Analyzing Popular Music

Front Cover
Allan F. Moore
Cambridge University Press, May 22, 2003 - Music - 270 pages
How do we 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 books 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 contextualisation in this way.
 

Contents

1 Introduction
1
ten apothegms and four instances
16
analyzing the words in pop song
39
score sound design and exoticism in The XFiles
60
house music as rhetoric
80
the case of Try a Little Tenderness
103
popular music and urban geography
131
8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture
158
9 Pangs of history in late 1970s newwave rock
173
10 Is anybody listening?
196
popular music and ethnomusicology
218
Bibliography
240
Discography
258
Index
261
Copyright

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About the author (2003)

Allan F. Moore is Professor of Popular Music and Head of the School of Performing Arts 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

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