Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgement -- Contributors -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances -- Introduction -- Disciplines and values -- Ten apothegms -- 1 It's okay to write about music -- 2 Unlike language, music often seems not to require translation -- 3 Musical judgements can never be dismissed as subjective -- neither can they ever be celebrated as objective -- 4 The split between musicology and ethnomusicology is no longer useful because its constitutive dichotomies - self/other… -- 5 Analysis is a relational activity -- its success is relative to its goals, which analysts should feel obliged to make clear -- 6 The split between musicology and music theory has never been useful because its constitutive… -- 7 Analysis is inevitably reductive, which is precisely why it's useful -- 8 'Popular music' and 'classical music' cannot be compared in terms of value because these categories are interdependent… -- 9 'Twentieth-century music' is the music that twentieth-century people have made and heard -- 10 You only have the problem of connecting music and society if you've separated them in the first place -- Profound simplicity -- Fearing semiotics -- Is it good to have violent music? -- Killing Kenny G -- Analysis and values -- 3 From lyric to anti-lyric: analyzing the words in pop song -- Introduction -- Lyrics and poetry -- Verbal space -- Sound: rhymes and alliterations -- Sense: word novelty and grammatical rectitude -- 4 The sound is 'out there': score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files -- Introduction -- Stylistic precedents -- Sound precedents -- 'Natural' sound -- Alien/other/exotic -- Language and transformation -- Conclusion -- 5 Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric -- Musicological considerations.

'French Kiss': on the wave of the Chicago phenomenon -- Editing and mechanizing the 'beat' -- Stripping it down! Beats, hypermetric units, CGPs, and processes in 'French Kiss' -- 'Jacking', desire and house aesthetics -- Conclusion: deep meanings or just 'cheesy' clichés? -- 6 The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of 'Try a Little Tenderness' -- The early history of 'Try a Little Tenderness' -- Structure -- Melodic interpretation -- Harmonic setting -- Timbre, dynamics and playful voicedness -- Instrumental accompaniment -- Making sense of difference -- Meaning -- Copyright -- 7 Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography -- How Adorno stands in for 'Marxism' in popular music studies -- Flexible accumulation (or, Why Adorno should not stand in for 'Marxism' in popular music studies) -- 1 Standardization -- 2 Cultural imperialism -- How cultural studies approaches take the same view of capital as Adorno -- Reality rap, knowledge rap, and the urban ethos -- A shift in rap genres -- The urban ethos -- Conclusion -- 8 Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture -- Introduction -- Idiolect in Jethro Tull -- Defining the Tull idiolect -- Contextualizing the Tull idiolect -- Conclusion -- 9 Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock -- (Post)modern reactions? The rise of new wave -- Musical worlding -- Foreigner -- The Cars -- Conclusion -- 10 Is anybody listening? -- Introduction -- The semiotics of the sound object -- Problems of listening specificity I: time, demography, intensity -- Problems of listening specificity II: locus, user task/producer task -- Towards a cultural-acoustic model of functional music analysis -- Example tune: 'Shadowboxing' by Doc Scott -- Analysis I: The manager's text -- Analysis II: The bank clerk's text -- Analysis III: The Major's text.

Conclusion -- 11 Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology -- Introduction -- Cultural subjects -- Music and its languages -- Bibliography -- Discography -- Film/Videography -- Index.