The British Journal of Sociology 2011 Volume 62 Issue 1

The sociology of popular music, interdisciplinarity

and aesthetic autonomy1 bjos_1353 154..174

Lee Marshall

Abstract
This paper considers the impact of interdisciplinarity upon sociological research,
focusing on one particular case: the academic study of popular music. ‘Popular
music studies’ is an area of research characterized by interdisciplinarity and, in
keeping with broader intellectual trends, this approach is assumed to offer signifi-
cant advantages. As such, popular music studies is broadly typical of contemporary
intellectual and governmental attitudes regarding the best way to research specific
topics. Such interdisciplinarity, however, has potential costs and this paper high-
lights one of the most significant: an over-emphasis upon shared substantive inter-
ests and subsequent undervaluation of shared epistemological understandings.The
end result is a form of ‘ghettoization’ within sociology itself, with residents of any
particular ghetto displaying little awareness of developments in neighbouring
ghettos. Reporting from one such ghetto, this paper considers some of the ways in
which the sociology of popular music has been limited by its positioning within an
interdisciplinary environment and suggests two strategies for developing a more
fully-realized sociology of popular music. First, based on the assumption that a
sociological understanding of popular music shares much in common with a socio-
logical understanding of everything else, this paper calls for increased intradisci-
plinary research between sociologists of varying specialisms. The second strategy,
however, involves a reconceptualization of the disciplinary limits of sociology, as it
argues that a sociology of popular music needs to accept musical specificity as part
of its remit. Such acceptance has thus far been limited not only by an interdisci-
plinary context but also by the long-standing sociological scepticism toward the
analysis of aesthetic objects. As such, this paper offers an intervention into wider
debates concerning the remit of sociological enquiry, and whether it is ever appro-
priate for sociological analyses of culture to consider ‘internal’ aesthetic structures.
In relation to the specific case study, the paper argues that considering musical
specificity is a necessary component of a sociology of popular music, and some
possibilities for developing a ‘materialist sociology of music’ are outlined.
Keywords: Sociology; interdisciplinarity; popular music studies; aesthetic
autonomy

Marshall (Department of Sociology. University of Bristol) (Corresponding author email: l.marshall@bristol.ac.uk)

© The Author 2011 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01353.x
 The sociology of popular music 155

Although there were significant precursors, the academic study of popular

music really became established in 1981, with the formation of the Interna-
tional Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and the publica-
tion of the journal Popular Music. Since that point it has become increasingly
institutionalized, with further specialist journals and entire degree pro-
grammes dedicated to the study of popular music (see Cloonan (2005) for a
detailed overview). Popular music studies (PMS) is inherently interdisciplinary
with significant input from sociology, cultural studies, musicology, ethnomusi-
cology, literary studies and others. To a certain extent, the political and intel-
lectual challenges that generated PMS – the recognition that musical meaning
is generated through context at least as much as text, combined with the charge
that traditional musicology provided an ineffective conceptual toolbox for
analysing popular music and was inherently prejudiced against it – mean that
the academic study of popular music presupposes interdisciplinarity and, in
keeping with wider political and intellectual currents, this interdisciplinarity is
accepted as an inherently good thing.
The assumed interdisciplinarity of PMS and the benefits it is supposed to
bring need to be examined closely, however. My argument is that, despite
important benefits being derived from debates with scholars from other disci-
plines, the interdisciplinary consensus in PMS has created significant problems
for sociologists studying popular music and prevented a fully-realized socio-
logical approach to popular music from developing. What has resulted is a
ghettoization of the sociology of popular music away from the sociological
mainstream that can have a significant impact on individual careers (in terms
of access to research funding, evaluations in research assessment exercises, and
so on) as well as creating broader intellectual problems (such as the stripping
away from mainstream sociology of core concerns within the sociology of
popular music). Though these narrowing of horizons will have characteristics
particular to popular music, my suggestion is that the problem is not unique to
the study of popular music but, rather, is one of the unintended consequences
of interdisciplinarity itself. Therefore, although this paper reports from one
interdisciplinary ‘ghetto’, it is seems reasonable to suggest that the issues
raised are symptomatic of the overall drift to an interdisciplinary consensus
and, therefore, relevant to other areas of sociological study.
The central argument in this paper is that ‘the sociology of popular music’
has not been sociological enough in its focus. The fragmentation of approaches
inherent within interdisciplinarity has resulted in sociologists of popular music
looking outward to other disciplines rather than inward to find shared episte-
mological understandings with disciplinary colleagues. At the same time,
however, considering popular music as an object of sociological analysis
requires a rethinking of what can be considered ‘sociological’. In particular, it
raises questions over whether a sociological analysis of culture should consider
the ‘internal’ structure of the aesthetic object as part of its remit. Must a
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156 Lee Marshall

sociological account of culture always be reductionist? Does an analytical

account of aesthetic structure always have to lapse into idealism? How should
sociology deal with the specificity of cultural objects while simultaneously
recognizing their historically constructed nature? These are obviously very
grand questions with a long sociological tradition.2 I do not intend to offer a
thorough overview of the debate here but, by offering an illustrative case
study, I hope to concretize some of the issues at stake and to argue that a
sociological approach to popular music must take account of aesthetic speci-
ficity if it is to flourish. A second theme in this paper, therefore, concerns the
intrinsic limits of sociology and some possible strategies are outlined in order
to consider what distinctively sociological understandings and approaches can
be developed in what I have termed a ‘materialist sociology of music’.3

Sociology, musicology and popular music

To talk of ‘sociology’ in this way is, perhaps, a dangerous thing.4 It can be

argued that there is no one thing that is ‘sociology’, that sociology has always
been characterized by a multiplicity of methods and theoretical approaches,
many of them contradictory, that this has only accelerated in the age of inter-
disciplinarity and, therefore, that the style of boundary-drawing occurring in
this paper is now irrelevant. After all, what does it matter whether the
researcher is ‘a sociologist’ so long as the work produced is insightful? Yet,
while it is true that sociology has always been something of a unity-in-diversity
there remains, to this sociologist at least, some sense of a sociological core, a
way of thinking sociologically, that remains relatively coherent and distinctive
despite the variety of approaches housed within the disciplinary label. That
core would include a focus on people in their social relationships, a commit-
ment to empirical investigation as a basis for theoretical understanding and an
epistemology that understands individual action as structured by patterns of
recurring actions that become institutionalized as social structure. Though
there is no space in this paper for a full defence of the sociological imagination,
it remains, in my opinion, essential for an accurate understanding of the nature
of social life. It is also true that the sociological imagination is no longer solely
in the possession of sociologists (if it ever was). I am not suggesting that we
raise the drawbridge to non-sociologists and would therefore endorse Jenkins’
suggestion of the label ‘generic sociology’ that recognizes that a relatively
coherent core of sociological concerns can be found in a variety of disciplines
such as social anthropology and ethnomusicology (2002: 22–7). None the less,
it does seem reasonable to suggest that those best-placed to develop and
enhance a more sociological approach to popular music are those who have
undergone training as sociologists and who institutionally label themselves
as sociologists. Disciplinary identities and boundaries are not completely
dead yet.
© The Author 2011 British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
 The sociology of popular music 157

