Scholars of pop music often inhabit the worlds of both academic research and popular media. This is due not only to a surplus of market demand, but also to the necessity of community engagement in relatively young, grassroots genres like rap. A constructive dilemma thus confronts every researcher in the field: how to combine the rigor and innovation of academia with the immediacy and concision of mass media. Adam Bradley's book adroitly bridges this divide with its tone, intelligible terminology and constellations of familiar reference points. It all comes smoothly packaged inside an ambitious memoir-cum-conversation format that delivers on such potential by being not only sharply incisive, but also deeply engaging.

The Poetry of Pop is much more than an extension of earlier work done on the poetry of rap by its author, whose disciplinary home is the English Department. This new work is Bradley's attempt to avoid essentialising mass media's lingua franca by taking account of all of the tensions that surround a pop song's constituent elements of poetry, music and performance. For example, do transcribed song lyrics constitute poetry? Bradley's new title answers such questions by interweaving perspectives from musicology, literary criticism, neurology and psychology into unifying conclusions about why pop music, broadly defined, is so compelling to so many. As Bradley writes in the book's introduction (p. 22): ‘The Poetry of Pop offers something different. The end of analysis isn't enshrining pop lyrics in the Western poetic canon, but, rather, figuring out what makes them work structurally and sonically, what makes them beautiful, and what makes them move us so’.

Music scholars have long recognised the need for this kind of interpenetrating project. As Bohlman (Reference Bohlman1993, p. 430) succinctly states, ‘Rap music avoids essentializing as “music”’, and that implicit aim is what Bradley accomplishes not only for rap, but also for all pop genres, including folk, blues, country and R ‘n’ B. He addresses the interests of poets, musicians and songwriters by declining to ignore or undercut the supposed contradictions found in pop music's multiple forms of representation, whether lyrics, recordings or notation. Instead, to paraphrase Bradley, he chooses to generate heat through their friction. For example, Bradley's answer to the lyrics-or-poetry debate would be refreshingly straightforward: sometimes song lyrics are music, and sometimes they're poetry. Consequently, this book's inquiries often begin at a more progressive stage: what happens to melody and poetic metre when a lyric's musico-textual elements are refracted through the lens of recorded performance?

References to the works of Daniel Levitin, Steven Pinker and Oliver Sacks ground the author's forays into new territory, alongside reference to musicologists like Caroline Abbate, Simon Frith and Albin Zak III. One of the resultant advantages is this book's verification of knowledge that musicians have informally hypothesised. For example, musicians like Elvis Costello (p. 153) have at times asserted that the semantic content of some of their songs’ lyrics is evaluated by the listener only after the more immediate impact of their lyrics’ emotional content has been attended to. Bradley (pp. 51–2) goes on to ground this assertion in neurological conclusions that lyrics’ connotative meanings (rather than denotative meanings) are processed in the primitive limbic system of the brain's right hemisphere. Bradley thus provides a context for the views of the very people whose work is the main subject of music scholarship: musicians.

Another aspect illustrative of Bradley's larger project is his description of the separate roles that musical rhythm, lyrical rhythm and performative rhythm play in the ultimate realisation of a pop song. Using the norms of each medium as an ideal model that every song seeks (and fails) to attain, this trifold framework is used to explore how recorded songs are the sum of shifting compromises between all three art forms. An emphasis on lyrics over melody (Bob Dylan) or of melody over lyrics (Black Eyed Peas) can then be used to compare and contrast pop artists and their subgenres more constructively. As pop culture scholarship continues to develop the requisite tools necessary for successful analysis, The Poetry of Pop admirably transcends any single field's own privileged viewpoint or methodology. Or, as Elvis Costello might put it (Reference Costello2016, p. 294): ‘You don't really need musical notation for rock and roll. I always said it was all hand signals and threats’.

Costello's tangential reference to methodology is possibly part of the one small nit that might be picked here. Specifically, if musical notation is not enough for pop music analysis, than what should take its place? While an incisive discussion on the differing treatment of tonal centres in rapped vocalisations and sung vocalisations takes place on pp. 198–9, the reader is left wishing that Bradley had gone into a level of detail that's beyond the naming of a shared E–F pitch centre (at p. 198) on Lil Wayne's 2008 song ‘A Milli’. However, this emphasis on theory and practice over specific technique probably results from nothing more sinister than the delightfully large ambition of this tome, one whose own poetic methodologies have been more fully diagrammed in the author's Reference Bradley2009 Book of Rhymes. For this reason, The Poetry of Pop is notable not only for its own direct impact, but also for the clear-cut directions to future findings that it should supply to a successive generation of pop scholars.

Readings of Bradley will be most fruitful when he is positioned as a universal translator of capital-P Pop, in the tradition of a Jeff Chang or Amir ‘?uestlove’ Thompson, and not strictly as a knowledgeable explicator of its most visible musical forms. Since pop's natural fluency with cultural milieux of all kinds is likely to dominate our modes of cultural expression for years to come, its scholarship should speak directly to both consumers and scholars by reflecting pop itself: the accessibility, the immediacy and the viral incision. By achieving this delicate balance, The Poetry of Pop will be required reading for anyone who would like to understand pop as pop per se.