robert walser
About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!1
Introduction
What exactly constitutes ‘analysis’ of the texts, performances and dis-courses of popular music too often goes without saying. Indeed, the very idea of musical analysis has often been disparaged or defended as though it inevitably implies the deployment of ready-made models that had originally been designed to demonstrate the supremacy of German instrumental music or the underlying coherence of jarring modernisms. But basic questions of analytical method deserve to be continually rethought, since interpreting
Portions and earlier versions of this chapter were delivered as invited talks at the Claremont Graduate School, the University of California, Riverside, the University of Colorado, Northeastern University, Brandeis University,
SUNY-Buffalo, the University of Girona, the University of Valencia, Gothenburg University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Melbourne and the University of Munich, as well as at conferences of the American Musicological Society and the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (US Branch), the Cross(over) Relations conference at the Eastman School of Music, and the Discord conference at UCLA. I am grateful for the invitations to speak and for the productive dialogue that followed in each case. I would like to thank David Ake, Robert Fink, Susan McClary and Mitchell Morris for their helpful comments on the written version of this chapter; I am solely responsible for any faults they may have charitably overlooked.
1 Charles Darwin in a letter of 1861, quoted in Zinn (1990: xvii).
popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances the musical texts and activities upon which pleasures and powers of popular music depend ought to constitute one of the central activities of popular music studies. And yet much of the popular music analysis that has been appearing lately simply applies methods that were developed for very dif-ferent repertoires, without much explicit concern about the fit. This chapter is written in suspension, out of dissatisfaction with the recent burgeoning of formalist approaches to popular music analysis, on the one hand, and on the other, the conviction that despite the importance of scholarship that investigates other topics (the music industry, technology, criticism, artists, audiences), ‘the study of popular music’, as Susan McClary once put it, ‘should also include the study of popular music’ (McClary 1994: 38).2What follows are some reflections on the situation of musical analysis in popular music studies, a set of ten proposed axioms or aphorisms that might help generate some interesting new analyses, and a set of four analytical sketches of fairly recent popular songs.
Disciplines and values
Joseph Kerman predicted in 1985 that the most interesting areas for future music research would be found where disciplines compete for territory (Kerman 1985: 15). I doubt that he had popular music in mind, but the interdisciplinary community of popular music studies has come to exemplify perfectly his prediction. Over several decades, and particularly since the founding of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music in 1981, the academic study of popular music has evolved from a cramped and furtive enterprise, wedged in between jingoistic defenders of high culture and pathologists of adolescent deviance, into something exciting, ambitious and conflicted. The field can boast a top-notch scholarly journal, Popular Music, along with several contenders, as well as increasing visibility in less specialized journals across several disciplines.
Many debates over method and value within popular music studies stem from its mixed heritage: from sociology, Parsonian models that present the world as too static and unconflicted, and scholarship as too na¨ıvely
2 See also McClary and Walser (1990). At present, our field is strikingly different in this respect from the study of the printed word, where many more scholars analyze printed texts than analyze the printing industry.
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objective;3from music theory, formalist analytical methods that inevitably yield ahistorical results; from musicology, an inferiority complex that makes such methods tempting, as well as positivist research models; from English departments, a readiness to push aside the specific details, techniques and re-lationships of musical texts (however unthinkable it would be to do that with verbal texts); from ethnomusicology, the tendency to regard technologies and mediations as distortions of something more ‘authentic’, rather than as parts of the conditions of cultural creativity;4from fandom, the intensely felt desire for authenticity as compensation for the feeling that nothing escapes com-merce; from rock criticism, the imperative to decide what is cool, what sucks, what to buy and recommend.
IASPM maintains valuable lines of communication, yet it has been a fractious society; its rocky history can usefully be understood in terms of struggle among those factions whose primary objects of analysis are texts, institutions and people. A number of scholars have been working to under-mine this methodological separation by taking notes seriously – as traces of social activities.5Such work blurs the lines among historical, analytical and ethnographic approaches arguing, in effect, that musical texts and practices
3 Sociologists should be credited, though, with having studied popular music first, decades ago, because they weren’t worried about whether popular music was
‘art’; they knew it was socially important.