When one surveys the literature, it is clear that a sociological approach has
proved useful for developing and enhancing our understanding of popular
music. Among other things, sociologists have produced detailed analysis of
musical scenes, subcultures, local economies (for example, Bennett 2000),
have told us a lot about the music industry (for example, Negus 1992), and
have examined the relationship between music and politics, or music and
the state (for example, Cloonan 2007). There remains a notable absence,
however. There seems to be little in the sociology of popular music that deals
with the specifically musical aspects of its subject. Not music as an object to
bought, held, collected, traded, shared, but music as music, as organized
sound. The sociology of popular music skirts around music and, as a result,
contains remarkably little discussion on how music creates particular
effects, and relatively little on the experience of listening to music.5 Yet it is
surely the power of musical experience that makes (popular) music so
important and, therefore, worthy of sociological investigation in the first
place. Without an understanding of how (popular) music can give rise to such
intense individual and collective experiences, the sociology of popular music
offers not just an incomplete picture, but a picture with a big black hole in
the middle.
There are common sense explanations for why sociologists have generally
steered clear of musical analysis. It has frequently been commented that music
poses challenges to all forms of analysis (for example, DeNora 2000: 21;
McClary and Walser 1990: 278), its non-literal character and assumed lack of
referentiality arguably making it less amenable to analysis than cultural forms
which depend upon literate enunciation. Furthermore, there is a frequent
implication that the affective nature of music is impossible to pin down and
cannot be captured by academic analysis. In the sphere of popular music,
incorporating a prominent anti-intellectual current, such ideas are amplified
and it is commonly accepted by musicians and music fans alike that to aca-
demically analyse popular music is to miss the point.
The general reluctance of sociologists to investigate the aesthetic specificity
of popular music also reflects long-standing concerns that to study ‘the music
itself’ necessarily results in an aesthetic idealism that removes the work from
its social context. Ironically, this attitude seems to have become further
entrenched through existing in an interdisciplinary environment with music
specialists. One of the principle purposes of the establishment of IASPM was
to open up dialogue between sociologists and musicologists. However, what
seems to exist within PMS is not ‘real’ interdisciplinarity but, rather, a form of
entente cordiale in which each disciplinary player respects the conclusions of
other players but fails to engage in meaningful dialogue with them, resulting in
a relatively rigid division of labour between sociologists and musicologists.6
The remainder of this section will, therefore, briefly discuss the construction
of musical meaning, focusing in particular on the divergent approaches of
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‘musicology’ and ‘sociology’, before offering suggestions for how sociology can
begin to move beyond this rigid dualism.
In a foundational essay by Susan McClary and Robert Walser (1990), they
offer a fable concerning a sociologist and a musicologist attending a concert
together. At a particularly intense moment the sociologist, along with the rest
of the crowd, jumps up in excitement. As she sits down, curious as to her and
others’ reactions, she asks the musicologist to explain how it occurred. ‘You
were expecting an E-flat’, says the musicologist, ‘and he played an E-natural’.
The sociologist becomes indignant, explaining that she wasn’t expecting an
E-flat and wouldn’t know the difference between an E-flat and a hole in the
wall.
The sociologist is here taking issue with crude musicological explanations
that tend to explain musical effect as something that happens to a listener
because of the musical structure. In such an interpretation, the ‘meaning’ of the
music is generated within the music’s structure. So, in this particular case, the
E natural causes the listener to respond in a certain way. Yet musical laws are
not laws of nature in the same manner as the law of gravity. We do not have
natural (biological) reactions to musical notes: if an E seventh sounds bluesy,
or minor keys melancholic, it is for historical rather than natural reasons.
Sociology thus immediately has a role to play in understanding musical
meaning.
This is a familiar discussion to anyone working within PMS, and I have taken
the sociologist’s liberty of over-simplifying musicological analysis.7 It is impor-
tant to note that there is no simple dichotomy, as many of the most interesting
musicologists working on popular music recognize the aforementioned issues
(it is often the case that they end up in PMS precisely because they recognize
the social context of musical meaning and found that ‘traditional musicology’
could not accommodate them). However, it does seem that there remains a
distinction of note in that, in musicological accounts of musical effect, the
musical structure has primacy. Effect happens because of what exists within the
music. From a sociological perspective, however, this idea is problematic. In
literary and cultural studies much progress has been made in emphasizing that
‘meaning’ is not a property of a work acting externally on an individual but is,
rather, actively constructed by readers. Yet while similar approaches have been
completed in the study of music, they seem to have had less prominence than
in the study of language, and there remains a latent tendency to see musical
affect as something that happens to people, if not quite against their will, then
certainly without their agency.

