ABSTRACT
This chapter began as a presentation at an SMA day,3 whose raison d’être was encompassed by the assertion that, in recent analytic work, ‘one common goal has been to seek out a productive synthesis between contextual interpretive and formal analytical approaches’ and that ‘popular music provides a particularly relevant context in which to do this’.4 I have been publishing analytically informed work on popular song for some 15 years now and have constantly worried about how well it passes what I call the ‘so what?’ test – that is, how well it moves from analysis to useful, and usable, interpretation. At first, I was content that the analysis of large areas of the repertoire, if necessarily somewhat superficial because of its scope, brought important understandings in terms of common practices, or ‘style’, helping to reinstate that concept as one worthy of consideration – indeed, I maintain that without an understanding of the style which organizes a particular performance, we cannot properly understand the details of that performance. More recently, I discovered that other key questions, particularly for me those of ‘authenticity’ and of ‘intertextuality’, could be addressed by analytic means. However, I have been unable to convince myself that such analysis of individual tracks always, as a matter of course, passes the ‘so what?’ test. It is this doubt which lies at the root of this chapter – a doubt I shall attempt to assuage.