4 See Martin Stokes’s chapter in this book [ed.]. Ethnomusicologists have long been suspended between openness to all musics (particularly those that have been neglected by Eurocentric musicology) and a queasiness about mass mediation. This is changing with, among other developments, the rise of ‘urban ethnomusicology’, which treats mediations and interactions as normal aspects of culture rather than as corruptions of autonomous traditions. Recently,
ethnomusicologists have usefully championed ethnography within popular music studies; still, the discipline’s principled opposition to ethnocentrism has had the corollary effect of disabling, except in a few exceptional cases, discussions of value and detailed analysis of musical texts. The best known of those
exceptions would probably be Chernoff (1979), Seeger (1987) and Feld (1990).
In this context, it’s worth noting that none of these three scholars was trained primarily as an ethnomusicologist.
5 This approach owes much to the influence of Christopher Small and George Lipsitz, as well as to scholars of classical music who have developed new approaches to analysis, such as Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer. In addition to these writers, I would suggest that the most successful examples of this sort of work have been produced by Richard Middleton, Philip Tagg, Susan Fast, Alf Bj¨ornberg, my colleagues Mitchell Morris and Robert Fink, and David Brackett.
popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances are just as complex, and just as historically situated, as people are. But there are many conceptual and practical barriers before this sort of analysis, some of them quite recently erected.
For instance, two of popular music’s most influential scholars have recently presented arguments that stand squarely in the way of attempts to develop popular music analyses that are both specific and consequential.
Simon Frith’s most recent book, Performing Rites, raises what he calls ‘the value problem in cultural studies’ (1996: 3). Frith argues that as cultural stud-ies has taken up a wider range of texts for its cultural analysis – advertising, Madonna, comic books – scholars have lost sight of, or avoided, questions of value. In particular, he charges that many of us have neglected the importance of the arguments about value that take place among fans and critics. In effect, Frith argues that popular music deserves the sorts of aesthetic distinctions that are taken for granted in discussions of more elite forms of culture. Even more than that, he contends that we must establish value in order to be able to convince others to listen to what we like: ‘If, in my own cultural practice, I prefer . . . Meat Loaf to U2, shouldn’t I be prepared to argue the case for my values? Shouldn’t I want other people . . . to listen to Meat Loaf rather than U2? Shouldn’t I be able to persuade them . . .?’ (1996: 16).
Frith’s appeal should sound familiar to music scholars: he has just reinvented music appreciation, whereby people who have greater authority, cultural capital or rhetorical skills (teachers, critics) tell others (students, fans) what they ought to be listening to (classical music, authentic rock) according to a single scale of value. The presumption is that what they should be hearing is somehow better for them, although it is rare to find anyone attempting to explain just how or why this improvement will take place.
Since Frith limits his concern to what he thinks people should be listening to, without examining the moral and ethical commitments that underpin such choices, his is not really a discourse of value as much as it is a discourse of power.6If, as Kerman alleged in a famous critique of formalism, ‘analysis exists for the purpose of demonstrating organicism, and organicism exists for
6 As Virgil Thomson once characterized such a conflation of value and power, ‘the German tradition is a perfectly good one, of course, as you can tell by all of the big names that are associated with it’ (Thomson 1981: 128); the logic of this relationship is circular because it can be, given the economy of prestige within which it operates.
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the purpose of validating a certain body of works of art’ (Kerman 1980: 315), it seems that much journalistic criticism and academic work alike, however different their methods, exist for the same purposes.