Musical knowledge and musical meaning

There is, therefore, a need to move away from the idea of a musical structure
creating an effect upon a person and to transform listener(s) into active
© The Author 2011 British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
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agent(s) in the creation of musical meaning. While musical structure is impor-

tant (I will argue later that sociologists need to pay more attention to musical
structure), it is important to recognize that listeners creates musical meaning
through their position within a discursive framework that gives them the tools
to make sense of the sounds they hear. For this reason it may be useful to
consider the role that musical knowledge plays in creating musical affect: the
‘meaning embedded in musical structure’ approach turns listeners into passive
receptors, whereas an approach that sees meaning constructed by the listener
emphasizes the active application of knowledge.8 This knowledge is actually
quite sophisticated: as Martin points out that ‘people who know nothing of
formal music theory can identify a wrong note’ (1995: 9).
In McClary and Walser’s anecdote, therefore, the musicologist is correct –
the sociologist was expecting an E-flat – because the question of musical effect,
and hence musical experience, comes down to the question of musical knowl-
edge and, in particular, the application of knowledge on the part of the listener
in the process of listening. The sociologist has enough musical knowledge to be
able to interpret the music and know what to expect next.When the music does
not meet her expectation, she knows enough to respond to the change.
However, the sociologist is also right, or at least honest, when she says that she
doesn’t know the difference between an E-flat and a hole in the wall. The
knowledge that she has is latent rather than discursive for, as McClary and
Walser themselves highlight, listeners are not usually aware that they are
participating in any active process of interpretation (1990: 278). The knowl-
edge being applied has been acquired through continual involvement
with musical cultures rather than learned through more explicit academic
processes – but it is knowledge. As listeners we are engaged in a constant
interaction with music and its surrounding cultures. We sometimes concentrate
and we are sometimes inattentive, but we are constantly absorbing, transform-
ing and utilizing knowledge about how music works and about what music
means. Without such knowledge, the sounds we hear would be literally mean-
ingless; we would not be able to make judgments about what kind of music this
was, or whether it was good or bad. We would not know to expect the E flat.
I want to offer a personal example to illustrate the nature of latent musical
knowledge. In Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2003: 34), Christopher Ricks hones in on
a line from the song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’, which runs ‘The highway
is for gamblers, better use your sense’. Ricks shows the line to be a pun, urging
both caution (use your sense, be wise) and recklessness (better, as in one who
gambles, use your cents). I’ve been listening to that song for twenty years and
I can honestly say that I didn’t know that: it had never crossed my mind that
this latent pun existed, waiting for Ricks to unearth it.9 In contrast, I have
recently read Dai Griffith’s book on Elvis Costello in which, among other
things, he compares three different versions of ‘Every Day I Write The Book’;
an early live recording, the initial studio recording, and the final released
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version (2008: 69–73). Griffiths discusses how the different musical arrange-
ments and the different productions of the song generate different meaning,
particularly the significant differences between the earlier Merseybeat-
influenced versions and the final, heavily produced, white-soul version that was
released as a single. In this case, I would argue that I already knew what
Griffiths was telling me. As a listener, I already understood the different
meanings these versions facilitated and had experienced them for myself. I
think that this is a crucial difference.Whereas Ricks tells me something I didn’t
know, Griffiths makes explicit something that I already knew. One makes me
think ‘oh, I hadn’t thought of that’ while the other makes me think ‘yeah, I can
see how that works’.
This is not intended to denigrate Griffiths’ book, or musicological
approaches generally. I think that books like Elvis Costello are far more
important than books like Visions of Sin for developing an understanding of
musical experience. It does not matter that I didn’t hear the pun in the Baby
Blue line. Its absence did not matter to my musical experience (though its
presence now does), nor do I feel that I did not know the song ‘properly’
because I was ignorant of the pun. On the other hand, I do think that the issues
enunciated by Griffiths help me to better understand my musical experience.
In the nicest way possible, Griffiths at his best has a talent of making the
obvious obvious, of helping me verbalize my musical knowledge. This is an
important role for analysts of popular music – sociologists and musicologists –
and I shall return to it later.

PMS and the drift towards ‘decorative sociology’

Emphasizing the application of latent knowledge as central to the creation of

musical meaning offers new opportunities about how best to study it but
returns us to the theme of this paper – the problems of interdisciplinarity in the
study of popular music. One of the pitfalls of interdisciplinarity is a tendency
for scholars to concentrate on dialogue with other scholars sharing a similar
substantive interest, so that sociologists of popular music are more likely to
engage with scholars working on popular music in other disciplines than they
are sociologists working on different substantive topics. This is not an inherent
failing of PMS but a broader weakness of interdisciplinarity itself. The danger
is that substantive matters take precedence over epistemological ones and
there is an emphasis upon surface similarities rather than more deep-seated
connections. The outcome is that those working within the sociology of
popular music (and other sub-disciplines) are not making best use of the
sociological resources available to them.
In this regard, considering the application of musical knowledge as funda-
mental to musical experience offers opportunities for the sociology of popular
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 The sociology of popular music 161

