adorno could not have anticipated: (1) diversification in the realm of expressive culture while simultaneously (2) increasing economic and spatial segregation due to concentration of wealth, power, and authority in the hands of fewer social groups (140). Krims shows how these and other related changes (e.g., mode of production) impacted the economic terrain and cultural “ethos” of American cities, emphasizing the devastating effects these changes had on inner-city underclasses during the 1980s and 1990s. He historicizes music-poetic shifts between “reality” and “knowledge” rap in relation to popular music and culture, using a technique termed “telescoping” to connect musical and social processes to the larger system of late capitalism.Footnote ⁸

Analyzing Popular Music stands alongside Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic because the authors in both collections express similar ideological motivations and address the challenge of close reading of musical texts.Footnote ⁹ Throughout this review, I have suggested that the contributors of Analyzing Popular Music hardly attempt to directly engage each other's ideas. I am left with the impression that concepts such as “musical worlding,” “personal text,” “telescoping,” and “cognitive dissonance” hold critical value only for the author from whom the concept originates. Indeed, the lack of theoretical discussion among them does more to re-center than to de-center each writer's authorial voice in a series of differentiated exegeses of popular music. If all scholarship is dialogic, then to say that this concern is beyond the context of the book does not explain the virtual absence of any such dialogue. Moore's “divergence of practices” embraces scholastic pluralism but falls short of realizing how a theoretical discussion might have been achieved among this group of writers. That said, my account here does not diminish the fact that each author consciously contextualizes the analysis of (inter)personal musical experience within the rich tradition of postmodern cultural theory and criticism. Indeed, the collection as a whole openly demonstrates the performativity of theory and the irreducible polysemy of music. By doing so, the book accomplishes Moore's overarching intentions.