Among the questions I want to raise here are whether the arguments of rock fans and critics provide the ideal model for what scholars should be doing, and whether the advocacy mission of music appreciation is the best model for cultural analysis and historical understanding. Frith quite rightly attacks the dominant model of cultural hierarchy, but I would argue that he’s going the wrong way: instead of aestheticizing popular music, we should be historicizing all music and accounting in each case for the particular pleasures that are offered and thus for the values on which they depend and to which they appeal.
Even more fundamental to the problem of value, however, is the prob-lem of signification. In Performing Rites, Frith credits my book Running with the Devil (Walser 1993) with having produced ‘a wholly convincing musi-cological explanation’ of how heavy metal musicians compose and perform.
Yet, he wonders, do all of these technical details – modes, rhythms, timbres, harmonic progressions – tell us anything about what listeners experience?
(Frith 1996: 64). Despite the fact that the book’s analysis of heavy metal meanings was grounded in interviews with fans and musicians, analysis of the discourse of fans and critics, and historical accounts of musical signi-fication, Frith remains unconvinced; he is essentially distrustful of music analysis.
That attitude is shared by cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg, who writes that to understand rock music, ‘it is necessary to explore effects that are not necessarily signifying, that do not necessarily involve the trans-mission, production, structuration, or even deconstruction of meaning’
(Grossberg 1990: 113). One might mean by such a statement merely that we must understand musical signs within the social locations of the music and the people who are involved with it, but that’s not Grossberg’s point;
he means to deny the operation of musical discourse. Not displaying any grasp of how musicians learn to produce affective responses through their negotiation of shared codes, he leaps to this:
without the mediation of meaning, the sheer volume and repetitive rhythms of rock and roll produce a real material pleasure for its fans (at many live
popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances concerts, the vibration actually might be compared to the use of a vibrator, often focused on the genital organs). . . . (1990: 113) No statement could better illustrate the need for musicologists to partici-pate in popular music studies. If we don’t take seriously the technical and interpretive statements of musicians and music analysts, we’re likely to end up mystifying music and dismissing musicological discussions as academic obfuscations. Such explanations – ‘without the mediation of meaning’ – ultimately trivialize and essentialize popular music and those who partici-pate in it, by implying that sounds work on selves that are unconstructed by culture, by not facing the question of why only some people get such pleasures (after all, not even vibrators produce pleasure for everyone).
Scholars outside music departments often mock the technical vocab-ulary musicologists use because they find it exclusive or unilluminating.
This is partially due to the mysteriousness of musical signification for non-musicians – unlike language, music seems transparent, uncoded, not requiring translation. But it’s partially our fault; as Alf Bj¨ornberg puts it:
What in musicology is often termed ‘analysis’ often amounts to paraphrasing music-as-sound in some technical and formal symbolic language or other, the mastering of which requires special training. Such formal languages have been developed partly with the aim to invest musical analysis with an appearance of scientific ‘objectivity’, rather than ‘mere’
hermeneutic interpretation. (Bj¨ornberg 1998)7
As Bj¨ornberg suggests, musicologists need to consider carefully the tools and goals that they have inherited from previous analysts if they want to produce illuminating accounts of how popular music works and what it means.
But analyze we must. Whatever else they do, neither Frith nor Grossberg offers us new ways of understanding how musical discourse articulates social meanings and produces particular pleasures; indeed, they imply that these are not useful or practical goals. In contrast, I argue that any cultural anal-ysis of popular music that leaves out musical sound, that doesn’t explain why people are drawn to certain sounds specifically and not others, is at
7 This line of thought was acutely articulated in Kerman’s (1980) earlier and broader critique of musical formalism.
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least fundamentally incomplete.8Understanding of cultural pleasures is an unavoidable precondition to understanding social relations, identities, struc-tures and forces, so we might as well confront the issue head-on: we are, despite the proverb, in the business of accounting for taste.