music to consider its position within the discipline more broadly. Indeed,
analysed from this perspective, it may be that the sociology of music is really
not so very different from other areas of sociological study, with similar theo-
retical and methodological challenges. One of the most fundamental issues in
sociology is how people get through daily life without having to think about it.
How do we know all of the concepts and practices necessary to do something
as mundane as write a cheque or catch a train? The role of latent knowledge
has always been key to understanding how such social practices continue.
Giddens offers the concept of ‘practical consciousness’ to explain our ability
to get by, which he defines as ‘the mutual knowledge employed by actors in the
production of social encounters, [that] are not usually known to those actors in
an explicitly codified form’ (in King 2004: 32–3). Practical consciousness is
distinct from discursive consciousness, in that individuals are self-consciously
aware of the latter yet unaware of the former. However, practical conscious-
ness is more fundamental for social action as it forms the hidden assumptions
upon which all social action rests: without practical consciousness, we would
not know how others will react to our actions. Giddens sees practical con-
sciousness as a vital component in centring the acting subject in sociological
explanation.
Given that the kind of knowledge I am focusing on here shares a similarly
hidden quality – the sociologist knows to expect the E-flat, but doesn’t know
that she knows – then the theoretical work completed on this kind of everyday
consciousness may perhaps provide insights for understanding musical
experience. At the same time, however, a concept like practical consciousness
does not quite capture the nature of the musical knowledge being discussed in
this paper. There is something more substantive about the kind of knowledge
I am describing, even though it is not enunciated. It may have elements in
common with this kind of ‘getting by’ knowledge, it is not just a means of
‘getting by’. For similar reasons, neither do I think that Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus is the right one for addressing the issues outlined here (although it
undoubtedly provides several useful avenues for the consideration of musical
tastes and practices, not least in recognizing that differing abilities to verbalize
musical knowledge are themselves an outcome of differing social-structural
experiences).
Despite rejecting concepts of tacit knowledge as providing ‘the answer’ for
the challenge posed, considering popular music as similar to many other areas
of social life may encourage sociological researchers to consider what
advances can be drawn from other areas of sociology and, significantly, to
utilize some of the more conventional sociological tools when analysing
popular music. In particular, there is a distinct need to get back to sociological
basics and for more ethnographic and qualitative work to be conducted in this
area. The interdisciplinary context of the sociology of popular music has drawn
it away from traditional sociological approaches and moved it towards a
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cultural studies agenda which currently predominates within PMS. The soci-
ology of popular music therefore risks becoming a prime example of what
Rojek and Turner (2000) refer to as ‘decorative sociology’, described as ‘a
trend in contemporary sociology where “culture” has eclipsed the “social” and
where literary interpretation has marginalized sociological methods’ (2000:
629). Rojek and Turner suggest that decorative sociology (indistinguishable
from cultural studies in their analysis) emerges in the wake of postmodernism,
coalescing around the figure of Stuart Hall at the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. It is generated by a post-Leavis crisis in
English departments and the ‘discovery of the popular’ by social historians
such as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams (2000: 631–2). The character-
istic feature of decorative sociology is its prioritization of the aesthetic over the
social, thus constituting all social life as a variety of ‘texts’ to be ‘read’. The
negative outcomes of this, according to Rojek and Turner, are a privileging of
theory at the expense of empirical research, a relatively ahistorical under-
standing of culture and very little comparative analysis. Furthermore, although
decorative sociology’s emphasis on texts is highly politicized, it is a dubious
politicization with ‘no tenable or sustained political agenda’ (2000: 639).
It is not difficult to see at least some of Rojek and Turner’s portrayal in
PMS. The establishing of popular music as a legitimate object of study in the
early 1980s occurs in the context of the emergence of post-Birmingham cul-
tural studies. It must also not be forgotten that arguing for the value of the
academic study of popular music was a statement of political significance (to
some extent it remains so, particularly in the context of American musicol-
ogy). On the whole, however, I think it is fair to say that the social study of
popular music has perhaps been driven more by a ‘cultural studies’ agenda
than by a ‘sociological agenda’, particularly in how there remains a signifi-
cant echo of the Birmingham School in the continuing emphasis on resis-
tance in popular music (Bennett 2008: 421). Rojek and Turner suggest that
the material circumstances of higher education from the 1980s onwards
provide some explanation for the emergence of decorative sociology (2000:
640), and these circumstances clearly affect PMS as well.10 However, it is also
clear that the interdisciplinary context in which it has been housed has
drawn the sociology of popular music away from conventional sociological
concerns. So, while there has been some excellent sociological work on
popular music completed in the last thirty years, Bennett’s call for an
increase in the amount of qualitative research in the sociological study of
popular music (2008: 429, see also Grazian 2004) is both justifiable and desir-
able as an antidote to any decorative sociology tendencies existing within the
sociological study of popular music. If we want to find out what how, when
and where people listen to popular music, and how they feel when they are
listening to it, there is no alternative to asking or observing them. This
approach also resonates with more general current trends in the sociological
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study of culture that emphasize detailed study of the ‘sayings and doings’ of
cultural consumption (for example, Lahire 2008 and Warde 2005).
Gaining an understanding of an individual’s experience of listening to
popular music is challenging, however, because, as mentioned earlier, musical
experience is notoriously difficult to verbalize. There is a sense that words fail
to do justice to the uniquely visceral and emotional experience that music can
seem to provide, a sense that musical experience is unutterable. When people
are asked to recount musical experience, there is frequent hesitance and
recourse to metaphors revolving around drugs, religion and sex. These diffi-
culties pose methodological challenges for the sociologist committed to under-
standing musical experience but I wish to suggest that, once again, we would
benefit from seeing popular music as not so very different from other areas of
social life and make use of the insights available from other areas of sociology.
One danger of interdisciplinarity is the fragmentation of disciplines into a
disconnected mass of sub-disciplines. Given the explosion of academic pub-
lishing in the last twenty years, it is difficult to stay up to date in even one
substantive area, let alone others. Interdisciplinarity comes, therefore, at the
expense of a broad disciplinary awareness and the result is a sociology of
popular music blind to other areas of sociological study. I am surely not alone
in having read articles on popular music from authors outside of the specialist
area, only to be disappointed that they are reinventing the wheel or missing an
obvious point that has been discussed in PMS for twenty years. Surely the, say,
sociologist of emotions feels similarly when reading work completed by
popular music specialists on the emotional impact of music?
The solution to this problem lies in genuinely collaborative work within the
sociological field – not dipping one’s toe into another literature to write
another article, but genuine collaboration on research projects with specialists
from other areas of sociology. All areas of sociological enquiry should offer
rich opportunities, but I wonder whether the sociology of sexuality may prove
a particularly useful field to investigate, as there seems to be a number of
analogues in the social experience of popular music and sex (and, of course,
there are frequent inferences drawn about the relationship between them).
The intensity of experience, its association with the emotions, the implication
that the experience is unverbalizable, the tendencies towards universalism
and/or naturalism; all are issues shared, to some extent, by sexuality and
popular music. How have sociologists of sexuality come to terms with these
issues? What can we learn from each other? Of course, wider than merely the
sociology of sexuality, sociologists of popular music can surely gain much from
contemporary developments within the sociology of the body. Musical con-
sumption is rarely a purely intellectual act, it is more often a physical act –
dancing, obviously, but also more mundane forms of listening such as humming
or tapping one’s foot to the rhythm, as well as modifying the rhythms of
complementary practices done ‘to music’ (such as in DeNora’s discussion of
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164 Lee Marshall

aerobics classes, 2000: 89–102). As Bourdieu emphasizes in his discussion of

habitus, the social norms and values we absorb are learned and enacted bodily;
if we want to consider how popular music ‘works’, it is vital to consider the
embodied nature of listening, and engagement with ‘the sociology of the body’
thus becomes a necessity.
Emphasizing these areas of sociology does not preclude rich opportunities
from collaboration with specialists in other areas; given the reliance on reli-
gious metaphors for discussing musical experience, we should look at the
insights to be gained from the sociology of religion (and there is much work
completed on music in religious studies that lacks the insights already gener-
ated within PMS); many understandings of musical consumption will be
incomplete without the insights from the sociology of technology, or the soci-
ology of the internet; research on musicians and performers would benefit
from collaborative work with sociologists of work; the sociology of family/
children will help us to understand how social relationships are constructed
through popular music; and so on. Many ‘middle range’ concepts that are part
of the conventional terrain of general sociology, such as Hochschild’s notion of
emotional labour, could be extremely useful for the sociology of popular music
but they rarely, if ever, make an appearance. Looking outside of popular music
to other areas of social life may help rectify this oversight.

