Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song

Abstract

Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Recorded Popular Song. By Allan F. Moore. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. 395pp (hardcover). Music Examples. Bibliography. Index. ISBN 9781409428640 Allan F. Moore, Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey, has published extensively on pop music, having written short books about the Beatles and Jethro Tull and edited collections such as Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge, 2003) and Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (Ashgate, 2007). Song Means builds upon foundations he laid in Rock: The Primary Text (published in its second edition in 2001) to codify his philosophy and methodology of popular song interpretation. Moore begins by explicating his aims, motivations, and assumptions. He aims to balance broad hermeneutics with narrower technical analyses. It is clear that he will draw from disciplines outside musicology, and throughout the book he references work in sociology cognitive science, literary theory linguistics, and other fields; large parts of Moore's approach rest on theoretical constructs adapted from these areas. He distinguishes between songs, performances, and tracks, with the combination of song and performance equating to his primary concern, the track. Moore builds his case logically unveiling several such valuable conceptualizations along the way. Early chapters focus on musical structural elements and ideas about how these can lead toward interpretations. Noteworthy is his prioritization of texture, the first element he discusses in detail. Technical analysis of melody and harmony can obscure the fact that most listeners, lacking such training, derive a great deal of meaning from timbre and texture. Moore's functional layers of music, corresponding roughly to an ensemble of drums, bass, chording and melodic instruments, are graphically shown to occupy the soundbox, which illustrates the locations of sounds within the stereo spectrum. The following chapters find Moore detailing his analytical approaches to rhythm, meter, harmony melody, and form. For consistency's sake, he insists on analyzing harmony in terms of modes, which is awkward when a composer's intention is clearly non-modal (the Kinks' "You Really Got Me" is Ionian?). Moore also provides a history of popular song with the hope of enabling listeners to gauge a track's place on the continuum of style. In later chapters, Moore synthesizes these structural considerations into broader interpretations. His concept of friction explores how meaning is derived from a track's deviations from expected norms. He sets up a distinction between performer (a real person), persona (the public and artistic image that person assumes), and protagonist (a character in a song who is not necessarily the performer or persona). Moore bases his concept of authenticity partially on the perceived closeness or distance between performer and persona. Other potential considerations are whether songs' personas and situations seem realistic or fictional, whether the persona and listeners are participants or observers in a song's action, and the degree of proximity between personas and their listeners and environment. …