How do we know music? We perform it, we compose it, we sing it in the shower, we cook, sleep and dance to it. Eventually we think and write about it. This book represents the culmination of such shared processes. Each of these essays, written by leading writers on popular music, is analytical in some sense, but none of them treats analysis as an end in itself. The books presents a wide range of genres (rock, dance, TV soundtracks, country, pop, soul, easy listening, Turkish Arabesk) and deals with issues as broad as methodology, modernism, postmodernism, Marxism and communication. It aims to encourage listeners to think more seriously about the ‘social’ consequences of the music they spend time with and is the first collection of such essays to incorporate contextualisation in this way.

Acknowledgement; Contributors; 1. Introduction Allan F. Moore; 2. Popular music analysis: ten apothegms and four instances Robert Walser; 3. From lyric to anti-lyric: analysing the words in pop songs Dai Griffiths; 4. The sound is ‘out there’: score, sound design and exoticism in The X-Files Robynn J. Stilwell; 5. Feel the beat come down: house music as rhetoric Stan Hawkins; 6. The determining role of performance in the articulation of meaning: the case of ‘Try a Little Tenderness’ Rob Bowman; 7. Marxist music analysis without Adorno: popular music and urban geography Adam Krims; 8. Jethro Tull and the case for modernism in mass culture Allan F. Moore; 9. Pangs of history in late 1970s new-wave rock John Covach; 10. Is anybody listening? Chris Kennett; 11. Talk and text: popular music and ethnomusicology Martin Stokes; Bibliography; Discography; Film/Videography; Index.