Developing a more musical sociology

The sociology of popular music could, therefore, benefit greatly by diminishing

(not abandoning) its interdisciplinary perspective in favour of increasing dia-
logue with sociologists working in other substantive areas. Approaching
popular music from a more conventional sociological perspective enables us to
observe similarities between popular music and many other areas of social life.
At the same time, however, treating popular music as just like anything else (to
paraphrase Becker) has limitations because there are ways in which (popular)
music is not just like anything else. One area of social life is not substitutable
for another: we cannot study, say, television, or popular culture, and expect to
know everything about popular music. Popular music (like everything else) has
its own distinctive qualities that make it worth studying in its own right and,
obviously, one of the particularities of popular music is that it is music; an
aesthetic, sonic, object with particular aesthetic, sonic, qualities. If a fully-
realized sociology of popular music is to be developed, then this fact needs to
be considered more than at present: engagement with ‘the music itself’ must
become a necessary part of sociological analysis.
Despite the centrality of ‘the music itself’ to musical experience, many
sociological analyses ignore music. Indeed, some explicitly argue that sociol-
ogy most definitely should not address musical content. Martin, for example,
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argues that ‘the only defensible position for the sociological analyst is that of
detached observer . . . we must remain indifferent to the arguments of musi-
cians, critics and so on in their various debates and disputes. It is no business of
the sociologist to take sides, or to arbitrate the validity of their claims’ (1995:
12). He suggests that because the meaning of the work can never be tied down
to one ‘true’ reading, discussion of musical content should be left to the
philosopher and the aesthetician (1995: 13).
While broadly sympathetic to Martin’s overall argument, I do not agree with
his conclusion that analysing music is not a job for sociologists. That the
meaning of music is arbitrary, indeterminate, socially constructed and histori-
cally specific does not make it any less real.We cannot keep skirting around the
issue that it is this music that person A adores and it is this music around which
social group B unite. It is not another type of music, it is not a random or an
arbitrary music, it is this music. We therefore need to consider the character-
istics of this music, consider the meanings generated by engagement with it and
question why it is this music and not other music. The sociology of popular
music must address aesthetic specificity. Not doing so implies an Adorno-like
tendency to assume that one piece of popular music is substitutable for any
other.
But what does it mean to consider ‘the music itself’? One of the conven-
tional difficulties with writing about music has been the indeterminate nature
of ‘the musical work’. Should musical analysis concern itself with the written
score, which in one sense is pure (idealized) music and in another sense is not
music at all? Should it instead focus on performances of scores? Live or
recorded? When one talks of ‘the musical work’, about which of the above is
one talking? These philosophical conundra are not irrelevant when consider-
ing popular music (though the sound recording has surpassed the written score
as ‘the work’) but, interesting as they might be, it is possible for sociologists of
popular music to sidestep such debates as the difficulties of defining ‘the
musical work’ do not seem to tax people listening to popular music. I find it
hard to believe that the person listening to the radio at work agonizes over
whether the sounds coming through the air really are the music she is listening
to. Nor does it seem to cause much trouble for the individual attending the
rock concert. In everyday social life the music is not an abstract entity, it is the
actual thing with which individuals are engaging at that moment. ‘The music’
has a materiality to it, a materiality with both spatial and temporal dimensions.
If we are to understand musical experience and musical meaning, we need to
address these material aspects, to consider musical content as well as musical
context. There is, in short, a need for a materialist sociology of music.11
The work of Antoine Hennion offers some possibilities for sociologically
investigating ‘the music itself’. As a sociologist, Hennion rejects the notion that
the meaning of the work can be found in ‘the work itself’. However, he aims his
most vehement criticism at sociological analyses of music that either explain
British Journal of Sociology 62(1) © The Author 2011
166 Lee Marshall

away the content of the work as merely the reflection of abstract social forces
or see music as ‘cloaking a social game of which the actors are not aware’
(2001: 5). Over-determinist approaches to music cannot successfully account
for the specificities of music or of musical experience and, for Hennion,
addressing the substantive content of music has to take a central position in a
sociology of music:

if artistic values cannot deterministically be read ‘in’ the musical texts, nor
decoded ‘out’ through social explanation, they should not continue to be
excluded from the picture. (1997: 418)
However, ‘the dilemma now faced by sociologists is how to incorporate the
character of the works produced without reverting to autonomous aesthetic
comments’ (Hennion 1997: 416). Hennion’s proposed solution is to reconfigure
the way in which we conceive of music. He argues that one of the distinctive
features of music is that it exists only as sound which is experienced in situ
(either live or recorded performance). As such, unlike sculpture or painting,
music does not exist as an independent aesthetic object – there is no ‘work’
outside of the specific mediations of the experienced sound. Music is not an
abstract thing with many forms, it is only the forms themselves (Hennion 2001:
11). The focus for the sociologist of music, therefore, should not be an abstract
notion of a musical work but, rather, the content of specific musical practices,
what Hennion refers to as ‘mediations’:

These mediators include scores and texts, sound, instruments, repertoires,

staging, concert venues and media, and in a wider context the rites, ceremo-
nies, prayer, religious, national and political celebrations, which form the
backdrop for the public performance of music. They allow us to talk of a
music not directly in terms of aesthetic content or social authenticity, but in
terms of the way in which, by rejecting certain mediators and promoting
others, both are collectively constructed (Hennion 1997: 432).

