Analysis and rock music: are they incompatible? Is popular music criticism’s analytic methodology ill-equipped for its own purposes? In the above passage, Paul Clarke complains that modes of inquiry developed for the analysis of western art music, focusing upon the text and the musical ‘score,’ are inappropriate for the analysis of rock music. He believes rock analysts wrongly attempt to fit the music within a narrow, established template. A more profitable approach, he suggests, would evaluate the music “not on any one aural strand - lyrical, musical or vocal - but on the complex of created relationships between sounds as they act on us through time.” Clarke’s analysis would represent a composite set of interests. His insights would emerge from his own interpretive experience as well as from a technical understanding of the music. His observations would be less confined by preexisting prescriptive or circumscribed guidelines. Instead, Clarke suggests that...
University of California Press