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Reviewed by:
  • Analyzing Popular Music
  • David Beard
Analyzing Popular Music. Ed. by Allan F. Moore. pp. ix +270. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003, £47.50. ISBN 0-521-77120-X.)

Framed by two polemical chapters that attempt to map new paths for popular music analysis, Analyzing Popular Music, edited by Allan F. Moore, represents an invaluable summary of recent developments in the discipline. Palpably, an interest in the experience of listening and performing has increasingly shifted the focus of popular music analysis onto the multiple, relational meanings that are constructed 'out there' in cultural and popular discourse. In Moore's words, it is 'the experience which is subject to interpretation' (p. 6). Less a response to recent developments in musicology and more an absorption of ethnographic and cultural studies, this shift is tangible throughout the book (for a useful summary of issues associated with these changes see Philip V. Bohlman, 'Ontologies of Music', in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford, 1999), 17-34). Hence, in the opening chapter, 'Popular Music Analysis: Ten Apothegms and Four Instances', Robert Walser argues that analysis is about people, not structure, 'because people make and perceive structures' (p. 38); the most successful popular music analysis, he reasons, 'blurs the lines among historical, analytical and ethnographic approaches arguing, in effect, that musical texts and practices are just as complex, and just as historically situated, as people are' (pp. 18-19).

While relational approaches epitomize many of the book's chapters they are deployed in contrasting ways, some apparently upholding the semantic importance of patterns that inhere in the music as text, others subverting such an idea, instead positioning the analytical text entirely in the realm of the perceiver. In general, examples from the two ends of this spectrum are the most problematic. The former tendency is well illustrated by Stan Hawkins's essay, 'Feel the Beat Come Down: House Music as Rhetoric', which represents a rare example of an attempt to analyse the sound of electronic dance music, in order to determine the function of its internal mechanisms. We are shown how the apparent regularity of the beat is in fact continually undermined by a more fluid state formed from layers of different cellular groove patterns (CGPs). Rhythmic, timbral, and textural variety is clearly illustrated by a graphic sonogram that reveals gaps and irregularities in the intricate rhythmic patterns (Ex. 5.1, p. 93). However, the suggestion that these elements are moulded 'into an organic unity' (p. 95) rests uncomfortably (unnecessarily, even) with the idea of a beat that is never stable and repetition that is 'oppositional' as a result of 'the relationships between gradations of linear and vertical principles of rhythmic development' (p. 97).

Similar inconsistencies appear when Hawkins attempts to relate these details to an aesthetic context: 'Almost as if depersonalized in its aesthetic intention, the sublime effect of the beat is to mechanize the dancer into a collective entity which often involves the reconstruction of identities through carnivalesque display' (p. 98). While the concept of the beat mechanizing dancers into a depersonalized, collective identity implies a loss of a sense of self (later Hawkins refers to complete immersion in the beat, blissful escapism, and becoming 'one' with the music), the comment about reconstruction of identities brings subjectivity back into the frame, and the idea of carnivalesque display implies a collective body comprising altered individuals. Moreover, the concept of a mechanized response is problematic. Is the implication really that people dancing in a club completely 'lose themselves', that the bodily senses of heat, sweat, pain, and joy do not also reaffirm a sense of self? Hawkins's comments about raves being safer places for women, owing to the de-libidinizing effects of Ecstasy, are particular to an outdated, idealized form of house music clubbing experience, and it is noticeable that his discourse draws extensively on a writer who champions this idea, Simon Reynolds, ignoring for example Maria Pini, who has written about the realities of clubbing for women (see her Club Cultures and Female Subjectivity: The Move from Home to House (Basingstoke and New York, 2001)). The idea that house, or any other form of dance music, might be involved in...

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