DeNora suggests that this approach enables us ‘to speak of the contents or
effects of musical works, but never to speak of those matters in relation
to . . . “the works themselves” ’ (2000: 31). The outcome of Hennion’s agenda,
also practised by DeNora, is an emphasis on the microsociological analysis of
a broad array of musical practices. By focusing on such practices, Hennion
proposes that we ‘shift our focus from questions of music to those of listening’
(2008: 41). This, he suggests, offers

an unlikely but fertile approach for a sociologist: the same people who were
at a loss for words and who made excuses when they were asked about their
tastes, became remarkably inventive when describing what they do when
someone asks them not what they like but how they form attachments, with
whom, what they do, how they go about it . . . (2001: 6).
© The Author 2011 British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
 The sociology of popular music 167

Hennion’s approach, and his overall agenda to create a sociology of listening

provide a fertile resource for the sociologist of popular music. However,
further development is necessary if his goals are to be realized. Most signifi-
cantly for this paper, it is questionable how successful Hennion has been in
addressing ‘the music itself’. Arguing that philosophical discussions about ‘the
work’ are insoluble, Hennion defines music in a different way in order to claim
that he is, in fact, discussing music itself. But there is still a common-sense way
in which music is understood to exist – as experienced sound – which is not
being addressed. His argument that music does not exist outside of its media-
tions is useful but, despite listing sound as a mediation in the passage quoted
above, Hennion has so far not really translated his approach into a discussion
of sound. His analysis of the controversies surrounding the playing of Baroque
music in France (1997) are formally about musical instruments and notes but
are really a familiar sociological discussion about authenticity. A similar criti-
cism can be aimed at DeNora; following an excellent discussion of how the
meaning of music is constructed by discursive frameworks around music but
that the music itself generates ‘affordances’ that structure these discourses
(2000: 21–45), discussions of specific musics remain relatively absent from her
empirical investigations, so that ‘music’ is in danger of becoming reified – to say
that all people use ‘music’ does not tell us why certain kinds of music are used
in particular ways (although DeNora is more successful in discussing musical
experience).
Despite the promising opportunities afforded by Hennion’s work, therefore,
how particular songs generate meaning and the sonic experience of music
remain pushed to one side in sociological accounts. There remains a line
dividing ‘sociological’ and ‘musicological’ approaches to music which, in my
experience, most sociologists seem reluctant to cross. This returns us to the
main theme of the paper. The situation I am outlining here is not caused by
interdisciplinarity – as already discussed, sociological reluctance to deal with
aesthetic specificity has a long history – but the problem is exacerbated by
sociologists existing in an interdisciplinary environment that means they can
pass responsibility for musical analysis over to other disciplinary specialists.
This is ineffective, however, not least because the musicological approach
remains limited in its understanding of popular music. The problem is that, like
sociological reluctance to deal with aesthetics, musicologists are constrained
by their disciplinary background (what McClary and Walser refer to as ‘the
hidden ideological claptrap of their musicological training’ (1990: 281)). Even
those who have most clearly embraced interdisciplinarity and the heretical
analysis of popular music remain restricted by all that they have learned
about music theory. Musicologists hear things differently from ordinary
listeners. This is perhaps argued most clearly by Nick Cook, who suggests that
musicians (and, by extension, musicologists) and listeners hear two different
kinds of music, a technical, intellectual one, and an immediate, aural one. While
British Journal of Sociology 62(1) © The Author 2011
168 Lee Marshall

musicians hear notes, listeners hear sounds (1990: 85). This has significant
repercussions for investigating how people listen to, use, and make sense of
popular music given that the majority of people who are engaged with popular
music are listeners rather than players or composers.12
Greater sociological engagement with ‘the music itself’ would, therefore,
offer a number of benefits. Firstly, it would bring the listener’s perspective to
bear on musical analysis. Secondly, it would begin to develop new ways of
writing about popular music that were not so entrenched in the practices of
traditional musicology. Such writing should prioritize the listening experience
(thus overcoming the problems of overly technical accounts and reducing the
possibility of treating music as the active agent) but also deal with the speci-
ficity of the music (thus overcoming any tendencies toward journalistic or
impressionistic writing). This approach would result in a third benefit: the
development of a musical vocabulary for understanding musical experience
that would facilitate qualitative work on such experience. If listeners have the
knowledge to make sense of music and generate musical meaning, but lack the
capacity to verbalize both their knowledge and their experience, then new
tools to help their verbalization need to be developed.
What is thus required is a rigorous, analytical, approach grounded in ‘the
music itself’ (a materialist sociology of music) that emphasizes the active
process of listening. By ‘the music itself’, I mean analysis of what particular
music sounds like, including the temporal elements of musical structure, as well
as a discussion of what meanings those sounds generate, enable and constrain.
Sociologists need to consider the material structures of music as similar to any
other kind of social structure; musical structure is no more or less idealist than
a gendered division of labour.13
What should such an analysis look like? Given that the sociology of popular
music should seek to centre the listener’s perspective into an analysis of
musical experience, this approach should include more connotative accounts
of musical affect. I suggest connotative rather than impressionistic to empha-
size that some form of critical engagement remains a necessity – this is not a
call for more fanzine journalism – but, as Griffiths writes, ‘the more [music
analysis] wallows in its nature as prose, the more interesting it might be’ (1999:
411–2). McClary and Walser (1990: 288–9) suggest that new strategies for
communicating how music feels (such as greater use of metaphor and using
one’s own musical experience) rather than what it means need to be adopted
in the academic analysis of popular music. This seems sensible; virtually all of
the best writing about music gives a sense of what it feels like to listen to the
music being discussed.
This kind of writing about musical experience requires a willingness, to a
certain extent, to ‘suspend disbelief’ in relation to individuals’ understandings
of musical experience. Sociologists obviously need to be aware of the socially
constructed nature of musical meaning and musical experience. At the same
© The Author 2011 British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
 The sociology of popular music 169