Ten apothegms
The methodological divisions and conflicts that have been affecting popular music studies (as well as musicology and cultural studies more broadly) have prompted the following ten apothegms. Despite their declara-tive tone, they are meant to be heuristic rather than authoritadeclara-tive, useful more than definitive. The test of their utility is simply whether they can lead to more illuminating analyses of popular music. The wording of the apothegms is mine, but the ideas have been stolen, derived, developed and twisted from the work of many other people, some of whom are acknowledged explicitly in notes.9
1 It’s okay to write about music
It is often said that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architec-ture’, to which I would reply that dancing about architecture might be very illuminating, if we all danced as much as we use language.10 Many schol-ars continue to argue that we need new terms and technologies as means for gaining greater analytical rigour. Technical terms for musical procedures and details are useful, of course, but we may not need as much jargon as we might
8 Such cultural analysis abounds, often in sophisticated form. A very recent example: ‘This chapter has argued that the Yanni phenomenon is not primarily a musical one (based on artistic or aesthetic factors) but rather a socio-cultural and commercial phenomenon based on the mercantile, performative and cultural logics of twentieth-century capitalism. The Yanni phenomenon is partly a triumph of the commodification and technologisation of the exotic within the global cultural economy. It is also partly a triumph of the multi-media marketing of spectacle, privileging the ambience and formula over music per se’ (Neuenfeldt 1999: 187). But can we really imagine that ‘the Yanni phenomenon’ would be unchanged in its scope and meanings if, for example, Yanni played electric guitar?
9 In particular, I’d like to acknowledge the impact upon my thinking of Small (1987), McClary (1991), Lipsitz (1990), Chernoff (1979), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Marcus and Fischer (1986) and the writings of Seeger (1977 and 1994).
10 This anti-criticism apothegm is sometimes attributed to Elvis Costello, sometimes to Thelonius Monk.
popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances suppose if we are to go beyond labelling to interpretation. Moreover, tech-nical analysis hasn’t made much progress in dealing with certain aspects of musical experience: how can we describe, let alone account for, such essential things as compelling qualities of motion or particularly affecting timbres?
One answer is that we already have tools that we’re not using as skilfully as we might. We have language, which is, like music, an incredibly powerful and nuanced system for making sense of things and communicating our understandings.
2 Unlike language, music often seems not to require translation We don’t imagine that we understand someone who is speaking a language with which we have no familiarity, but music can more easily be un-derstood as interpretable within one’s own discursive competency. We often hear unfamiliar musical systems as not having system at all, or as warped versions of the systems we know. That is why music enables great understand-ings and misunderstandunderstand-ings across cultural boundaries. This phenomenon is both a caution for analysis and an object for it.
3 Musical judgements can never be dismissed as subjective;
neither can they ever be celebrated as objective
Since subjects are formed in culture, all understandings are inter-subjective; since there is no way to stand outside cultural understand-ings, there can be no Archimedean objectivity. Thus we must work all the time with interpretations – our sense of what things mean and why they are the way they are. Musical interpretations are always open to re-finement and contestation, but they are never arbitrary, and there is no way to avoid committing interpretation. So we work for the most illumi-nating ones, drawing upon our knowledge of history and of how music works and signifies. There is no one point of perfect perspective, and we can learn from other people, times and cultures so as to expand our individual understanding.11
11 Many philosophers and other scholars have developed critiques of objectivity.
For my purposes, the most pertinent have been Lakoff and Johnson (1980) on objectivity; Marcus and Fisher (1986) on juxtaposition and Bakhtin (1981) on dialogism.
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4 The split between musicology and ethnomusicology is no longer useful because its constitutive dichotomies – self / other,
Western / non-Western, art / function, history/ethnography, and text/practice – are no longer defensible
What was once a progressive attempt to undermine ethnocentrism and elitism now reinscribes too many disabling binaries.12According to the implicit terms of this split, ninth-century French monks are ‘us’, while
What was once a progressive attempt to undermine ethnocentrism and elitism now reinscribes too many disabling binaries.12According to the implicit terms of this split, ninth-century French monks are ‘us’, while