Song Interpretation in 21st-Century Pop Music

Ralf von Appen holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Gießen, Germany, where he has been working as a teaching and research assistant since 2004. He has published widely about the history, psychology, aesthetics and analysis of popular music. André Doehring studied Musicology and Sociology and is working as a musicologist at the University of Gießen, Germany. His current research topics focus on jazz, electronic dance music, popular music journalism, analysis and the sociology of music. Dietrich Helms is Professor of Music History at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He studied Musicology, English and Sociology at the University of Münster, Germany, and the Universities of East Anglia and Oxford, UK. He has published widely on music at the court of Henry VIII, popular music, music of early modern times and musical theatre for children. Allan Moore is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey, UK. His chief research interests lie in the domain of the interaction of music and lyrics in recorded song in the service of potential readings. He is series editor of Ashgate’s ’Library of Essays in Popular Music’ and author to date of five monographs including Rock: the Primary Text and Song Means (both Ashgate).

• Introduction; I: Listening Alone; 1: Death Cab for Cutie's ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark' as Exemplar of Conventional Tonal Behaviour in Recent Rock Music; 2: Ear Candy; 3: Metrical Ambiguity or Microrhythmic Flexibility? Analysing Groove in ‘Nasty Girl' by Destiny's Child; 4: Pragmatic ‘Poker Face'; 5: Can't Get Laid in Germany – Rammstein's ‘Pussy’ (2009); 6: An Analysis of Space, Gesture and Interaction in Kings of Leon's ‘Sex On Fire'; 7: Andrés's ‘New For U'; 8: So Just What Kind of Life Is This? Amy Macdonald's ‘This Is The Life'; II: Listening Together; 9: An Ambiguous Murder; 10: Interpreting Meaning in/of Janelle Monáe's ‘Tightrope'; 11: ‘Can't Keep it to Myself'; 12: How to Make a Global Dance Hit; 13: Analytical Approaches to Björk's ‘Crystalline'

"This book could be an important first step in shifting the field from entrenched habits of sole-authorship to the incorporation of many different kinds of collaboration, including smaller groups, junior-senior scholar pairings, or single-author analyses with responses and revisions published together. This book reminds us that there is no one way to "do" popular music analysis and is an opportunity to think even more creatively about what effective and fulfilling research can look like."- Alexa Woloshyn, Carnegie Mellon University"Taken as a whole, this essay collection not only makes a convincing case for the relevance of musicological analysis in the study of popular music, but also provides us with an impressive demonstration of the myriad ways by which it can be done."- Nadav Appel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel; Open University of Israel, Israel"I know of no other instance in popular-music analysis in which multiple authors reconcile their views within the bounds of a single essay, and so this effort should be applauded for its original approach."- Trevor de Clercq, Middle Tennessee State University"This book offers an engaging read and presents multiple approaches to musical analysis, which is to be expected given the diversity of its contributors."- Donna Weston, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia