Review of Richard Middleton ed., Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2000)

Abstract

You want the bad news first?[1] Poor Richard. He wants writers on popular music to address the topic from what he sees as the single viable perspective. He looks at what is offered by many American analysts, with their emphasis on the inner tonal relationships of a song or group of songs, and he finds the approach both doctrinaire (because it is based on what he asserts to be the uncritical adoption of "formalist" systems that had been created to clarify the workings of music of a different sort) and inadequate (due to its failure to consider the entirety of the music's social context). He turns to the cultural-studies sociologists, and admires their consumer-based interest in gesture and dance steps but is embarrassed by their lack of sophistication in parsing a musical text. He then announces that in order to pretend to any validity at all, the only proper approach in pop-music scholarship is to synthesize the two goals in every piece of published research. He reasons that "musical meaning cannot be detached from the discursive, social and institutional frameworks which surround, mediate, and (yes) produce it." (1) Middleton is not alone in this argument, but is supported by a number of the book's contributors. Thus, Philip Tagg: "no analysis of musical discourse can be considered complete without consideration of social, psychological, visual, gestural, ritual, technical, historical, economic, and linguistic aspects relevant to the genre, function, style, (re-)performance situation, and listening attitude connected with the sound event being studied." (2) Thus, Alf Björnberg: "It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance." (3) In his own chapter, Middleton grasps at cultural studies, linguistics, genetic theory, and even the electro-chemical nature of neural circuits to explain the nature of a gesture, because for him meaning is to be found not among musical relations but in the music's relationship to its surroundings. (4) To this reviewer, such an entanglement of music with its context seems almost less "necessary" than ever, in an age when a reference to the text of Abbey Road should mean exactly the same thing to everyone the world over-the collection of 478.5 megabytes appearing on a compact disc that contains in every case the same stereo mix of a recording fixed in 1969. This sort of musical text, common to most popular-music compositions of the past fifty years, can be studied as an independent unit much more easily than could a Mozart sonata, which exists only in a general notational roadmap suggestive of many possible valid and interesting tangible interpretations.[2] Just as he gets comfortable advocating a balance of the musical and the sociological, in the thumbnail history of approaches to popular music featured in his Introduction, along comes the post-modern discourse-edifying critic, and a