Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis (review)

Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis. Edited by John Covach and Graeme M. Boone. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. [xiii, 219 p. ISBN 0-19-510004-2 (cloth); 0-19-510005-0 (pbk.). $45 (cloth); $19.95 (pbk.).]

The most recent conference program of the Musicological Society of Australia included a paper with the tart title "Exposing the Structure of a Work of Art and Accounting for Its Impact Are Not the Same Thing." That declaration could serve just as well as the motto of this review, for Understanding Rock is a disappointing retreat from the state of the art in musicological study of popular music into an intellectually isolated formalism. The study of rock-era popular music is and always has been dominated by writers who concentrate on lyrics, mediation, industry, technology, subcultures, videos--everything but the music--and music scholars who work on popular music have long had to argue that analysis of musical practices and details is crucial. In the eighties and nineties, the work of Philip Tagg, Charles Keil, Richard Middleton, David Brackett, Christopher Small, Barry Shank, Susan McClary, Allan Moore, Sheila Whiteley, Stan Hawkins, myself, and others demonstrated how nonformalist music analysis can illuminate the workings and meanings of popular music. The significance of all of this work seems largely to have escaped John Covach, Graeme M. Boone, and their contributors, for they repeat the basic argument about the importance of analysis as though it were new, and they do almost nothing that could be counted as building upon this previous scholarship. These essays are not aimed at musicians or fans, certainly, since their discourse is unapologetically academic. But it is clear that their authors also are not trying to engage previous analysts of rock music or the larger interdisciplinary community of popular-music studies--people from musicology, sociology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, history, American studies, and communications who have for decades been studying popular music and debating its significance--for the work of such scholars and the concerns they address go largely unmentioned.

Why, then, were these essays written? The editors tell us that they analyze rock because "we like it," a vaguely defiant gesture that some of the other contributors echo. It is easy to understand this impulse, given the marginalization of popular-music studies within the academy until quite recently. There must be more to it than that, though, or popular-music analysts would be merely heavily armed fans defending their individual tastes, brandishing roman numerals and Schenker graphs in place of lighters and devil signs. In fact, many of the contributors to this volume share an intellectual trajectory: as they have turned their attention from serialism to rock, they have worked the new terrain with their old tools --something that anthropologists and comparative musicologists learned not to do nearly a century ago. Judging from the essays themselves, these authors hope to confirm the transhistorical and transcultural utility of certain methods of analysis by colonizing new repertories with them, and they seek to prove the worthiness of rock music by locating within at least some of it a number of already prestigious traits, such as organic unity, formal complexity, and resemblance to European classical music. The main purpose of this volume thus appears to be the reciprocal legitimation of rock music and modernist analytical techniques.

This conjunction of interests creates certain awkwardnesses. Walter Everett begins by condescending to his subject, Paul Simon, crediting him with enough "innovative," "sophisticated" "complexities" to warrant analysis, but nevertheless calling him "naïve," "technically innocent," and "untrained." Daniel Harrison does the same thing to the Beach Boys; true, they had a "vocally untrained lead singer," but he points proudly to their "structural complexity" and "classically correct" voice leading. Covach is principally concerned with showing that a song by the rock group Yes combines art-music influences with rock not only at the "surface" level, but also in the "underlying structure." Anyone who has heard this music might be inclined to grant that...