time, however, it is also important to recognize that these constructions are the
reality of a particular human experience. It’s all very well stating that the
claims for the emotional, non-verbal character of music are socially con-
structed, but that doesn’t stop the hairs on my arms standing up when I hear
certain songs. We need to ‘buy into’ this account of human experience, to
believe it to be true if we are to do it justice. Adopting the position of
disbelieving sceptic, as Martin sometimes seems to suggest (1995: 12–3), will
not aid our efforts at understanding. What is required is a dialectical analysis
that manages to contain both the deconstructionist impulse and the reality of
the lived experience.
A materialist sociology of music is not just about listening, however; it
requires an analysis of what people listen to as well as how they listen to it.
There needs to be an engagement with the specifics of the music, of the issues
conventionally left to the musicologists. It is vital that a sociological analysis of
popular music recognizes that the music itself is a central resource for how
musical meaning is generated. A piece of music may not be the determining
factor in what music means but it opens up possibilities and closes off others.
It is a structural constraint upon the generation of musical meaning (listeners
create musical meaning but they do not do so under circumstances of their own
choosing) and what opportunities and constraints for musical meaning a par-
ticular piece of music generates needs to be considered by sociologists. To do
so requires what Griffiths (1999: 411) refers to as ‘close listening’ and, probably,
some kind of transcription of music (though not of the traditional musicologi-
cal variety). What kind of analysis/transcription remains to be developed, but
some possibilities already exist. Almost thirty years ago, Tagg offered sugges-
tions for non-musicologists interested in engaging with music. Tagg’s checklist
of things to consider includes matters such as aspects of time, the orchestration
of voices, and dynamic issues, all of which ‘can be carried out by anyone willing
to exercise their synaesthetic and associative capacities as well as their
intellect . . . Anyone with a bit of imagination can sing bits of tune in the wrong
order, or substitute new continuations, and thereby discover what actually
makes the music say what it says’ (1982: 65).
To give a sense of the kind of things that I think should be considered, and
why they are important for a sociological analysis, I will end this paper with a
brief example, of the Bob Dylan song ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,
though it will of necessity be extremely compressed. To consider why this song
became extremely meaningful to large numbers of people at a particular time
requires an understanding of what the song means. Of course, precise meaning
can never be ascertained and one suggested reading does not preclude the
song meaning something else, at either an individual level or at a social level
(for example, the song may now generate nostalgic meanings). However, fol-
lowing Frith (1988) and Moore’s (2001) discussions of lyrics and song meaning,
I think we can at least talk of general attitudes being communicated through
British Journal of Sociology 62(1) © The Author 2011
170 Lee Marshall

songs. So, what is the general meaning of the song? I would suggest that a key
characteristic of the song is insistence. This is not a pleading song, it is not a
song asking nicely, it is a song that says ‘this is going to happen, are you in or
out?’ There is also an air of urgency about the song – ‘this is happening now,
there is no time to lose’. These characteristics can help explain why the song
became popular (indeed, emblematic) at a particular historical moment and so
a sociological understanding of the songs needs to consider broader demo-
graphic and social trends (the baby boom, changing consumer practices), some
broad understanding of ideological currents (for example, the symbolic signifi-
cance of the acoustic guitar in the late 1950s and early 1960s), as well as
specific, micro-level, historical analysis (for example, how Pete Seeger’s black-
listing in the late 1950s indirectly contributed to the rising popularity of folk
music because he had to tour college campuses to earn a living) (see Marshall
2007: chapter 3 for more detailed discussion of these issues).
So far, so traditionally sociological. These comments can explain why, in
America in 1963, a space existed for a song characterized by urgency and
insistence. They do not, however, explain why it is this particular song that
takes on the emblematic position it does. What, musically, makes this song
effective in communicating urgency and insistence? By looking at the musical
qualities of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’, we can better explain why it is
this song, and not ‘Masters of War’ or Barry McGuire’s ‘Eve of Destruction’
that became so significant. Some brief suggestions follow. Lyrically, Ricks
describes it as one of Dylan’s great ‘you songs’ (2003: 263–4). This is not a song
that calls for collective action, nor is it a song that affirms the collective (c/f ‘We
shall overcome’), it is a demand to be part of what is occurring or to stand
aside. Lyrics never stand alone, however, they are also mediated through a
voice and here the voice is similarly insistent: Negus (2008: 123) describes it as
Dylan’s ‘declamatory voice’ and, while there is a certain declamatory quality to
this song, the voice is also demanding, refusing to be ignored and demanding
a response from the listener (c/f ‘Which side are you on?’). The harmonica
breaks at the end of each verse have a similar ‘pay attention!’ quality.These are
significant as they follow the refrain which can be read as rather complacent
(Ricks suggests that many who listened to this song assumed that the times
would stop changing once they held sway (2003: 271)). The fact that it is an
individual singer and player is significant too in that it creates a certain
prophet-like quality to the proclamation, a sense of an individual rallying the
masses (as well as being important because of the ideological rules of the folk
revival).
Sonically, I would suggest that the key to the song’s effectiveness also lies in
its rhythm. The song has a conventional 3/4 time signature, which creates a
certain wave-like quality to music which in this example is in harmony with the
dominant theme of times continually changing. There is no chorus or middle
eight to change musical structure and interrupt this flow. However, although
© The Author 2011 British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
 The sociology of popular music 171

the song is constructed in conventional four-bar blocks, Dylan routinely adds

extra bars. He also routinely starts vocal lines fractionally forward, starting on
the upbeat and even earlier in a couple of lines. If we examine the timing of the
first verse, these effects become more apparent:
1. Come gather ‘round people wherever you roam
(four bars, plus one extra bar)
2. And admit that the waters around you have grown
(vocal comes in half a bar early, then four bars and no extra bar)
3. And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
(vocal comes in half a bar early, then four bars and two extra bars)
4. If your time to you is worth savin’
(four bars and no extra bar)
5. Then you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone
(four bars and no extra bar)
6. For the times, they are a-changin’
(four bars and no extra bar)
(Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’, © Special Rider Music)
These irregular rhythms creates two effects: firstly, the added bars create
suspense and add impact to the proclamations, particularly the two added bars
before the fourth line.14 This suspense intensifies the demand for listener
response (particularly in the fourth and fifth lines as there is no extra bar and
the pitch of the song raises); secondly, although the song is moderately paced,
by starting each line ahead of the rhythm, Dylan conveys a sense of urgency, of
things moving fast (particularly the third line because of the absence of an
extra bar).
Clearly, there is more that could be said about this example and we could, of
course, continue to deconstruct: why is it this particular tone of voice that gets
characterized as insistent? How does a 3/4 time signature acquire this lilting
quality? Ultimately there will remain a dividing line between sociological and
musicological approaches; sociological analysis is necessarily obligated to con-
sider the socially constructed nature of musical production and musical expe-
rience in ways that other approaches are not. I am not arguing in favour of the
autonomy of aesthetic objects, relative or otherwise. However, the demystifi-
cation impulse inherent within sociology can obfuscate the subject as much as
the worst musicological jargon. It is, of course, theoretically possible that,
under certain social and cultural conditions, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ could be a
romantic song, or a mournful one, but does it really help our sociological
understanding to make this point? Would it not be more effective to consider
how the unrelenting loudness, the buzzsaw guitar sound, the angry conviction
in Johnny Rotten’s vocal, the jolt of the anti-Christ/anarchist half-rhyme, and
other things in ‘the music itself’, contribute to how the song means what it
means, and how that might make some people want to violently jump up and
British Journal of Sociology 62(1) © The Author 2011
172 Lee Marshall

down and bang into each other, and some other people to put their hands over
their ears and turn away in disgust? Musical meaning is never merely the
product of the music itself, but if we are to understand what makes certain
music meaningful, if we are to develop better sociological understandings of
musical experience, then it is necessary to consider the sounds that people hear
as well as the ways in which they hear them. Not doing so fails to do justice to
the subject, and the subjects, which we study.
(Date accepted: November 2010)

