Introduction

Introduction

            I can’t think at this point in my life of any type of writing that would be more personal than popular music analysis. Getting deeply into the inner workings of a popular song, exploring how it works on the listener’s ear, considering how it has managed to move us (or at least me) in the way that it has: these acts all feel deeply creative and fulfilling for me as a writer right now. It’s hard to explain why. Why would anyone want to read this blog? That’s another question—and a good one. I want to start, though, by clearing up a few other things before we really get started with this blog.

            I teach first-year writing at colleges, and one of the assignments that I have been giving over the past few years is called the Film/Song Analysis Project. The students have to choose a film or song and write a two-to-three-page analysis of it. I think it’s a useful assignment for a lot of my students because they have little understanding of what the word “analysis” really means, and they often write something that is closer to a summary, an evaluation, or an interpretation on the first draft. I take time to guide them toward the type of writing where they explore the technique used by the musician or filmmaker to create a particular effect on the listener/viewer. The resulting analyses are in many cases really excellent writing that I enjoy reading.

            I’ve been thinking for awhile about starting a blog where I write this type of analysis myself, and where I stick to music specifically. I’ve been a rabid consumer of popular music since I was a little kid. My parents tell me that the first song that became my favorite is a song called “You Can Do Magic” by America. I am such an obsessive student of popular music that I can tell you that that song reached #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1982, and I didn’t even have to use Google/Wikipedia (honest!). I think it would be fun and potentially interesting to a handful of readers to write blog entries where I choose a particular song and analyze it in exhaustive detail, ideally getting at what elements of it enable it to have its particular effect on listeners.

            While I assign my students to stick closely to the mode of analytical writing without veering much into other, related modes likes interpretation, evaluation, or summary (beyond a brief summary in the first paragraph), I think I am going to allow myself a little bit more freedom in this blog. There are two reasons for this lenience:

·         This is a blog. It’s fairly casual. I’m not planning on publishing or presenting this work in any sort of academic forum, though I hope it will help me to be more productive as an academic writer.

·         I trust myself with that intermodal fuzziness enough to feel that I can indulge myself in occasional tangents of evaluation or interpretation without losing my analytical momentum. If my students eventually read this blog, I hope that they don’t take this comment as a condescending one. I guess I feel that the common phrase about modern art is applicable here: you have to learn how to paint accurately with the principles of perspective and shadow before you can create the next Guernica.

Why am I starting this blog? I’ve had a hard time at maintaining a blog regularly in the past, but I have been thinking about writing a music analysis blog for awhile. I have a lot of content in the back of my mind for this one. I think a lot about pop music, and I think we all think about it, at least in English-speaking culture, anyway, a lot more than we would usually admit. I listen to music very frequently: while driving, while grading papers, while washing the dishes, while reading. I’ve heard an embarrassingly high percentage of the songs that have made the Top 40 in the rock era. I’ve also found myself combing through the canon of the Critically Acclaimed Rock Song in recent years and coming across gems like Big Star’s “Thirteen” and R.E.M.’s “(Don’t Go Back to) Rockville.” I feel like this blog is one that I could stick to for awhile.

            I also have a little time on my hands lately. It’s the first time in awhile that I can say that. I’ve been really busy with work for the past few years. My Mondays through Fridays have been often filled with work-related activities just about from rising to going to bed, and it’s shameful how little attention I’ve given to other important aspects of my life. I’ve also neglected the unimportant-but-fun aspects of my life, such as writing creatively. Creative writing is fun for me, but it isn’t essential. Now I’m having the time to get back into that, so I’m trying to blog again.

            I’ve had good experiences contributing to and monitoring my students’ blog assignments in the classes I’ve taught, too, and this has made me realize how interesting and rewarding blogging can be. One of those blogs is still online at OtherNationalIdentities.blogspot.com. This blog involved choosing a country that hadn’t been written about yet on the blog and writing two entries about aspects of its culture. I had about 70 students who contributed to it. Check it out if you have the time and are interested.

