Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis

The previous reviewer was clearly expecting something that would be a bit more like music journalism. In reality, this is a true scholarly work, designed for mostly graduate students and professionals in the musicological fields. The title clearly implies a more academic nature because of the "musical analysis" tag. Some of these articles are more geared towards recording practices, some are more music theory, some ethnomusicological, and others in the greater scheme of music history. The previous reviewer commented "this ain't Mahler, y'know," but the point is that these essays are designed for people who do want to use the traditional studies used for the classics of music to apply to current rock too. This is a great resource for anyone trying to get a sense of how one can write about rock music. It is also an excellent sourcebook with a typically accurate and extensive bibliography for rock scholarship. The field of rock and pop studies in music academia is growing, from Beatles to Beach Boys to Tori Amos to Radiohead. This is a great survey study on a number of broad aspects of music scholarship.