Notes

1. Many thanks to Dai Griffiths, Dave as a sub-discipline of sociology. This, from

Hesmondhalgh, Gregor McLennan, Keith
Negus and Lynne Pettinger for comments
on an earlier draft – all of you significantly
improved the paper.
2. See McLennan’s (2005) debate with
Alexander (2003, 2005) as a recent example.
3. As Frith (1996: 16) argues, there is no
a priori reason to assume that the processes
occurring within popular music consump-
tion are different from those occurring
within the classical sphere. Similarly,
although there may be specificities associ-
ated with the consumption of popular
music, there seems to me no reason why
many of the issues raised in this paper are
not appropriate for the sociology of music
more generally. I have tried to be as precise
as possible in my use of terminology, but
where points raised refer to specifically
musical aspects of popular music, some-
times I have referred to music, rather than
popular music.
4. To talk of ‘the sociology of popular
music’ even more so as it can be plausibly
argued that the sociology of popular music
does not exist. As Bennett argues, the socio-
logical work conducted on popular music
‘has never cohered into a recognized con-
ceptual approach to the sociological study of
popular music’ (2008: 419–20). It is relatively
straightforward to find individual examples
of excellent sociological work on the topic of
popular music. It is harder to consider what
constitutes ‘the sociology of popular music’
© The Author 2011
the perspective of this paper, is part of the
problem.
5. Perhaps the most notable exception to
this is DeNora (2000), whom I shall discuss
below. The work of Simon Frith can also be
characterized as an attempt to sociologically
capture the nature of musical experience.
6. Over time, however, it is arguable that
the IASPM terrain has moved away from
traditional sociology and musicology and
come to be dominated by a cultural studies
agenda, which I shall discuss below in terms
of ‘decorative sociology’. Indeed, it is
notable that some of the leading British
sociologists interested in popular music,
such as Tia DeNora, Pete Martin and Dave
Hesmondhalgh have had relatively little to
do with IASPM in the last decade.
7. In fact, the terminology being used
here would not necessarily be accepted by
those working within the discipline, for
‘musicology’ has conventionally focused on
historical analysis of musical texts and
periods while ‘music theorists’ do the kind of
syntactical analysis of music being suggested
here. I will continue to use ‘musicology/ist’
in this article because within PMS musicolo-
gists perform the kind of formal analysis
associated with music theory (McClary and
Walser 1990: 280) and this remains an
accepted label within PMS (see, for
example, Tagg 2008).
8. I am emphasizing listeners here but we
also need to recognize the intentions and
British Journal of Sociology 62(1)

aims of musical producers in this approach.
While the ‘death of the author’ theories
underpinning the emphasis on everyday cre-
ativity are undoubtedly crucial, it is impor-
tant to recognize that music, as with other
cultural products, is created intentionally.We
need to give similar consideration to the role
of knowledge in musical production as we
do to musical consumption, without relaps-
ing into author-centred conceptions of
creativity. Music is the product of social
action, which provides further justification
as to why sociologists need to explicitly con-
sider musical structure.
9. Irritatingly, of course, I can now never
not hear it, once again illustrating the signifi-
cance of knowledge in the creation of
musical meaning. I feel rather aggrieved that
Ricks has managed to forever imprint
himself upon my experience of the song, and
I now pass that misery on to you.
10. Speculatively, I wonder whether one
of the relevant issues is the role of PhD
funding/supervision in this area: the scarcity
of funding, the pressure to complete within
three years, the financial and time costs of
empirical research, coupled with a tendency
for new PhD students to study an area of
music with which they have strong familiarity
result in a preponderance of popular music
PhDs being theory-driven and text-centred.
11. To use an analogy: if a company built
a ten-storey building with no elevator, the
employees working on the tenth floor may
behave in a variety of ways. They may see
the forced use of stairs as a way to become
fitter, for example, or they may feel deliber-
ately excluded and discomforted. There may
be union representation concerning access
for disabled people. However, in these cases,
the social relations between people are
structured by the material structure of the
building itself. Music – like buildings – are
structures created by human action. These
structures do not determine action but they
make certain forms of response more likely
British Journal of Sociology 62(1)
The sociology of popular music 173
and others less likely. DeNora suggests that
the concept of ‘affordance’ may be useful in
acknowledging this with regard to music
(2000: 39–41).
12. This is a quite brutal and reductionist
critique of musicological approaches to
popular music and it seems only fair to
acknowledge that ‘pop musicologists have
made enormous strides [in their attempts to]
reconstruct the semiotic codes of Western
music’ (McClary and Walser 1990: 285).
However, there does seem to be an episte-
mological divide that separates musicolo-
gists from ordinary listeners. Reviewing a
collection of writings of (sociologist) Simon
Frith, (musicologist) Phil Tagg writes ‘musi-
cology, I have painfully come to realize, is in
a very sorry state when it comes to one of
the things it is supposed to be best at – the
structural denotation of musical sound . . .
years of teaching popular music analysis to
students both with and without formal train-
ing in music has convinced me that collect-
ing and systematizing recurrent aesthetic
descriptors like bitch voice, defective chord,
Psycho strings, high-heeled saxophone
(a.k.a. sexophone) and so on, may be the
best way of starting to cure musicology’s
woeful lack of terms denoting musical struc-
tures that average listeners find meaningful’
(2008: 10–11, emphasis in original).
13. Two excellent examples of sociolo-
gists explicitly considering music within
their overall analysis are Toynbee’s discus-
sion of dance music (2000: chapter 5) and
Negus’ account of Bob Dylan’s music (2008:
chapter 5).
14. Dylan only leaves one extra bar in the
other verses, so it is plausible that this extra
extra bar is a mistake. However, Dylan was
very fluid in his use of extra bars early in his
career, often being led by lyrical content. It
therefore seems plausible to suggest that the
effect is intended, if instinctive; certainly the
single extra bar is used consistently through-
out the song.
© The Author 2011
174 Lee Marshall
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