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Title: Reading Pop: Approaches to Textual Analysis in Popular Music by Richard Middleton ISBN: 0-19-816611-7 Publisher: Oxford Univ Pr on Demand Pub. Date: September, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: Academia Goes Pop
Comment: This volume is an uneven affair but a valuable contribution to the oft-neglected examination of popular music. While many academicians lament the dwindling attention and support given to cultured music-- i.e. classical, and to some extent to jazz-- these same musicologists and ethnomusicologists are missing the vitality of the current world. Music has genuinely become a soundtrack to our lives, bursting forth from all kinds of sources and in so many venues. Try conducting daily life in markets, stores, restaurants, cafes, even streets without being exposed to contemporary pop music. The authors of the pieces in "Reading Pop" have in fact realized the ubiquity of pop music and address its role in modern life.

There are interesting data contained in many of these essays. The many elements that make some pop music memorable are explored. This includes the music and/or lyrics of such artists as Randy Newman, Prince, James Brown, Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. Theories about what is important in contemporary popular music are put forth; the ideas are valuable. There is an informative and well-written chapter about torch singers by John Moore. Also included is a "Method Of Analysis" chapter by Philip Tagg. It looks at musicology and compares modes of folk, pop and art music transmission. Tagg provides a checklist of features that might be analyzed in pop music, and gives examples of how these features might be described in rich and meaningful ways. Tagg unfortunately falls prey to his own jargon.

Actually, most of the book suffers from a particularly virulent case of "academ-ese." Esoteric jargon from the ivory tower suffuses the prolix writing. The sentences are structured in knotted prose, running on and on in complex clauses and sub-clauses that are too often difficult to disentangle. The obnoxious reliance on trendy phrases and supposedly clever writing devices-- heavy uses of slash marks and words with some syllables parenthesized: these are pretentions that reflect poor style and bad habits.

Four sentences illustrate this problem, sentences from the editor's own introduction to the book: "Interestingly, if any emergent analytic paradigm may be represented as currently possessing the potential for dominance, it is, in my view, 'dialogics.' Congruent with theories of discourse, mediation, and (post)modern ethnography, its recent prominence is nevertheless associated with a more specific influence, that of Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's materialist seminology posits-- against structural formalisms and sociological and economic reductionisms alike-- that meaning is always both socially and historically situated, and generically specific. Heteroglot networks of discursive conventions resulting from never-ending, historically contingent exchanges create a kind of giant intertextuality, operating both between utterances, texts, styles, genres, and social groups, and within individual examples of each."

One can only imagine the bloated egos or inferiority fears that fuel such composition. Because of the way it is written, this volume really serves only those with recent training in musicology-- other readers are apt to become too frustrated with the authorial style. Too bad for these writers-- their ideas make a contribution, but the ideas are apt to fall on a limited audience.

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