Analyzing Popular Music
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
This page intentionally left blank Analyzing Popular Music Howdowe ‘know’ music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The book presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the ‘social’ consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualization in this way. allanf.mooreis Professor of Popular Music and Head of the Department of Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey. He is author of Rock: The Primary Text and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel Music. He is also co-editor of the journals Popular Music and Twentieth- Century Music. Analyzing Popular Music edited by allan f. moore Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521771207 © Cambridge University Press 2003 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2003 isbn-13- 978-0-511-06669-6 eBook (NetLibrary) isbn-10- 0-511-06669-4 eBook (NetLibrary) isbn-13- 978-0-521-77120-7 hardback isbn-10- 0-521-77120-X hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Contents Acknowledgement[vi] Contributors[vii] 1Introduction[1] AllanF.Moore 2Popularmusicanalysis:tenapothegmsandfourinstances[16] Robert Walser 3Fromlyrictoanti-lyric:analyzingthewordsinpopsong[39] Dai Griffiths 4 The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in TheX-Files[60] Robynn J. Stilwell 5Feelthebeatcomedown:housemusicasrhetoric[80] Stan Hawkins 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: thecaseof‘TryaLittleTenderness’[103] Rob Bowman 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography[131] Adam Krims 8JethroTullandthecaseformodernisminmassculture[158] AllanF.Moore 9Pangsofhistoryinlate1970snew-waverock[173] John Covach 10Isanybodylistening?[196] Chris Kennett 11Talkandtext:popularmusicandethnomusicology[218] Martin Stokes Bibliography[240] Discography[258] Film/Videography[260] Index[261] v Acknowledgement Permission to quote the REM song ‘Nightswimming’ is gratefully acknowl- edged from Warner-Chappell. vi Contributors ALLAN F. MOORE is Professor of Popular Music and Head of the Department of Music and Sound Recording at the University of Surrey. Author of Rock: The Primary Text (2nd edn 2001) and The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1997), he has published articles on Yes, U2, Big Country, the Beatles, Frank Zappa, rock music theory and musical modernism and has contributed extensively to the revised New Grove. He is a joint editor of Popular Music and is on the editorial board of Popular Musicology. ROB BOWMAN is the author of Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records which won the 1998 ASCAP-Deems-Taylor and ARSC Awards for Excellence in Music Research. In 1996 he won the Grammy in the ‘Best Album Notes’ category for the monograph accompanying the ten-CD box The Complete Stax/Volt Singles vol. 3, which he also co-produced. In the past ten years he has compiled and written liner notes for more than 100 CD reissues. He is Associate Professor of Music at York University, Toronto. JOHN COVACH is Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Co-editor of Understanding Rock (1997), he has also edited special issues of Contemporary Music Review and has written widely, particularly on Progressive Rock and on the philosophy of music. DAI GRIFFITHS is Principal Lecturer in Music at Oxford Brookes University. He has published articles on songs by John Cale, Bob Dylan, Michelle Shocked, Bruce Springsteen and Anton Webern. Other recent papers have included book chapters on cover versions and on the history of pop music since punk. STAN HAWKINS is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Department of Music and Theatre, University of Oslo, where he teaches courses in popular music. In addition to his book, Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity (2002) he has published numerous articles and chapters in vii contributors the field of popular music studies. He is currently chief editor of Popular Musicology Online and the Norwegian chair for the Nordic Branch of IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music). CHRIS KENNETT includes among his research interests pop music sociology, the cognition, perception and analysis of music in retail environments, and film music theory, in addition to his long-held interest in pitch-class set theory. He has taught at the Universities of Bristol, Reading, Nottingham, Exeter, Thames Valley and at Goldsmith’s College, and is currently Researcher in Sound Media at the University of Westminster. He writes for journals including Music Analysis, Popular Music and Computer Music Journal. ADAM KRIMS is Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Alberta. Author of Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000) and editor of Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic (1998), he has published numerous essays and articles on music, Marxism, urban geography and cultural theory. ROBYNN J. STILWELL is Assistant Professor of Music at Georgetown University. Her main research interests lie in music as cultural text and in the interaction of music and movement. She has published on topics as diverse as Phil Collins, Die Hard and Torvill and Dean, and has recently edited a special issue of Popular Music and Society dealing with popular music and national and ethnic identities in the wake of recent political change. She is currently working on a book, Recontextualizing Music: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film. MARTIN STOKES is the author of The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (1992), the editor of Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (1994), co-editor of Nationalism, Minorities and Diasporas: Identities and Rights in the Middle East (1996) and of a special issue of the journal Popular Music on the Middle East (1996). He has published articles in Popular Music, New Formations, The British Journal of Ethnomusicology, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Middle East Report, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and elsewhere. Currently he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago. viii contributors ROBERT WALSER is Professor and Chair of the Musicology Department in the University of California at Los Angeles. He is the author of Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (1993), which won the Irving Lowens Award for distinguished scholarship in American music, and Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (1999). A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Whiting Foundation Fellowships, he is co-editor of the Music/Culture series at Wesleyan University Press, and former editor of American Music. ix 1 Introduction allan f. moore How do we ‘know’ music? Although music has a variety of distinct audiences, one way of approaching a universally applicable response is by looking at the activities we undertake in its presence. Most widespread, of course, is listening. We may listen for pleasure, for identification, as an ac- companiment to other activities (dancing, cooking), distractedly (as when watching a film) and in many other ways. In pre-modern societies, listening without any more active form of participation was rare indeed, whether that activity focused on performing itself, on some form of dance, or even on banter with the musicians: some would argue that in modern society too, the musical experience is impoverished without such participation. Many of us are either fortunate or wilful enough to insist on performing, and even composing. All of these activities may be defined as ways of ‘knowing’ music, even if that knowledge is not communicated verbally. We do, however, find verbal communication about music a seductive activity: the scholar Nicholas Cook even argues that words are indispensable in the process of our creat- ing for ourselves meaning out of the music we listen to (Cook 1998a: 270). Verbal communication is certainly necessary for the remaining activity we undertake in respect of music – its study, the process of knowing it ‘better’. Twenty years ago, it was difficult to find any institution where popu- lar music (as a field distinct from ‘classical’ or ‘non-Western’ musics or jazz) could be found being taught to prospective musicians at undergraduate level. It simply did not appear