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.
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