            Another factor that has motivated me to start blogging again is reading the blogs of colleagues and former colleagues of mine, academics who also blog. They write about various topics and in various registers, some of the blogs approximating their academic prose that they seek to publish, and others having a conversation with their readers in a fairly casual—but still thoughtful—way. I have to give particular credit to Ben Railton, as his American studies blog has been a real inspiration to me (AmericanStudier.blogspot.com). The current blog will be an opportunity to write thoughtfully in a way that is less formal than scholarly writing, and in a forum where I don’t have to worry as much about citations and grammar, two aspects of academic writing that are labor-intensive. I understand the reasons that academic writers need to place emphasis on citations and grammar, but those aspects aren’t a lot of fun.

            One last reason I want to write this blog: I think it would fulfill a niche in the blogosphere that hasn’t been really inundated yet. I’ve been Googling a bit trying to find a similar blog, but I can’t find one. Please let me know if I’m just rehashing a blog that has existed for years. I think it would be nice to write about a song from a different approach than that found on a Wikipedia entry, or on a Last.fm comments section, or on any other forum or website. I’m not trying to write encyclopedically here, but there really isn’t a lot out there when you Google the name of a particular interesting popular song. “Where are the ramblings of exhaustively-detailed analysis that I am looking for?” I would wonder. Now they will be on this blog (if I do a good job).

            I should try to talk a bit about the theoretical frameworks that I’m planning to use here. I’m not afraid of theory or THEORY or Theory, and readers might want to know what sort of significance I think a song can have for its listening public. I’ve read a lot of poststructuralism, but I suppose I think the pattern of interpretations or understandings that often swirls around a text tells us something, and it’s interesting and worthwhile to point out what that thing is, though we can acknowledge that listeners/readers/viewers with a different cultural/historical context might be reading differently. I’m writing analyses, so my question will be “How does this song reach its effects?” But in pursuing the answer to that question, I will acknowledge that those effects often include a cohesive or roughly cohesive meaning that listeners get from the song. That’s enough about poststructuralism, for now.

            You’re probably also wondering about my practical approach to writing this blog. I’m going to try to write these entries fairly quickly, but I plan on editing/revising a little bit. I’m going to aim for a once-weekly schedule, and I would like to continue writing the blog even once my fall semester starts, bringing a busy teaching schedule with it. We’ll see how that goes, but I think I can do it! I’m not sure where the brow will be here, but I’m thinking that most of the entries will be middlebrow in tone, sort of like Nick Hornby’s Songbook, but a little bit more intellectual and microscopic.

What songs will I analyze? That’s up to me…and I’m fairly eclectic in my musical tastes. You probably think I’m a bit pretentious by now. (Thanks for reading, by the way!) I listen to all sorts of pop music from the 50s to the present, from early rock to hip hop to folk to R&B. I don’t know much about classical, jazz, house, Asian pop, African pop, South American pop, or ambient music. Any requests? Feel free to let me know, and I will consider them for a later entry. When I worked as a college radio DJ at WCHC in Worcester, MA, I often got calls from a listener who wanted to hear the 80s band Asia. I think I eventually played “Heat of the Moment.” It felt like an odd request to me, but “Heat of the Moment” is a cool song, and I was happy to play it.

I think that covers all the important elements of this introduction. The analyses will cover a wide range of popular music from the 50s to the present. Each entry will be exhaustively detailed. The autobiographical asides will be brief and fairly witty, ideally. The trivia tidbits about the songs’ origins or recording processes will also be only occasional, so as not to distract from the analysis. The focus of the blog will be on how the music does what it does to us as listeners, as we get lost in its intricate folds, its melody, its message, its structure, its tone, its emotional spectrum, its tempo. Bruce tells us that he “learned more from a three-minute record, baby, than [he] ever learned in school.” I wouldn’t say that I learned quite that much from a three-minute record, but I feel compelled to explore what I’ve found in a lot of those records, to examine how they do what they do, and I hope you’ll come along for the journey.